One Way to Tell If You Feel Truly Loved in Your Relationship

"The real evidence of love hides in the tiniest of spaces. In fact, it can literally be found in the pauses between one person's words and the other's responses. To that end, one of the most overlooked but powerful relational phenomena is called "repair latency." It stands for the time it takes for one partner to respond to the other's bid for connection. It's the "micropause" of love."

"Developmental research underscores just how consequential these micropauses can be. In one study of nearly 240 preschool children and their mothers, researchers examined how quickly the pairs repaired moments of disconnection during a short, challenging task they were assigned to do together. They found that children who had been exposed to more environmental stressors struggled to find harmony again with their caregivers and experienced longer delays before emotional repairs were made."

"It wasn't just whether relationship ruptures were mended that mattered, but how quickly they were taken care of that mattered. The nervous system seems to register a quicker response time as a signal of safety. In adult relationships, this manifests in the form of the split second it takes for a partner to respond to your bid for connection. This carries disproportionate weight in how secure and loved you feel by them."

Repair latency denotes the time between one partner's bid for connection and the other's response. Shorter repair latency signals safety to the nervous system and contributes to accumulating trust and security over time. Developmental evidence from preschool dyads links greater environmental stress to longer repair delays and difficulty reestablishing harmony with caregivers. The speed of emotional repair, not merely whether ruptures are mended, predicts felt security. Bids function as fundamental units of emotional communication and can be overt or subtle. In adult relationships, the micropause between reach and response strongly influences feelings of love and belonging.

Read at Psychology Today