What actually determines which way it goes

Here is a question worth sitting with before we go any further:

Think of a couple you know who has been together for a long time — twenty, thirty, even forty years — and who still seem genuinely close. Not just still-married close, but actually connected: interested in each other, alive to each other, still curious about who the other person is becoming. You probably know at least one couple like this. They exist. And when you’re around them, something about their presence together makes you feel both hopeful and a little envious.

Now think of another long-term couple — perhaps one closer to home — where the years have created distance rather than depth. Where two people share a history and a house and a last name, but have become, somehow, strangers in the most intimate sense. Where the life is technically intact but the connection has quietly hollowed out.

Both of these couples have been together for decades. Both of them have lived through the same kinds of things — the raising of children, the career pressures, the losses and celebrations, the ordinary relentless passage of time. Why did growth bring one couple closer and the other further apart?

This is the question this essay is about. And it turns out that the answer is both more specific and more hopeful than most people think.

Growth in a relationship is not random. It follows patterns. And patterns can be understood — which means they can be changed.

What the Research Actually Tells Us

Before we get into the lived texture of this — because this is not only a science essay, it is a human one — it is worth grounding ourselves in what researchers have actually found about how relationships evolve over time. Because the psychological and sociological literature on long-term relationships is, in places, genuinely illuminating.

◆  THE GOTTMAN INSTITUTE: THE TURNING TOWARD PRINCIPLE

Dr. John Gottman, perhaps the most widely cited researcher in relationship science, spent decades studying couples in his “Love Lab” at the University of Washington — observing their interactions with extraordinary precision and then following up years later to see which relationships had thrived and which had dissolved or deteriorated.

One of his most significant findings was deceptively simple: the couples who stayed genuinely connected over time were not the ones who had fewer conflicts, or more in common, or better communication in the traditional sense. They were the ones who consistently “turned toward” each other in small, everyday moments.

What ‘turning toward’ looks like in practice: One partner makes what Gottman calls a ‘bid’ — a small attempt at connection. It can be as minor as pointing out something interesting outside the window, making a joke, sighing audibly, or asking a question about something that happened that day. The other partner either turns toward that bid (acknowledges it, engages with it, responds), turns away (ignores it), or turns against it (responds negatively). In his research, couples who eventually divorced had turned toward each other’s bids only about 33% of the time. Couples who remained happily together turned toward each other’s bids about 87% of the time.The direction of a relationship — toward or apart — is built in these small, daily, almost invisible moments far more than in the dramatic ones.

◆  ATTACHMENT THEORY AND THE ADULT RELATIONSHIP

Attachment theory — originally developed by John Bowlby and later extended to adult relationships by researchers Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver — gives us another lens for understanding why some couples grow closer and others don’t.

The core insight is that the attachment style we developed in early childhood (based on how reliably our caregivers responded to our needs) shapes the way we show up in adult intimate relationships. People with secure attachment styles are able to ask for closeness without fearing it will overwhelm their partner, and can tolerate distance without interpreting it as abandonment. People with anxious or avoidant attachment styles carry patterns that can, without awareness, systematically undermine connection — even when both people genuinely want it.

The three primary adult attachment styles: Secure: Comfortable with closeness and autonomy both. Able to communicate needs and tolerate imperfection. Most naturally inclined toward growing together. Anxious: Craves closeness but fears it won’t last. May become hypervigilant about signs of distance. Often pursues connection in ways that inadvertently create more distance. Avoidant: Values independence; may unconsciously withdraw when closeness intensifies. Often perceived as not trying, though frequently they want connection — they simply manage intimacy through distance.

What matters for the growing toward vs. growing apart question is this: attachment styles are not fixed. Research by Sue Johnson, developer of Emotionally Focused Therapy, has demonstrated that even people with insecure attachment histories can develop earned security — particularly within relationships where they experience consistent, responsive care over time. The relationship itself can become a corrective experience, if both people understand what they’re working with.

◆  THE SOCIOLOGICAL LAYER: LIFE TRANSITIONS AS INFLECTION POINTS

Sociologists who study long-term relationships have identified what they call “life course transitions” — major life events and stage changes that disproportionately affect the trajectory of relationships. These include the transition to parenthood, career changes, children leaving home, retirement, illness, loss of parents, and the renegotiation of identity in midlife.

