Most people don't realize that the way you respond when someone shares good news reveals more about your character than how you respond when they share bad news. Psychologists call it active constructive responding and very few people do it well.

My business partner called me on a Sunday evening about three years ago to tell me he'd landed a partnership deal we'd been chasing for over a year. He'd been grinding toward this for longer than I think even he realized. I remember the exact pitch of his voice—that barely contained electricity that happens when someone is sharing something they're proud of but also slightly afraid to be proud of.

And I remember what I said.

I said, "That's great, mate. What's the revenue split look like?"

He paused. Said he'd send over the details. And the energy left the call like air from a slow leak.

We talked for another ten minutes about logistics—contract timelines, deliverables, whether we'd need to bring on extra help. By the time we hung up, I'd managed to take the single brightest moment of his professional year and turn it into a risk assessment.

I didn't know it then. I know it now.

And I've spent the years since paying attention to how people respond to good news—including how I respond—and what I've noticed has changed the way I understand almost every relationship I'm in.

The Four Ways People Respond to Good News

Psychologist Shelly Gable, who spent years studying how couples and close relationships function, identified something she called "capitalization." It's the process of sharing positive events with others. The idea is simple: when something good happens to you, you want to tell someone. And what happens next matters more than most of us think.

In her landmark 2004 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Gable and her colleagues found that there are four distinct ways people respond when someone shares good news with them. She mapped them on two axes: active versus passive, and constructive versus destructive.

Active constructive is the gold standard. The person is engaged, enthusiastic, asks follow-up questions, wants to hear more. "Tell me everything. When did you find out? How did you feel?" They amplify the joy.

Passive constructive is what most of us default to. A quiet, understated acknowledgment. "Oh, that's nice." Maybe a nod. Then a subject change. It's technically positive, but it lands like a period at the end of a sentence that wanted an exclamation point.

Active destructive is the one people recognize as harmful. It's pointing out the downsides. "Does that mean more pressure? Are you sure the terms are fair?" It's what I did to my business partner that Sunday evening.

Passive destructive is ignoring the news entirely. Changing the subject to yourself, looking at your phone, or simply not registering that anything important was just said.

Gable's research found that only the active constructive response was associated with increased relationship satisfaction, trust, and intimacy. Every other response—even the technically "positive" passive constructive one—was linked to lower relationship quality. The people who felt their partners responded actively and constructively when they shared good news reported feeling more understood, more validated, and more committed to the relationship.

I came across this research about two years ago, during a period when I was reading everything I could about why some of my relationships—professional and personal—had quietly eroded while others had held. Living in Singapore, far from where I grew up in Australia, I was already navigating the structural challenge of maintaining friendships across time zones and continents. I was looking for explanations in distance, in busyness, in the natural drift that happens when people's lives move in different directions.

And all of that was true. But Gable's work pointed to something I hadn't considered: maybe some of those relationships weakened because I was consistently failing the good-news test.

How the "Strategic One" Gets It Wrong

I've spent the better part of two decades building digital businesses. Running Ideapod, managing multiple publications, constantly thinking about growth and risk. For most of that time, my job has been to be the analytical one. The strategist. The person who can look at a situation and immediately identify what could go sideways.

That same skill carries over into every part of my life. When someone tells me something, my instinct is to analyze it, assess it, prepare them for what could go wrong.

My wife used to tell me I could take the joy out of a sunset. She'd say it with affection—the way you tease someone about a flaw you've made peace with. But she was right. When she'd come home excited about something, I'd go straight to logistics. When a friend called with good news, I'd go straight to risk.

I thought I was being helpful. I thought I was being the kind of person who prepares you for reality. What I was actually doing was telling the people I loved that their happiness wasn't safe with me.

There's research that backs this up. A 2010 study by Gable, Gonzaga, and Strachman found that perceived partner responsiveness during capitalization attempts—sharing good news—was a stronger predictor of relationship well-being than responsiveness during negative events. Meaning: how you show up when someone is hurting matters, yes. But how you show up when someone is shining matters more.

And almost nobody talks about this.

I think about all those years I've spent being the person who shows up for every crisis, who'll take a call at 2 AM when someone's struggling—and I wonder how many of those same people tried to share something good with me and got my analytical mind instead of my heart. I wonder how many of them stopped trying.

