Cute Animals (🦉)
“M found you a pin on Pinterest!”
It’s M’s equivalent of the kissy face, which never fails to cheer me up. Whenever she finds a cute picture of a giraffe—my favorite animal based on the classic Graco commercial featuring the line “Giraffes eat cookies!”—on Pinterest, she sends it to me. Not only does this let me know she’s thinking about me, it also simply cheers me up because it’s cute.
In return, I’ll send her cute pictures of her favorite animals, penguins and owls.
As tiny as this gesture may seem, it’s had a major positive impact on our relationship.
Interestingly, it appears that we aren’t the only ones this works for. In a recent study, married people were asked to view a slide-show that paired pictures of their spouse with pictures of cute animals like puppies and bunnies. Associating their spouse with cute animals, people who viewed this slide-show—as opposed to a slide-show which paired their spouse with neutral images—actually came to have more positive automatic reactions to their spouse. And in the end, these positive automatic reactions actually translated into measurable improvements in overall marriage satisfaction.
— N