We often think that vulnerability sharing and uncovering the hidden (or not-so-hidden) traumas of our lives are what make us closer to each other. Getting into the dark stuff and the sad stories of the past or of the present is the right way to bond.
So we often treat relationships as places to vent and offload about the things that don’t work, saying things like ‘that person doesn’t like me, they are so awful, they treat me so badly’ and so on and so on because we feel comfortable with the other person. It’s safe, and relationships are about safety.
The other person is there to hug us, either verbally or physically, and to be there for us. And at the end of the process, we will bond. But what’s actually surprising is that this kind of behaviour is not necessarily the one we should be doing. Treating our relationships like an emotional landfill isn’t the ultimate key to intimacy. What the research actually says is that sharing positive events has a very beneficial effect on bonding, and it doesn’t really matter if it’s friendship or couples or even couples with existing problems like breast cancer.
Sharing positive events and not undermining those for the other person but actually amplifying them is a way to make the relationship better, and I think it’s something worth looking at. Especially if you used to think that trauma bonding is the way to go in life.
The impact of sharing good news
What is actually happening in our brains when we tell someone about a win is called capitalisation. The concept was originally introduced by Langston (1994) and then heavily expanded upon by Shelly Gable and her colleagues.
Basically, capitalisation is the act of disclosing a positive event to derive an additional benefit from it. The idea is that when a good thing happens to you, the life cycle of that good thing isn’t actually over. By sharing it with someone else, you capitalise on the initial joy and like you stretch its value. Telling the story actually writes that joy to your memory.
Gable ran this daily diary study to track the mechanism. The researchers had participants log their daily experiences, and they found that sharing the best event of the day increases something called ‘activated positive affect’. It’s an energetic, like active positive emotion. It also boosts overall life satisfaction.
And this increase happens in addition to the baseline happiness the person got from the event itself. The act of sharing and rehearsing and elaborating on the story actually forces your brain to relive the positive memory. Even if there are bad events happening to you at the same time.
Two pathways instead of one
There’s a team of researchers led by Otto. They tracked female patients who had been diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer along with their partners. The couples completed daily diaries for over a week, specifically right around the time of the patient’s surgery.
So we’re talking about a period characterised by intense physical pain, fear, and extreme psychological distress. An environment where you would assume every single conversation is just focused on survival, pain management, and fear.
Yet the data showed something surprising. Even in the middle of that awfulness, when the patient or the partner engaged in a capitalisation attempt, meaning they shared a win or deliberately shared the best event of their day, however small it was, it predicted a significant increase in daily feelings of intimacy for the person sharing. The couples were actually building closeness through joy, even on the days surrounding a cancer surgery.
This sounds unusual. We are deeply conditioned to believe that during a crisis, we must match the emotional frequency of the suffering, focusing entirely on their pain and holding space for it, being gentle and tiptoeing around the other person when they are in crisis mode. So, coming home and bringing up your own win at work feels insensitive and selfish.
But the researchers found that the intimacy built by capitalisation was completely independent of the effects of sharing bad news. Offering a shoulder to cry on, i.e., social support, is absolutely crucial. But joy doesn’t cancel out or compete with the sorrow. They run on two separate tracks. Providing social support handles the pain, but capitalising on positive events actively builds this separate reservoir of intimacy. Exactly. You need both.
If a relationship in a crisis becomes solely focused on pain processing, it loses its vitality. Sharing the silver linings and savouring those small positive events maintains a baseline of connectedness and resilience. It proves that the human brain desperately needs a partner to celebrate with, even when the broader context is incredibly dark. Not only in the darkest moments, though.
From oncology straight to the bedroom
There was a lab study on cohabiting couples led by Bosisio that examined this everyday dynamic of sharing the positive and focused on how it impacts sexual well-being and sexual satisfaction.
The framework Bosisio’s team used is grounded in the sexual crucible model. It suggests that maintaining true intimacy and sexual vitality over a long period of time requires managing two opposing forces. First, you need emotional closeness and security. But second, you need differentiation.
It’s exactly the opposite of the notion of two people merging into one single inseparable entity.
While emotional fusion might feel really safe, it is actually terrible for long-term desire. Because it’s boring.
Differentiation is the ability to see your partner as an individual with a completely separate life, separate successes, and a separate identity from you. You need a little bit of separation and something to admire to maintain a spark. And that’s where capitalisation comes in. Based on Gable’s earlier research, Bosisio looked at four distinct ways a partner can react when you share good news.
They are categorised across two spectrums, active versus passive and constructive versus destructive. The first is ‘active constructive’, which is genuine joy amplification. The second is ‘active destructive’, which is actively undermining the good news. The third is ‘passive destructive’, which is passivity and disinterest. And the fourth is ‘passive constructive’, which is quiet, unspoken support. And this is where it gets really interesting – the language meets the desire in a completely different way than the obvious grand declarations.
‘Active constructive’ is basically being your partner’s personal cheerleader and the ‘tell me everything’ person, while ‘active destructive’ is essentially popping their balloon with a needle. So far, it’s obvious.
When you offer an ‘active constructive’ response, you are celebrating your partner’s external win enthusiastically, which means you are fully acknowledging their individuality. You’re seeing them as their own person.
It is like admitting, ‘I see you shining out there in the world completely separate from me, and I love it,’ which sparks new energy and fosters space and novelty. You are remembering that your partner is a whole interesting person outside of the relationship. Not surprisingly, the study found that one’s self-reported and partner-perceived active constructive responses were directly associated with greater sexual satisfaction.
