John and Julie Gottman define love as an action rather than an abstract feeling. A healthy relationship manifests not through grand gestures but through “tiny little doses, every day” (xi). On founding the Gottman Institute in Seattle in 1996, the couple wanted to know the formula that makes some romantic partnerships last while others fail. At the institute’s accompanying Love Lab, they have examined couples laboratory-style, analyzing body language, conversation, and attributes of conflict, alongside physiological factors such as changes in heartbeat.

The Gottmans’ scientific approach began with John’s background as a mathematician and his feeling that love could be measured and tracked in the manner of other biological phenomena, such as pandemics. When he began studying love laboratory-style, he found that most of our ideas about successful relationships, which come from our family or the movies, are wrong. The data he collected could counterbalance these misconceptions.

In the Love Lab, which was founded in 1986 and incorporated into the Gottman Institute upon the latter’s inception, the Gottmans discovered some universal factors that cause a relationship to thrive, such as a couple’s sustained curiosity about each other and frequent expressions of love and admiration. Throughout, they discovered that the nature of daily interactions in a relationship are crucial to ensuring its longevity and happiness.