Has Your Relationship Gone Cold? Here Are 8 Ways to Warm It Up

Has your relationship gone cold or started to feel distant? Even the strongest bonds can lose warmth over time. Explore insightful ways from Dr. Glassman to bring back warmth in relationships.

Key points

• Warmth predicts relationship satisfaction, trust, and emotional safety.
• Social trends show declining warmth: fewer friendships, less trust, and more incivility.
• Small behaviors—smiles, curiosity, listening—create powerful warmth signals.
• Warmth grows best when partners work on it together, with kindness and self-reflection.

Warmth is an essential ingredient of healthy relationships. Despite societal and technological forces that have made our interactions colder in many ways (think of a smiling emoji versus seeing a real smile), we can restore this crucial relationship nutrient in our lives if we better understand what strengthens and erodes it. 

The research is clear. The warmer we are toward each other, the more likely we will experience stronger felt bonds in our romantic relationships, family connections, and friendships—as well as a higher overall level of subjective well-being and life satisfaction.

Is Social Warmth Trending Down?

Are we getting colder to each other? Data over the past several decades suggests so, as indicated by declines in social trust, fewer close friendships, and increases in perceived rudeness.

Social warmth erosion and the “frienship recession” may be correlated. The number of Americans reporting that they have three or fewer friends has nearly doubled since 1990. Additionally, about half of U.S. adults think that people act more rudely in public since the pandemic, with 20% saying it is a lot ruder.

Over-reliance on digital communication to establish and maintain relationships has led to trading meaningful, emotionally rich interactions for more frequent but shallow connections. Fewer available nonverbal cues and less practice at interpreting them can contribute to diminished interaction quality. 

“Phubbing” or phone snubbing, the habit of checking one’s phone while on a date or having dinner, is another barrier to warmth and connection in intimate settings. It’s estimated that up to 56% percent of people phub as part of their nearly 200 phone checks per day.    

What Creates Warmth?  

Smiling, positive statements, and responsivity infuse our interactions with warmth, leading to more intimacy and closeness. Warm nonverbal and verbal behaviors together help build community as well giving us valuable information when assessing threats. In one study, researchers found that we prioritize social warmth cues over ability cues when evaluating others’ intentions. Warmth is also tied to traits like acceptance, openness, and curiosity, which in tandem can have a lasting positive effect on our style of communication.

You want to be careful, however, of forced warmth, or warmth cues which do not emerge from genuine feelings of liking and care. Recently, Target implemented a “10-4” policy that instructs associates to smile and wave whenever a customer comes within 10 feet and to start a “warm” interaction if within 4 feet. This has met with some consternation from associates and customers alike, since it comes across as manufactured warmth, a kind of social signaling that lacks depth and authenticity. Some customers have said they prefer maintaining a non-social space when they shop, suggesting that warmth receptivity is an equally important variable to consider as warmth-giving.

The message is clear. If you are looking to increase warmth in your interactions, expressing it in simple ways can generate approachability and closeness, but these behaviors have more positive impact when they come from choice versus obligation and signal honestly felt emotional resonance.    

5 Qualities of Warm People

Carl Rogers, the founder of person-centered therapy, unpacked the underlying structure of interpersonal warmth when he wrote about positive regard. From a Rogerian point of view, someone who expresses positive regard toward you is:

Accepting – nonjudgmental and open toward someone despite differences. 

Supportive – genuinely happy to see someone thrive and succeed, and willing to help them find the conditions and resources they need to do that, to the best of your ability.

Unconditional – not withholding acceptance or support based on conditions, quid pro quos, or expectations of meeting a goal.

Nonpossessive – not manipulative, controlling, or self-absorbed when expressing care, acceptance, support, and openness. 

Curious – sincerely interested in learning more about someone’s experiences, perspectives, and thoughts. Curiosity encourages safety, self-reflection, and connection. 

Although Rogers did not include curiosity as part of his original definition of positive regard, the person-centered style of therapy he developed includes a lively intrinsic interest in hearing about someone’s life. 

If you regularly use active listening skills like reflection, affirmation, and open-ended questions in your relationships, also the foundation for good therapy, people will more likely percieve you as interested, warm, and empathic. 

Read More Here: Why Your Relationships Keep Ending The Same Way: 6 Signs You’re Repeating Old Relationship Patterns

The Effects of Warmth in Relationships

We all grow up in environments with differing baseline levels of warmth, but it may help to recognize that the typical warmth level of your environment of origin can affect how much warmth and emotional resonance you currently direct into your relationships. 

