Most relationship advice has a repair bias. The skills we’re told to invest in – listening when a partner is upset, de-escalating a fight, repairing after a rupture – are almost all about handling the bad moments well. The implicit model is that a relationship’s health is decided at its low points, and that maintenance is essentially a form of damage control. Get good at the hard conversations and the rest takes care of itself.
A 2025 study in Contemporary Family Therapy by Noah Larsen, Allen Barton, and Brian Ogolsky at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign points somewhere different. The authors were interested in savoring – the practice, first modeled by Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff, of deliberately slowing down to notice and prolong a positive experience, whether by reminiscing about the past, attending to the present, or anticipating something ahead. Savoring has been studied for years as an individual skill. What Larsen and colleagues wanted to know was what happens when partners do it together. They adapted Bryant’s widely used Savoring Beliefs Inventory into a joint-savoring measure and administered it to a nationwide sample of 589 US adults, alongside measures of relationship satisfaction, communication conflict, confidence that the relationship would last, and perceived stress.
People who reported more joint savoring also reported less conflict, higher satisfaction, and more confidence in the relationship’s future. On its own that’s close to unsurprising – happy couples presumably find more to enjoy together, and it would be strange if the correlation ran the other way. The more interesting result was an interaction with stress. Savoring appeared to function as a buffer, and its association with relationship confidence and individual wellbeing was strongest among the couples reporting the most stress. The good-times practice seemed to matter most precisely when times were not good.
That inverts the usual intuition. Most of us reserve deliberate appreciation for when things are already going well and treat a stressful stretch as a time to put our heads down and grind through. If the buffering effect is real, the savoring is doing its most valuable work in exactly the period we’re least inclined to make room for it. The finding also rhymes with something I’ve written about in the context of gratitude: that the active, noticing step – not the pleasant event itself – is what seems to carry the relational benefit. An ordinary nice evening is just an input; savoring it together is what closes the loop.
The caveats here are not minor, and the authors are reasonably candid about them. The study is cross-sectional – a single survey at one point in time – so the causal arrow is unresolved. Joint savoring may build relational security, or already-secure couples may simply find more to savor, or some third factor drives both. Only one member of each couple was surveyed, so there is no dyadic data; the entire picture rests on one partner’s self-report, with all the rosiness that invites. And the sample is narrow: more than 85% were married, more than 85% were white, and the average household income sat around $85,000 to $95,000. The effect could look quite different in newer, less affluent, or more diverse relationships. This is suggestive correlational work, not a randomized trial, and it is best read as a hypothesis worth testing rather than an established mechanism.
What survives the caveats is a reframe more than a prescription. If even part of the buffering effect holds, then the moments worth protecting aren’t only the conflicts but the ordinary good ones – and the reflex to skip the nice dinner or cancel the trip because things are stressful may be precisely backwards. The practice is cheap and specific: once a week, slow down with your partner over something you both enjoyed or are looking forward to, and refuse to let the stressful weeks be the ones that crowd it out.
When things get hard in your relationship, is the shared good stuff the first thing you protect, or the first thing you let go?