Coaching practices for What Makes a Relationship Work

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For What Makes a Relationship Work, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• We’ve drifted into roommates running on autopilot
• We pass each other like roommates these days, connection only happening if it randomly happens, and there’s no reliable little moment that’s just ours
• When I ask myself if I’m happy in this relationship, all I can summon are the irritations and the fights
• My partner sided with their family over me again, or didn’t back me up in front of others, and I’m left unsure whether they’ll actually put us first when it counts
• Nothing’s wrong between us, but it feels a little flat, and I notice I only really put effort in when there’s a problem

Practices that may help

1. Relationship Maintenance Behaviors
   Relationship maintenance behaviors are the everyday actions partners use to sustain relationship satisfaction, commitment, and closeness over time. Laura Stafford’s research identified five evidence-linked categories — positivity, openness, assurances, social networks, and sharing tasks — with positivity and assurances showing the strongest and most consistent links to satisfaction.
2. Pro-relationship maintenance behaviors
   Actively do things that maintain and strengthen the relationship, rather than expecting it to run itself.
   The Investment Model of Commitment: Why People Stay (and Why They Leave)
3. Build rituals of connection and shared meaning
   Create repeatable rituals that signal the relationship is a priority.
   The 5-to-1 Positivity Ratio in Relationships
4. Satisfaction audit: tracking what is actually good
   Regularly inventory what genuinely works in the relationship — not as gratitude practice, but as an honest baseline.
   The Investment Model of Commitment: Why People Stay (and Why They Leave)
5. Create and protect the couple bubble
   Agree that you each put the relationship above any third party, including family of origin.
   Secure-Functioning Relationships
6. Secure-Functioning Relationships
   Secure functioning, as defined by Stan Tatkin’s PACT model, means both partners operate as a team that actively manages each other’s safety and security — rather than each person managing their own needs separately. The model has a strong mechanistic basis in attachment neuroscience; formal RCT evidence for PACT specifically is limited but growing.
7. Make capitalization a habit
   Treat your partner’s good news as a recurring opportunity to build the relationship.
   Active-Constructive Responding, Made Practical
8. Build small positive rituals that generate surplus passively
   Recurring small rituals deposit into the positive account without requiring sustained conscious effort.
   The Magic Relationship Ratio: Gottman's 5-to-1 Principle
9. Let repeated repair build earned security
   Each successful repair teaches "we can break and come back" — which is what makes a relationship feel safe.
   Rupture and Repair
10. Treat conflict as maintenance, not maintenance failure
    Repair well and quickly — because how you end conflict matters more than how you conduct it.
    Relationship Maintenance Behaviors

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