The study also linked ‘active destructive’ responses to lower sexual function overall and, in women specifically, lower sexual satisfaction. When you undermine a partner’s win, you are failing to accept their individuality and rejecting their individuality.
This may sound like an echo of low self-esteem, and it often is – their independent success feels like a threat. Like the subconscious fear of, ‘Oh, if they’re doing great out there in the world, maybe they won’t need me as much.’ Which, oddly enough, is the exact opposite. They need you to stay with them in this joy.
But if you feel so threatened by your partner’s independent joy enough to minimise it, you are suffocating the very novelty that keeps romantic desire alive and pulling them back down. And a relationship without independent shine quickly becomes a relationship without passion.
The True Language of Passion
So if you are now wondering which one of these four you are, the easiest way to visualise this is to look at the tool the researchers actually used, which is called the Perceived Responses to Capitalisation Attempts Scale. PRCA scale.
This is the language of enthusiasm, the ‘active constructive’ way involves asking a lot of questions, showing genuine focused attention, and reacting with high energy. One of the items on the assessment scale literally describes the feeling, ‘I got the sense that my partner was even more happy and excited than I am.’ It’s about stopping what you were doing, turning toward them and saying, ‘Tell me everything. What did your boss say? How did you feel in that moment?’
The total opposite, an ’active destructive’ response, is the language of deflation. It involves immediately pointing out the potential downsides or reminding the partner that most good things have negative aspects. I know people who do this automatically, and they almost always think they’re being helpful.
You come to them and say, ‘I finally got that promotion.’ And they immediately say, ‘Well, congratulations, but you know, you’ll probably be working way longer hours. Say goodbye to your weekends.’ They might mask it as being practical or keeping you grounded, but psychologically, it completely shuts down the savouring process. It drains the positive affect right out of the room.
The ‘passive destructive’ response seems fairly obvious. It is when a partner seems completely disinterested, doesn’t pay much attention or actively changes the subject. It’s a exchange of ‘I got a promotion!’ and ‘Cool; what’s for dinner, honey?’
And unsurprisingly, Besecia’s team linked this specific behaviour to greater sexual distress in the relationship. It’s complete invalidation. I can easily see how that kills the romance and builds resentment.
But the fourth category is a bit sneaky. ‘Passive constructive’ may not look like harm – and on the surface, it is not. The scale describes it as a partner trying not to make a big deal out of the news. They are silently supportive. They say very little, but you generally know they are happy for you. It’s the tight, polite smile. It isn’t malicious. But if we connect this to the bigger picture of the sexual crucible model, we see why it’s harmful over time.
The Bassizio findings revealed that perceived passive constructive responses from a partner were actually associated with lower sexual satisfaction. And the reason comes down to the concept of reward. When someone shares good news with you, they are taking an emotional risk. They are offering an invitation to connect, and their brain is looking for a reciprocal reward. And quiet tolerance isn’t a reward – it is… just neutral.
Merely tolerating your partner’s individuality without actively cherishing or promoting it fails to inject that necessary vitality back into the relationship. Without that shared energy, the intimacy stagnates.
When there is no ‘active constructive’ response, your partner learns that bringing their best self to you doesn’t create a meaningful connection. So they just stop bringing it. And then, you stay with the daily gloom of ‘my boss is a jerk and he doesn’t like me’ talks. Not exactly a bedroom chat, is it.
So while having a shoulder to cry on is important, capitalisation, the act of amplifying joy through active constructive language, builds a protective reservoir of intimacy during both everyday life and life crises like illness, and it sustains the vitality we need to keep a romantic spark alive.
We live in an era where trauma bonding is a major cultural buzzword. We are heavily trained by modern psychology on how to hold space for each other’s pain and how to navigate triggers. We focus so much of our energy on learning how to fix things when they break, but we neglect learning how to elevate things when they actually go right.
So instead of constantly being there for your partner, and especially if you are trying to save your relationship, next time they bring a positive event, just amplify it. And see what happens then.
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Sources:
Bosisio, M., Rosen, N. O., Dubé, J., Vaillancourt-Morel, M.-P., Daspe, M.-È., & Bergeron, S. (2022). Will you be happy for me? Associations between self-reported, perceived, and observed responses to positive events and sexual well-being in cohabiting couples. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 39(8), 2454–2477. https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075221080581
Gable, S. L., Reis, H. T., Impett, E. A., & Asher, E. R. (2018). What do you do when things go right? The intrapersonal and interpersonal benefits of sharing positive events. In Relationships, Well-Being and Behaviour. Routledge.
Gable, S., Reis, H., Impett, E., & Asher, E. (2004). What Do You Do When Things Go Right? The Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Benefits of Sharing Positive Events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 228–245. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.87.2.228
Langston, C. A. (1994). Capitalizing on and coping with daily-life events: Expressive responses to positive events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(6), 1112–1125. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.6.1112
Otto, A. K., Laurenceau, J.-P., Siegel, S. D., & Belcher, A. J. (2015). Capitalizing on everyday positive events uniquely predicts daily intimacy and well-being in couples coping with breast cancer. Journal of Family Psychology: JFP: Journal of the Division of Family Psychology of the American Psychological Association, 29(1), 69–79. https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0000042
Pagani, A. F., Parise, M., Donato, S., Gable, S. L., & Schoebi, D. (2020). If You Shared My Happiness, You Are Part of Me: Capitalization and the Experience of Couple Identity. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 46(2), 258–269. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167219854449
Peters, B. J., Reis, H. T., & Gable, S. L. (2018). Making the good even better: A review and theoretical model of interpersonal capitalization. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 12(7), e12407. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12407