Researchers found that low parental warmth was associated with more blunted neural emotional reactivity in adolescents, especially boys. They suggested that this could reduce empathic responding and make emotional self-regulation more challenging. 

While we may have baselines of warmth, we can increase the warmth we receive in a relationship by first showing warmth to the other person. Researchers have found that couples having a conflict-ridden conversation can raise their warmth levels in a complementary way, if one partner takes that “warmth leap” first. This phenomenon of “warmth complementarity” predicts 9 relationship health measures in couples, including relationship satisfaction, intimacy, trust, and respect. Generally, the expression of positive regard reduces worry, something that can interfere with being fully present in relationships. 

8 Ways to Bring More Warmth Into Your Relationship 

When you want to increase relationship warmth, a multi-level approach—trait-based, behavioral, and cognitive—can kick warmth generation and reception into high gear:

1. Focus on what you like best about the other person, not their less appealing attributes. Before you go into an interaction, think about why you like this person and what you enjoy about being around them. Liking leads to feelings of affinity and sparks the desire to connect in deeper ways. Warmth flows from this well of positive regard.
2. Step into a curious and accepting mindset more often. Warmth thrives on acceptance and curiosity. If you find that you tend to be a judgmental person, see if you can practice “allowing” in your relationship, letting go of small annoyances related to the other person. Ask more curious questions to learn about your partner before jumping to conclusions. If you extend this practice to other areas and situations of your life, you can build a broader habit of curiosity and acceptance that leads to a warmer interpersonal style. 
3. Do an honest warmth assessment, but with compassion and reciprocity. Have a gentle, non-accusatory conversation with your partner about warmth. Ask about the times they feel you are warmer or colder, and share your perspective on their warmth levels, withholding any judgement for perceived coldness. Stay strictly behavioral and future-focused (for example, “I’d like it if you asked me about my day when I come home”). Start with 1 small change and use the reciprocity rule. You agree to work on changing that one behavior and your partner does the same with theirs. 
4. Take turns sharing a vulnerability. Researchers have found that when we are less afraid of being rejected, we tend to be more open, accepting, and warm. Feelings of safety invite warmth into a relationship. Taking turns sharing a vulnerability can create that “we” versus “you and I” feeling.
5. Incorporate more positive “bids” in your relationship. A bid is a small gesture of affection, friendliness, or care—verbal or nonverbal. It can be a touch on the arm, hug, smile, soft eye contact, question about how your partner is feeling, or steady attention on what the other person is saying. If your baseline positive bid level is low, but your partner is open to them, you can change that balance by being the first to initiate one.        
6. Pay attention to your own unhappiness and take steps to care for yourself. If you are preoccupied or unhappy about something in your life unrelated to your relationships, it can shut off your source of warmth toward others. It could be that you need some protected time to self-nuture, like taking that extra day off from work, starting a project that invigorates you with purpose, or getting into personal therapy.
7. Recognize and celebrate times when you are warm. If warmth is hard for you, it’s important to find those small ways in which you might be showing it already, even if it’s not at the level you’d want. Keep a little warmth journal, describing times when that feeling was either given or received. During the day, pay special attention to “warm thoughts” and see if you can build on them.  
8. Don’t be afraid to leave a relationship or environment which remains cold. This one is self-explanatory. If your efforts to cultivate warmth in yourself, others, or your environment continually prove ineffective, sometimes the best thing you can do is separate and search for a connection or place that’s more conducive to warmth.

Relationship Gone Cold? Warmth is Buildable, But It May Not Happen Overnight

Read More Here: When To Leave A Relationship

Building warmth may feel like climbing a mountain, especially if you have suffered trauma or have found yourself stuck repeatedly in cold interpersonal environments. That is why it’s so important to have realistic expectations of progress. By understanding why warmth may feel challenging for you, and showing yourself acceptance for how you’ve responded in the past and the choices you’ve made, you are more likely to persist in changing the warmth status quo. If you are warm toward yourself first, others will see that in your words and actions and come closer to warm themselves around that fire.

For more insights, get a copy of A Happier You — a unique seven-week positive psychology program designed to help you turn the “negativity effect” into a lasting “positivity reflex.”

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Originally appeared on Psychology Today
Copyright by Scott Glassman, PsyD