The research finding that matters here is nuanced: these transitions do not themselves determine whether a couple grows toward or apart. What matters is how the couple navigates the transition together — or doesn’t.

What the research shows about transitions: A landmark study by researchers Cowan and Cowan found that couples who discussed their fears, expectations, and changing identities before and during major transitions maintained significantly higher relationship satisfaction than those who didn’t. The transition itself was not the determining factor. The conversation around it was. In other words: the empty nest, the career change, the midlife reckoning — these are not the enemies of connection. Silence about them is.

◆  THE SELF-EXPANSION MODEL

Psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron developed what they call the Self-Expansion Model of relationships — the idea that one of the primary motivations for entering and staying in intimate relationships is the opportunity to expand the self: to grow, learn, and experience the world through the lens of another person.

In the early stages of a relationship, this expansion is rapid and exhilarating. The other person is new; everything they bring — their perspective, their knowledge, their way of being in the world — enlarges your sense of what is possible. This is, in part, what we experience as falling in love.

Over time, the rate of expansion naturally slows. We become familiar with each other. The novelty fades. And here is where the research gets interesting: couples who continue to grow toward each other are, consistently, the ones who continue to provide each other with experiences of self-expansion — through shared novel activities, genuine curiosity about each other’s inner lives, and the ongoing willingness to be changed by each other.

A key finding from the Arons’ research: Couples who regularly engaged in novel, challenging, or exciting activities together reported significantly higher relationship satisfaction than those who primarily engaged in familiar, comfortable activities — even when the familiar activities were pleasant. The experience of learning something together, or of doing something that required both people to be fully present and a little uncertain, was itself connective.

This finding has a practical implication that is both simple and easy to let slip away in the business of ordinary life: boredom is not neutral in a long relationship. It is directional. And the direction it points is apart.

The Forces That Pull Couples Together Over Time

Having established some of the science, let’s get more specific about what actually determines the direction of growth in practice. What are the forces — behavioral, emotional, structural — that push couples toward each other as the years accumulate?

1. Continued Curiosity

The couples who grow toward each other never quite stop being curious about each other. Not in the performative sense — not because they force themselves to ask questions — but because they genuinely maintain the belief that their partner is still an evolving, surprising, knowable person. That the person in front of them today is not identical to the person they married. That knowing them requires ongoing attention, not just reference to established facts.

This sounds simple. It is, in practice, one of the harder things to sustain. Familiarity is the enemy of curiosity. After twenty years of living with someone, there is tremendous psychological pressure to believe you already know them — which makes it easy to stop looking. The couples who resist this tendency, who treat their long-term partner with something like the attention they brought to the early relationship, consistently report deeper connection.

What this looks like: Asking questions about the present rather than assuming you know the answers: not ‘how was your day’ as a formality, but ‘what are you thinking about these days?’ and actually waiting for an answer that might surprise you. Being genuinely delighted — not just politely supportive — when your partner changes. Treating their evolution as interesting rather than threatening.

2. Shared Meaning-Making

Gottman’s research identifies what he calls the “Sound Relationship House” — a framework for understanding the structural elements of strong relationships. Among the most important floors of that house is shared meaning: the rituals, values, stories, and symbols that two people build together over time that become specific to them.

Couples who grow toward each other are, almost universally, couples who have continued to build this shared meaning — who have kept creating new rituals, who revisit and update their shared story, who know what they stand for together and can articulate it. Not just “we are married” and “we have children,” but something more particular: we are the people who do this thing on Sunday mornings, who go to this place every year, who believe in this, who laugh at that, who have this particular shorthand that no one else shares.

When shared meaning erodes — when the rituals stop being maintained, when the shared story goes unrevised, when what you stand for together becomes unclear — couples lose something that is harder to name than communication or chemistry but perhaps more foundational than either.

3. The Practice of Repair

No long relationship is without conflict, hurt, misunderstanding, or the ordinary friction of two different people wanting different things at the same time. The question is not whether those ruptures happen — they do, in every relationship, always. The question is whether the couple has developed the capacity to repair them.

