A shared universe › Blog › Giving thanks as a couple · Español
When it is always the same person who makes the dinner, takes out the bins or remembers to phone the family, it is easy for nobody to thank them. Not for lack of affection: what is repeated stops being seen. The psychology of relationships has studied what happens when, despite everything, it is seen and said.
The psychologist Sara Algoe, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has spent years studying what gratitude is for between people who are close. In 2012 she summed it up with three rhyming English verbs, find, remind and bind: gratitude helps us find the people who are worth it, remind us of the value of those we already have and bind us more closely to them.
According to this idea, saying thank you is not just courtesy or a way of settling a debt. It is a signal that amounts to saying: I have noticed what you do for me and it matters to me. And that signal, when it arrives, encourages the other person to keep caring.
In 2010, Algoe, Shelly Gable and Natalya Maisel asked couples who lived together to keep, each partner separately, a diary of what happened between them. On days when someone felt gratitude for something their partner had done, the next day both felt closer and happier with the relationship: the one who had received the kindness and the one who had given it.
The authors separated two feelings that are sometimes confused: gratitude and the sense of being in debt. A thoughtful gesture aimed at you awakened gratitude, but not that sense of debt, and only gratitude was associated with the improvement the next day. That is why they described everyday gratitude as a small booster shot for the couple.
In 2012, Amie Gordon and her team, of the University of California, Berkeley, published a series of studies with couples. People who felt more valued by their partner valued them more in turn. And those who valued their partner most were more attentive to what they needed, more committed to the relationship and, over time, more likely to stay together. In the laboratory, observers who did not know the couples also noticed that attention in the way they treated each other.
A year later, Algoe, Barbara Fredrickson and Gable brought couples into the laboratory and asked one of the two to thank the other for something. The more the recipient felt that their partner understood them and was attentive to their needs, the more the relationship had improved six months later.
The American sociologist Arlie Hochschild interviewed dozens of couples in which both partners worked for a book of 1989, The Second Shift, on how they shared the housework. In it she spoke of an “economy of gratitude”: what each partner experiences as a gift from the other and what they take for granted. It is easy to feel unseen when what you contribute is experienced by the other as something that simply fell to you to do.
A 2024 study from the University of Zurich, with 163 Swiss couples who had been together for an average of thirty years, points in the same direction. Gratitude acted as a bridge between the support they gave each other in times of stress and how happy they were with their relationship. It is a study done at a single moment, so it does not prove what causes what, but it suggests that supporting each other and thanking each other go hand in hand.
In 2016, Algoe, Laura Kurtz and Nicole Hilaire recorded conversations in which one partner thanked the other. What was most closely linked to how the recipient felt was the part of the sentence that spoke about them: recognising their effort, their kindness, their way of being. Those who received that kind of thanks felt better understood, felt better and felt more affection for their partner.
We tend to think the other person already knows, but studies show that saying thank you moves people more than we think. Some ideas:
Gratitude does not fix what is wrong in a relationship. If the sharing of chores is unfair, a “thank you” does not make up for it: what helps is talking about it and changing it. And if the relationship is harming you, if there is fear or contempt, it is not a problem of gratitude. In that case, the most important thing is to ask a professional or someone you trust for help.
Nor is it about keeping count of who gives thanks more. What the studies describe is simpler: two people who notice what the other does for them and tell them so.
Think of something specific your partner did this week that went by without a word. You can leave it on a “For someone” star with “What I’m grateful for”, without names. And afterwards, better still, tell them in person with those same words.