Has bae been acting up lately? Are your subtweets and shady Instagram reposts just not helping him get the hint? Then maybe you both should take a few cues from Dr. Hannah Fry, a mathematician at the University College London, who created an entire formula for finding (and keeping) true love. Sure, we’d all love to think that we’re going to effortlessly find love the next time we check our Tinder messages, but there’s clearly more to it than that. Figuring out whether you and your new flame are a match for each other might require you putting those skills you learned in calculus to the test.
Dr. Fry is a bit of a relationship expert and she’s kind of a big deal. In a book she wrote, called “The Mathematics of Love,” which was inspired by her TED Talk of the same name, Dr. Fry basically concludes that the outcome of a relationship is based on how the two people involved perceive each other.
The book discusses the research that psychologist John Gottman conducted with various couples. The team observed how hundreds of couples interacted with one another, looking at everything from their facial expressions to the blood pressure. What they found was that low-risk couples have more positive interactions with each other whereas high-risk couples tend to dwell in a negative state.
“In relationships where both partners consider themselves as happy, bad behavior is dismissed as unusual,” Fry explained writes in the book. “In negative relationships, however, the situation is reversed. Bad behavior is considered the norm.”
This is also another way of pointing out that healthy relationships are those in which two people are genuinely happy with each other and optimistic about their relationship, assuming that if anything bad happens, it happens because one partner is having a bad day.
There’s also a formula that can predict just how positive or negative the next thing your SO says will be. Taking into account mood, expectations and influence, the formula basically states that, in a relationship, two people tend to have a great amount of influence on each other, which is pretty important. Fry found that the most important thing that couples need to look out for is their negativity threshold, i.e. how negative one partner needs to be before garnering a reaction from the other.
“The most successful relationships are the ones with a really low negativity threshold,” Fry writes. “In those relationships, couples allow each other to complain, and work together to constantly repair the tiny issues between them. In such a case, couples don’t bottle up their feelings, and little things don’t end up being blown completely out of proportion.”
Basically, if you’re questioning whether or not your relationship will turn out to be successful, it all comes down to communication and actually making an attempt to straighten out your issues when things get tough. We’re not sure if you actually needed an equation to show you that but if you think you can crack the code without putting a strain on your brain, feel free to take the challenge.