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Experts weigh in on whether those viral TikTok tests are a real litmus for a couple’s connection.
Layne Berthoud, an occupational therapist who lives in Los Angeles, did not expect her recent TikTok post to rack up nearly 5 million views in five days.
“I saw a bird today,” Ms. Berthoud, 30, tells her husband, Alexandre Berthoud, in the video. Mr. Berthoud pauses, briefly puzzled by the update.
“Oh yeah?” he asks.
In that moment, Mr. Berthoud, 30, unknowingly aced social media’s latest viral relationship test: the bird theory.
The setup is simple. One partner points out a bird to the other — or in a common variation, recounts a fake bird encounter from earlier in the day — and awaits a response. A partner who responds with curiosity passes the test. A partner who doesn’t fails.
The test is intended to measure a partner’s willingness to respond to what therapists call “bids for connection,” a concept popularized by the marriage researcher John Gottman.
Dr. Gottman, who works with his wife, Julie, has long argued that the happiest couples readily and regularly acknowledge, or “turn toward,” the many hundreds of bids each person offers the other throughout the day. A classic study of his concluded that couples who stay married turn toward each other’s bids around 86 percent of the time; those who split do so only 33 percent of the time. But is the bird theory really a meaningful measure of a couple’s connectedness?