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About this tool
Get practical relationship prompts, communication tips, and supportive advice for common situations.
This relationship adviser turns three published relationship-education frameworks into something you can act on today: Nonviolent Communication's four-part statement (observation, feeling, need, request), the Gottman Institute's Four Horsemen with their antidotes, and the Magic Six Hours a Week ritual budget of 360 minutes. Pick the situation you are actually in, get prompts you can say out loud, and check your week's connection time and your positive-to-negative ratio against the 5:1 mark. It is a communication aid for everyday friction, not therapy and not a diagnosis.
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Choose a situation in "What is going on right now?" — the list runs from "We keep having the same argument" to "I need to apologise properly" — then fill the four boxes: When…, I feel…, Because I need…, Would you be willing to…
Enter your real week in the connection budget: days a week you are together, plus minutes for Partings, Reunions, Appreciation, Affection, the Weekly date and the State of the union, and your counts of positive and negative moments.
Read the assembled statement, your ritual total against the 360-minute target and your ratio against 5:1, then press Copy statement — the builder refuses an observation containing always, never, lazy or selfish and says why.
Every prompt maps to a documented framework — NVC, the Four Horsemen, the magic ratio, or the Magic Six Hours.
The weekly budget adds up per-day and per-week rituals so you can see the gap to 6 hours in minutes.
The statement builder refuses observations containing always, never, lazy or selfish and explains why.
It is the Gottman Institute's 'magic ratio': in observed conflict, couples who stayed together averaged about five positive interactions for every negative one, while couples who separated averaged closer to 0.8:1. The tool works out your ratio and how many positive moments would close the gap.
Gottman's Magic Six Hours a Week is a concrete budget of about 360 minutes: 2 minutes of partings and 20 minutes of reunion per day, 5 minutes of appreciation and 5 minutes of affection per day, a 2-hour weekly date and a 1-hour weekly state-of-the-union conversation.
Replace the harsh start-up with the four-part statement: name the single event, one feeling word, the need underneath, then one specific request the other person could agree to today. Recurring arguments usually sit on an unmet need rather than the surface topic.
Name it and take a break of at least 20 minutes with an agreed time to return. Shutting down is usually physiological flooding rather than indifference, and research on flooding shows the body needs roughly that long to settle before the conversation can be useful again.