What couples need to focus on, Gottman advises, is their repair attempts. "Everybody messes up," says the University of Washington professor of psychology. "The four horsemen of the marital apocalypse that I identified—criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling—are predictors of divorce. Everybody does them to some degree. But some couples deal with them successfully."
Gottman recently summarized his 25 years of research and turned it into the Marriage Survival Kit, a weekend course for couples, taught at the Seattle Marital and Family Institute. He says that what makes couples' attempts at repairing their relationships work is not how they fight but what goes on in everyday, relaxed situations. These situations give partners a positive perspective, so that when they get a blast of negativity from their spouse, they can ignore it and take in only the information in what's being said. In short, it's the mindless, mundane moments of marriage that are the makers of romance.
Gottman says that in successful marriages, it's in those little moments that so much goes on. Happy couples make what he calls "love maps": They find ways of knowing one another and updating the information regularly. "A fondness and admiration system is active, particularly in the husbands," he says. "Those guys are thinking about the stuff they love and admire in their partners, even when they're not together. If you were to open up their skulls, you'd see they allocate a lot more brain cells to their marriages and the world of their partners than guys who wind up divorced." There's a balance of what Gottman characterizes as "turning towards versus turning away," which builds up the "emotional bank account" of relationships. Partners simply connect in tiny, unremarkable, emotionally neutral moments.
Gottman believes these otherwise unremarkable moments add up and put couples in "positive sentiment override," which in turn determines their disposition when it comes to problem-solving and the success of their repair attempts. So when one partner says something with irritability, the other sees it as neutral. Gottman urges couples—especially men—to see that the irritability or anger behind complaints is really just a form of italics. By positively responding to their partner's irritability, spouses keep their partner's complaints from escalating into criticism. In The Marriage Survival Kit, Gottman teaches couples five basic skills for conflict resolution.
To make sure couples can actually accomplish in their everyday lives what they've learned, Gottman brings them back six months later for a "booster shot," a one-day workshop. He also checks in on them via survey every three months to see how they're faring. Couples still having problems can come back for a special session with a clinician.
Practical Application Of Relationship Skills
Relationship difficulties are resistant to change for a very specific reason, says Falls Church, Virginia, family therapist Lori Gordon, Ph.D. Marriage has a devilish ability to tap into emotional issues from our past, especially from our families of origin. So Gordon developed Practical Application of Relationship Skills, or PAIRS, which reaches particularly deep and ties the cognitive and emotional components of love to their historical background.
Gordon believes that the past usually manifests itself in hidden expectations and assumptions in relationships. She says that as long as people remain unaware of them, they act as saboteurs to love: "Most unhappy partners feel disappointed, if not outright betrayed, because what they expected to find in their relationship either hasn't happened or stopped happening."
We hand our partner an invisible ledger, displacing onto a current partner the blame for past hurts. We hope they will prove they are not the person who hurt us, while we expect them to make up for previous hurts—hurts that enter our awareness only when we feel frightened or disappointed.
On that ledger are what Gordon calls "love knots," riddles exposing the contradictory nature of our many expectations. And they read like relationship haiku. For example, Love Knot #1: If you really loved me, you would know what I want, and you would do it. Since you don't, you obviously don't care. So why should I care for you, or for what you think, feel, say, want, or do? When you tell me what you want, I won't be very interested. I will be withholding.
Over the 120 hours of PAIRS class time, couples hone their communication skills. In addition to learning how to argue, they also learn how to confide in each other through a structured conversation called the Guide for Dialogue. "It's not enough to work on communication," Gordon says. "You need a cognitive understanding of the way you react to your partner."
Couples who take any of these courses discover that their skills work in other areas—parenting, the workplace, the community. Learning how intimate relationships operate is really a tool for managing the self. Says Markman, "We have to get away from the idea that knowing how to be in a relationship requires therapy. People don't feel bad about going to a ski instructor." Or taking driving lessons. So why should reaming how to operate a relationship be any different?
Taking The Floor
The Floor Premarital Relationship Enhancement Program (PREP) takes fighting between couples as a given. The course's creator, Howard Markman, Ph.D., says its aim is to teach partners how to do it right. Ground rules are established via The Floor, where one partner becomes "the Speaker," the other "the Listener." And then they switch.
Rules for the Speaker:
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