What a Repair Attempt Is, and the Forms It Takes
The repair attempt is a concept John Gottman identified in the course of his research on couples: any move, during a conflict, that tries to halt the escalation of negative interaction and steer the relationship back toward something constructive. Some repair attempts are made deliberately, as a conscious choice to de-escalate; others slip out without the person ever intending them. In practice they take a wide range of concrete forms. Humor is one of the most common, a joke that loosens the tension in the room. So is physical contact, taking the partner's hand or touching a shoulder. There are apologies ("I went too far, I'm sorry"), expressions of empathy ("I understand how you feel"), and metacommunication, in which the couple steps outside the argument to comment on it ("This conversation isn't going well, is it"). Changing the subject counts as well, and so does putting feeling into words ("I just noticed how angry I am right now"). One of the most important findings in Gottman's work concerns which of these matters. It is not the quality or elegance of the repair attempt that predicts whether a relationship stays stable, but its success rate, that is, whether the partner accepts the repair attempt at all.
What Separates a Repair Attempt That Works From One That Fails
Whether a repair attempt succeeds or fails depends largely on the balance in what Gottman calls the couple's emotional bank account. Where positive interactions have accumulated day after day, even a clumsy, poorly timed repair attempt tends to be accepted, because there is credit in the account to draw on. Where negative feeling has been accumulating instead, even a skillful and well-judged repair attempt is likely to be rebuffed. The success of a repair attempt, in other words, is not a problem confined to the conflict itself; it reflects the everyday quality of the relationship. Attachment style shapes the picture as well. People with a secure style make repair attempts readily and respond to their partner's attempts in kind. Anxiously attached people do make repair attempts, but their manner is prone to becoming excessively emotional, which can backfire with an avoidant partner and intensify rather than calm the exchange. Avoidantly attached people make repair attempts less often, and they also tend to have difficulty recognizing a partner's repair attempt for what it is, so a genuine overture can pass by unnoticed.
Repair Attempts in Compatibility Assessment
The repair attempt is where a couple's resilience, their capacity to recover, actually becomes visible. Every couple experiences conflict; what determines long-term stability is whether the relationship can be repaired after conflict rather than whether conflict occurs. In terms of the Big Five, high agreeableness correlates positively with both the frequency of repair attempts and receptiveness to them. High extraversion is associated with the use of humor and verbal repair attempts. High conscientiousness is associated with apology and with taking responsibility. The difficulty is that an attempt offered in one partner's own vocabulary may never register with the other as an attempt at all. Consider the case where one partner tries to repair through humor while the other expects a serious apology: the humor carries a real risk of being read as making light of the problem. Translating mid-argument is hard, so the exchange works better while things are calm: each partner names one thing they do that means I want this to stop and to be on good terms again. Cracking a joke, bringing a cup of tea, a hand on the shoulder. What the gesture is matters less than whether it appears on the other person's list.