Gottman found that the ability to repair after conflict was a stronger predictor of relationship health than the frequency or intensity of conflict itself. Couples who could re-establish warmth and connection after a fight, who could acknowledge their role in the rupture, who could return to each other without the need to win or be vindicated — these couples grew. The accumulated repairs became, over time, evidence of something: that this relationship can hold difficulty. That we can get it wrong and come back. That the connection is more durable than any single conflict.

Couples who cannot repair — or who stop trying — accumulate a different kind of evidence: that the relationship is fragile, that conflict means danger, that the other person cannot be trusted with the harder parts of yourself. This is the foundation on which distance is built.

The anatomy of a repair attempt: It doesn’t have to be elaborate. Gottman’s research found that even small gestures — a touch on the arm, a change in tone, a small acknowledgment — constitute effective repair when they are made and received genuinely. What matters is that someone reaches across the distance created by the conflict, and the other person allows themselves to be reached. The reaching and the allowing are both necessary. Neither person can do it alone.

4. Growing Individually While Remaining Visible to Each Other

Here is a nuance that the research supports but that is rarely framed this way: individual growth and relational growth are not opposites. Becoming more fully yourself does not inherently create distance in a relationship. What creates distance is becoming more fully yourself while failing to bring that new self back to the relationship. While stopping being visible to your partner as you change.

The couples who grow toward each other as individuals are the ones who stay transparent about their evolution — who say, in words or actions: I am changing, and I want you to know who I’m becoming. Who invite their partner into the experience of their growth rather than presenting them with the finished product of it and expecting them to catch up. And who remain genuinely interested in the parallel process happening in their partner.

This is, in some ways, the whole thing. Individual growth becomes relational distance when it happens in parallel silence. It becomes relational deepening when it happens in shared witness.

The Forces That Pull Couples Apart

With equal honesty, let’s examine the other direction — not to assign blame, but because understanding the mechanisms of drift is the only way to interrupt them.

1. The Slow Erosion of Turning Toward

Recall Gottman’s finding about bids for connection. The drift in most long relationships does not begin with a dramatic turning away — a betrayal, a rejection, a wound. It begins with small bids going unacknowledged. With one person pointing at the window and the other not looking up from their phone. With a sigh that goes unasked-about. With a small vulnerability offered and not caught.

Each of these is survivable. None of them, individually, is a crisis. But over thousands of repetitions — over years and years of bids made and not received — something accumulates. The person who keeps making bids and having them go unmet begins, without necessarily deciding to, to make fewer bids. And the person who has been distracted or unavailable, who perhaps didn’t even realize bids were being made, finds one day that the bids have stopped. The silence between them has become the default. And they’re not sure how it happened.

What the slow erosion actually looks like day to day: The conversation starter that gets a distracted response, again. The shared meal where both people are on their phones. The observation offered and not acknowledged. The small excitement shared and met with mild disinterest. None of these are crises. They are the material from which distance is built. What’s insidious about this erosion is that it requires no decision. No one chose to drift. It happened in the aggregate of ten thousand small moments where choosing connection would have been possible, but something else happened instead.

2. Parallel Lives Without a Meeting Point

Sociologists use the term “role engulfment” to describe what happens when an individual becomes so absorbed in a particular role — parent, provider, professional — that other dimensions of their identity recede. In long relationships, role engulfment often happens to both partners simultaneously, and in different directions.

She becomes the career builder and the household manager. He becomes the provider and the practical problem-solver. Or the reverse. Or some particular version of this that is specific to their relationship and life. Each of them is functioning, even thriving, in their domain. But the person they are outside their roles — the curious, feeling, dreaming, interior person who existed before the roles accumulated — has been quietly crowded out. And there is no longer a regular meeting point where those interior people encounter each other.

This is what parallel lives look like from the inside: functional, busy, not unhappy in an obvious way, and profoundly lonely in a way that’s hard to explain because nothing is technically wrong. This is the sociology of the drift.

3. Accumulated Resentment and Unprocessed Hurt

The psychology literature is consistent on this: unaddressed resentment is among the most reliably corrosive forces in long relationships. Not the acute resentment of a specific wound — that, at least, has a clear origin and can potentially be addressed directly. But the chronic, low-grade resentment that builds from years of small disappointments, unmet expectations, and the accumulated sense of not being seen or valued in the ways that matter most.