Why Most People Default to Anything But Active Constructive

Here's the uncomfortable truth. Active constructive responding requires something that many of us—especially those of us who grew up in households where emotional restraint was the norm—were never taught to offer freely: genuine, unguarded enthusiasm for someone else's happiness.

Growing up in Australia, there's a cultural layer to this too. Tall poppy syndrome is real. You learn early not to get too excited about your own wins, and by extension, you learn to temper your response to other people's. Enthusiasm can feel performative. Understatement feels safer. More honest, even.

But safe isn't the same as connected.

Active constructive responding requires you to set aside your own anxiety, your own envy (if it exists), your own need to be the wise one, and simply be happy because someone else is happy. That sounds easy. It is one of the hardest things a person can do consistently.

I've been journaling for years, and when I went back through entries from my late thirties and early forties, I noticed a pattern. When I wrote about other people's good news, I almost always framed it in relation to myself. A colleague launching a successful venture made me reflect on my own unrealized projects. A friend relocating to an exciting new city made me question whether I'd made the right calls. Someone else's breakthrough made me inventory my own stalled ambitions.

I wasn't being malicious. I was being human. But I was also, without realizing it, making every celebration about my own unresolved restlessness.

Research on capitalization published in Current Opinion in Psychology suggests that people who struggle with active constructive responding often do so because of attachment insecurity or low self-esteem. When you don't feel settled in yourself, someone else's good fortune can feel threatening—or at least disorienting. You reach for something familiar: caution, deflection, comparison. You respond from your wound instead of from your generosity.

What Changed for Me

About a year ago, a close friend called to tell me he'd been offered a book deal. Something he'd been quietly working toward for years. And I felt the old machinery start up—the analytical mode, the questions about advances and timelines and whether his agent had negotiated favorable terms.

I caught it. Not perfectly, not gracefully. But I caught it.

I said, "Mate, that's incredible. Tell me how you're feeling right now."

And then I shut up and let him talk for twenty minutes.

He told me about the moment he got the email, how he told his partner, how he'd sat in his car in a parking lot just staring at his phone screen. He laughed. His voice cracked a little. He said, "This is the most validated I've felt about anything in years."

When we hung up, I sat in my apartment in Singapore with the evening light coming through the window, and I felt something shift—because I realized how many of those conversations I'd shortchanged over the years. How many times someone had offered me their joy and I'd handed back a checklist.

I think about my wife, too. The things she comes home excited about. A conversation that moved her. A small win at work. A meal she made that turned out perfectly. And how often I've responded with something half-present, something that said I hear you but not I'm here with you in this.

You don't get those moments back. But you can start catching the new ones.

The Practice of Receiving Someone Else's Light

I'm 44 years old. I'm at a point in life where the relationships I have are the ones I've chosen to keep—and the ones that have chosen to keep me. My wife, my closest friends, my business partners, the small circle of people I trust with the unfiltered version of myself. I don't want to waste what I have with them by being the person who dims their good news.

So I practice. It sounds strange to say you have to practice being happy for someone, but that's the truth of it for people like me. People who were trained to scan for danger. People who show love through problem-solving. People who've spent years being the strategic one and forgot that sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is just say, "That's wonderful. I'm proud of you. Tell me more."

Gable and colleagues found in a 2006 study that the benefits of active constructive responding extend beyond the person receiving the response. The responder also reports increased positive emotion and relationship satisfaction. Being genuinely enthusiastic about someone else's good news actually makes you feel better, too. The generosity comes back around.

I think about this in the context of conscious living—the kind of mindful, intentional presence that so many of us talk about but struggle to practice in the moments that matter most. We focus on being present during hardship, during conflict, during crisis. But being present for someone's joy? That's its own discipline. And it might be the more important one.

Active constructive responding is the conversational equivalent of pulling up a chair for someone's happiness and saying, sit down, stay a while, I want to hear all of it.

Most people will never know this term. They'll never read Shelly Gable's papers or think about capitalization theory. But they will remember, with perfect clarity, the person who made them feel like their good news mattered.

And they'll remember, even more clearly, the person who didn't.

I know which one I was for too long. I'm working—deliberately, daily—to become the other.