Fondness and Admiration: The Secret Ingredient Missing in Online Dating

In four decades of studying couples, Dr. John Gottman kept finding the same thing at the center of the ones that lasted. Not chemistry. Not communication scripts. Something quieter and more resilient he called fondness and admiration. It's the felt sense that your partner is, on balance, a good person you're glad to be near.

Gottman called it the antidote to contempt — the single strongest predictor of divorce. Contempt says, "I'm above you." Fondness says, "I'm lucky to know you." The distance between those two sentences is the distance between a relationship that dies and one that grows.

The problem: dating apps aren't wired for fondness

Fondness needs three things to develop: attention, time, and specificity. It's built by noticing the particular way someone laughs at their own jokes, or how they always help their friend move apartments, or the way they get quiet before saying something honest.

Now look at how a dating app works. You see a face. You swipe. If you match, you exchange a few generic messages, then either meet or drift. Nothing about this system trains you to notice a person. It trains you to evaluate them. And evaluation is the exact opposite mental posture from fondness.

The difference between evaluating and appreciating

A person in evaluation mode is scanning for disqualifiers. Height, income, that one weird photo, a typo in their bio, a word in their prompt that gives them the ick. Everything is a possible reason to move on.

A person in appreciation mode is scanning for something to like. Not naïvely — you still have standards. But you're looking for evidence of the person, not evidence to reject them. The strange thing is that appreciation mode is much more accurate. Ick-hunting will find an ick. It always does.

How to build fondness into how you date

You can't manufacture fondness, but you can create the conditions for it.

• Slow down at the top of the funnel. Fewer profiles, read more carefully, beats hundreds skimmed in a blur.
• Notice one specific thing per person. A phrase, a hobby, a photo choice. Say it out loud in your opening message.
• Ask about origins, not resumes. "How did you get into that?" builds a story you can be fond of. "What do you do?" builds a checkbox.
• Track what you like, not what you don't. After a first date, write down three things you appreciated before you write down anything you didn't. It rewires how you show up on the second one.

Why this matters after the honeymoon

Fondness isn't only useful for finding a partner. It's the muscle that keeps a partnership alive once the novelty fades. Gottman's advice to long-together couples is the same as his advice to new ones: tell each other what you appreciate, out loud, often, and specifically. "You're a good person" is nice. "I love how you always thank the delivery person by name" is what actually lands.

The people who cultivate fondness early tend to cultivate it late. The people who spend the early season nitpicking often spend the whole relationship doing the same.

The Vetted take

The reason we built Vetted around vouches — a few real friends writing what they actually love about you — is because fondness starts before the first message. When you see a potential match through the eyes of the people who already appreciate them, your default posture shifts. You're not scanning for reasons to swipe left. You're starting from a small, honest reason to lean in.

That doesn't guarantee a relationship. But it points you at the right thing to notice — and noticing, done long enough, is what love actually is.