This Formula Tells You If You Will Split Up From Your Partner

Mathematician Hannah Fry may have unearthed something humans have puzzled over throughout history - the formula for love.

Fry, who has observed hundreds of couples, monitoring everything from facial expressions to blood pressure, believes a simple formula dictates whether couples are ‘high risk’.

In a recent TED talk, Fry explained that the key is how couples react to one another.

Fry believes that if couples react negatively to each other all the time - for instance by dismissing or ignoring what the other says, the entire relationship can be poisoned.

Fry says such negative relationships hit a ‘tipping point’. She says, ‘In relationships where both partners consider themselves as happy, bad behaviour is dismissed as unusual.

‘In negative relationships, however, the situation is reversed. Bad behaviour is considered the norm.

‘A husband, for instance, might think his wife’s grumpiness is 'typical', due to her 'selfishness' or other negative personality trait.’

Fry says that the key is a negativity threshold represented by an equation - where w stands for a person’s mood, rwWt represents their mood when they are with their partner, and IHW is how their other half’s actions influence them.

Fry believes that the key to successful relationships is having a low negativity threshold - so that couples get issues out in the open.

Fry says, ‘The most successful relationships are the ones with a really low negativity threshold. In those relationships, couples allow each other to complain, and work together to constantly repair the tiny issues between them. In such a case, couples don’t bottle up their feelings, and little things don’t end up being blown completely out of proportion.