Gottman calls contempt — the feeling that your partner is fundamentally beneath you, expressed through eye-rolls, dismissiveness, or cutting remarks — the single greatest predictor of relationship dissolution. But contempt is rarely the beginning. It is the end stage of a long process that started with smaller hurts that were never repaired, smaller disappointments that were never named, smaller resentments that were never released.

The mechanism is straightforward in theory and agonizingly difficult in practice: resentment left unaddressed does not simply sit still. It accrues interest. The original wound becomes a lens through which new events are interpreted, adding to the pile. And the person carrying the resentment becomes, over time, less available for genuine connection — because genuine connection requires a degree of openness that accumulated hurt makes very difficult to sustain.

The resentment cycle: Hurt goes unaddressed → becomes resentment → creates distance → makes honest conversation harder → leads to more hurt going unaddressed. This cycle, running quietly in the background of a relationship for years, is what people mean when they say ‘things calcified.’ The individual stones are small. But the wall they build is real.

4. Divergent Growth Without Shared Witness

Returning to what we established earlier: it is not growth itself that creates distance. It is growth that goes unseen and unshared. When one or both people in a relationship change significantly — in their values, their interests, their sense of identity, their vision for their life — and that change happens without the other person being invited into it, the result is two people becoming strangers to each other while sharing the same address.

This is perhaps the most poignant form of growing apart, because it requires no malice and no failure of care. It simply requires two people being so busy becoming who they are becoming that they forget to keep introducing themselves to each other.

The Pivot Point: What Determines Which Way It Goes

Having laid out both directions with their mechanisms and textures, we can now address the central question directly. What actually tips the balance?

The research, and the honest human observation that sits alongside it, points to several factors that appear again and again as determinative — not just in predicting which relationships dissolve, but in predicting which ones deepen.

Intention: Is the Relationship a Living Thing or a Finished Object?

The most fundamental difference between couples who grow toward each other and couples who grow apart may be this: the growing-toward couples treat the relationship as an ongoing project — something that requires continued investment and attention and intentional tending, not just maintenance. The growing-apart couples, at some point, began treating the relationship as a finished thing. As an object that exists, rather than a living thing that needs to be fed.

This distinction has enormous practical consequences. If the relationship is a living thing, then every week is an opportunity to either nourish it or neglect it. If it’s a finished object, then neglect is not neglect — it’s just the way things are. The growing-toward couples are not, in most cases, doing anything dramatically different from the growing-apart couples. They are doing something consistently different: they are making small, regular choices to show up for the relationship, turn toward each other, tend to it. Not perfectly. Not always gracefully. But consistently.

The question that determines everything: Not ‘are we happy?’ or ‘do we love each other?’ — both of which can be answered yes while a relationship quietly deteriorates. But: ‘Are we actively choosing each other, in the small daily ways that choosing requires, right now?’ That question, asked honestly and regularly, changes things.

Symmetry of Effort: Are Both People Rowing?

The research is clear that uneven effort — one person consistently more invested in the relationship’s maintenance than the other — is among the strongest predictors of eventual dissolution, and one of the most reliable sources of the resentment we discussed earlier.

This does not mean effort must be perfectly equal in every moment. There are seasons in every long relationship when one person carries more — through illness, loss, professional crisis, personal struggle. This is normal and survivable. What matters is whether the imbalance is temporary and acknowledged, or whether it has become the permanent structural reality of the relationship. Whether the person carrying more is seen and appreciated by the person carrying less. And whether both people, in the aggregate and over time, are genuinely invested in the relationship’s health.

When one person stops rowing — when the effort becomes entirely unidirectional — the person still rowing faces an impossible choice: keep rowing alone until they can’t anymore, or stop. Either way, the relationship stops going where it was trying to go.

The Willingness to Be Known Again

Perhaps the most underrated factor in whether couples grow toward or apart is the willingness — on both sides — to be known again. Not just to be loved from a safe distance, or accepted as the established version of themselves, but genuinely known: seen in their current reality, understood in their present form, met where they actually are.

