What is Positivity Resonance?

Saturday, August 16, 2025. This is for my new clients, Karina & Sean. See you the first weekend in October.

A team of scientists recently strapped heart monitors onto 148 long-married couples, set up cameras, and told them to argue.

Not surprisingly, what emerged was not the spectacle of marital apocalypse—but proof that love hides in the tiniest flickers of connection.

The couples who still laughed together, mirrored each other’s smiles, or matched their tones—even in conflict—were the same couples who scored higher on enduring love.

Thirty years into marriage, the data suggested, romance survives not because of grand gestures, but because of micro-moments of emotional synchrony.

If this sounds familiar, it echoes what I’ve written about in quiet quitting marriage—that relationships don’t collapse in fireworks, but in the erosion of everyday attention.

What Is Positivity Resonance?

The researchers call this phenomenon Positivity Resonance.

It’s not fireworks, not destiny, and not a line from a Hallmark card. It’s the fleeting but powerful state when two people share positive emotion and sync up:

• Facial Synchrony: the way partners’ smiles or eyebrow raises match each other.

• Vocal Harmony: tones of voice that blend instead of clash.

• Physiological Alignment: heartbeats finding rhythm together, like an invisible dance.

These moments trigger the release of oxytocin and other bonding chemicals, nudging couples back toward trust and warmth.

Positivity resonance is what makes love feel alive, even when you’ve already told each other the same stories a thousand times.

In couples therapy, we see the absence of this resonance in the same way we see the subtle signals of micro-cheating—the little things matter more than people admit.

Why It Matters in Long-Term Marriage

These weren’t starry-eyed newlyweds.

On average, the couples had been married for 30 years.

They’d lived through the usual gauntlet of mortgages, in-laws, and the slow betrayal of aging knees. And still, those who could spark micro-moments of positivity in the lab scored higher on what the researchers called “trait love”—the enduring, stable kind.

Even more telling: moment-to-moment spikes of positivity resonance were tied to “State Love”—the temporary, in-the-moment sense of affection. Love, it seems, is a dynamic system. It ebbs and flows not only across decades but also across seconds.

This is a useful reminder for couples emerging from therapy who wonder how to maintain progress after couples therapy. The work isn’t just in the breakthroughs—it’s in how you carry those tiny sparks home.

The Catch: Measuring Love with Love

There’s a caveat here. Both “positivity resonance” and “love” were measured from the same lab videos, which raises the philosophical problem of grading your own homework.

Do couples look more loving because they resonate positively, or are we just observing two sides of the same coin?

Still, the study finally gives some badly needed empirical footing to Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden and Build Theory: in other words, love isn’t a permanent possession, but a repeated state. If practiced often enough, it scaffolds into something durable.

The Takeaway

The moral here isn’t complicated: if you want to keep love alive, you don’t need to engineer a second honeymoon or master tantric breathing. You need to notice your partner’s glance, meet their half-smile, share their laugh.

Love, in this framework, is not an eternal flame—it’s a series of sparks.

Strike them often enough, and you might find that even after thirty years, you’re still glowing together, electrodes beeping in some research lab, proving that the small stuff is the big stuff.

And if you want to see how modern culture sometimes sabotages those sparks, my piece on the loneliness epidemic in marriage is a good companion read.

Call to Action: Start Your Own Micro-Moments

Here’s your homework, no electrodes required:

• Tonight, notice your partner’s smile and return it.

• Tomorrow, share one laugh that isn’t about the kids or the bills.

• This week, let your heart rate settle into rhythm beside them.

Please remember this simple truth; enduring love is found in small, repeatable acts of kindness and presence that build enduring love.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Fredrickson, B. L. (2013). Love 2.0: Creating happiness and health in moments of connection. New York, NY: Hudson Street Press.

Lai, J., Otero, M. C., Chen, K.-H., Wells, J. L., Levenson, R. W., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2024). Does positivity resonance signify love? Markers of positivity resonance in long-term married couples relate to trait and state love. Personal Relationships. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/pere.12540