This willingness is harder than it sounds. Being truly known requires vulnerability, which requires risk, which requires trust. In relationships where trust has been eroded — by accumulated hurt, by years of missed bids, by the particular loneliness of not being seen — the willingness to be vulnerable enough to be known again asks for more than many people can offer without help.

But it is, consistently, the thing that turns the direction around. When one person in a relationship chooses — despite the risk, despite the history, despite the uncertainty — to offer something real and allow themselves to be seen, and the other person meets that with genuine attention and care, something shifts. Not permanently, not automatically, but in the direction of toward.

What the growing-toward couples actually do differently: They turn toward the small bids, consistently. They stay curious about each other as evolving people, not fixed identities. They repair ruptures rather than letting them accumulate. They continue to create shared experiences of novelty and growth. They treat the relationship as a living thing that needs regular tending. They stay visible to each other through their individual changes. None of these are extraordinary. All of them are chosen, again and again, in the ordinary fabric of daily life. That is, exactly, the point.

The Most Important Question

If you have read this essay alongside the two that preceded it — “Lonely Together” and “Loving Someone You’ve Outgrown” — then you are probably sitting with a particular kind of self-inventory right now. A quiet reckoning with the direction your own relationship has been moving.

I want to offer you a question that is more honest, and more useful, than asking whether you’re happy or whether you still love each other:

Are we growing toward each other or apart right now — and is that direction the result of circumstance, or of choice?

Because here is what the research, and the human truth underneath the research, keeps coming back to: the direction is usually not predetermined. It is the accumulation of choices — small, daily, often unremarkable — about whether to turn toward or away. Whether to stay curious or assume you already know. Whether to repair or let the distance stand. Whether to bring your evolving self back to the relationship or keep it to yourself.

The direction can change. That is the genuinely hopeful thing here, and I mean it without sentimentality: the direction can change. Not instantly, and not through a single conversation, and not without the effort and willingness of two people who decide they want it to. But it can change. The research shows this. The couples who found their way back to each other after a long drift show this.

It starts with exactly where you are right now: with the honest acknowledgment of which direction you’ve been going, and the choice — made today, in some small way, and then made again tomorrow — to turn toward.

Where to Begin

Not with a conversation about everything. Not with a comprehensive relationship audit or a weekend retreat or a dramatic declaration. Those things can come later, if the foundation supports them. What the research and the human experience both point to is simpler than that.

Begin here: The next time your partner makes any bid for connection — however small, however ordinary — turn toward it. Put the phone down. Look up. Respond. That is where the direction changes: in one small turning, chosen. Ask one real question this week. Not ‘how was your day.’ Something that requires them to think, and you to listen. Something that treats them as a person still becoming, rather than a person already known. Name something you’ve been carrying — gently, without accusation. Not to relitigate the past, but to let yourself be seen in the present. Vulnerability is not weakness. It is the mechanism of closeness. Do something together that neither of you has done before. Novel shared experience is one of the most research-supported drivers of renewed connection. It doesn’t have to be extraordinary. It has to be new. If the drift has been significant, consider bringing a skilled third party into the room. A couples therapist is not a crisis intervention. It is a guide for two people trying to navigate toward each other across terrain that has gotten complicated.

A Final Word

The question at the center of this series — how do we stay genuinely connected across the long arc of a relationship? — does not have a simple answer. It has a practice.

The couples who grow toward each other are not the ones who had fewer obstacles or more luck or perfect compatibility. They are the ones who decided, in the accumulation of ordinary days, that the relationship was worth the practice. That the other person — the evolving, complicated, sometimes frustrating, deeply familiar person they chose — was worth continued curiosity and continued care.

That decision is available to you. It was available yesterday, and it will be available tomorrow, and it is available right now.

The direction is not fixed. The direction is chosen.

You are not passengers in the story of your relationship. You are the ones writing it, in the small choices of every ordinary day.

Continue the conversation.

This is the third essay in an ongoing series about love, growth, and the examined relationship. If this one resonated, “Lonely Together” and “Loving Someone You’ve Outgrown” are linked in the series archive. And as always — the comments are the best part. What does growing toward look like in your experience? What made the difference? I’d love to know. 🤍

---

✦  ✦  ✦

The Collecting Moments Project

Travel. Intention. The life you’re living right now.