[PDF]The Seven Principles For Making Marriage Work

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JOHN M. GOTTMAN, PH.D.,

.1 11 d N A hJ ,S I L V'' E R










Seven principles For making marriage work

By John M. Gottman, Ph.D, and Nan Silver
CROWN PUBLISHERS, INC.

NEW YORK

The anecdotes in this book are based on Dr. Gottman's research. Some
of the couples are composites of those who volunteered to take part in
his studies. In all cases, names and identifying information have been
changed. Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint
from After the Honeymoon



To Julie Gottman, who gives collaboration a new meaning, and to the
core of my team: Sybil Carr ere, Sharon Fentiman, and Cathryn Swan
son. They made it all possible and helped make the journey itself
delightful, like eating pastries and drinking coffee together in a
sidewalk cafe.

J.G.

To Arthur, my beloved and my friend

N. S.



Acknowledgments


First and foremost, I need to acknowledge the brave gift that several
thousand volunteer research couples have contributed to my
understanding. Their willingness to reveal the most private aspects of
their personal lives has opened a hitherto closed door that has made it
possible to construct these Seven Principles for making marriages
work.

This book was based on research that received continuous
support from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Behavioral
Science Research Branch. Of great assistance was the dedicated
guidance of Molly Olive ri, Delia Hahn, and Joy Schulterbrandt.

This book was also made possible by a number of important
collaborations that have been a joyful part of my life. These include
the main collaboration that has graced my life for the past nineteen
years with Professor Robert Levenson of the University of California.

Also important to me has been my collaboration with Neiljacob
son of the University of Washington and my work with Dr. Laura
Carstensen of Stanford University 1 have been blessed with rich
associations inside my laboratory.

The cornerstones have been Sharon Fentiman, whose elegance
greatly improves my life and keeps me from chaos; Dr. Sybil Cart ere,
who runs my lab and is a terrific colleague; and Cathryn Swan son,
my programmer and data analyst. Not only are they friends and
intellectual companions, but they help make coming to work a
pleasant experience. 1 also wish to acknowledge the contributions and
stimulation of Lynn Katz.

My wife, Julie Schwartz Gottman, provided love, friendship,
motivation, intellectual camaraderie, support, and conceptual
organization. She has also been my teacher and guide in practicing



psychotherapy. She made doing the couples' and parents' workshops
an exciting creative experience. While we are busy with our full-time
jobs, Etana Dykan capably runs our Seattle Marital and Family
Institute with great spirit and attention to detail, and she also helps
facilitate our communication. Her amazingly creative brother, Shai
Steinberg, has also been a tremendous asset in many areas of our
work. Linda Wright helps us keep the couples' enterprise very warm
and human—she is unusually gifted in talking to desperate couples.
Peter Langsam has been our faithful consultant and partner
throughout, helping us with wise counsel, elemental guidance, and
business sense.

1 have recently been blessed with excellent students and staff,
including Kim Buehlman, Jim Coan, Melissa Hawkins, Carole
Hooven, Vanessa Kahen, Lynn Katz, Michael Lorber, Kim McCoy,
Janni Morford, Sonny Ruckstahl, Regina Rushe, Kimberly Ryan,
Alyson Shapiro, Tim Stickle, and Beverly Wilson.

1 need to acknowledge the intellectual heritage upon which 1
draw. As Newton once wrote, "If 1 have seen further ... it is by
standing upon the shoulders of giants." For me these shoulders
include the work of Les Green berg and Susan Johnson on
emotionally focused marital therapy; Bob Weiss's scholarly work on
many concepts, including sentiment overrides; Cliff Notarius's work
on many concepts, including couple efficacy; Howard Mark man's
faith in preventive intervention; Dick Stuart's great contributions,
including his approach to behavior exchange; Jerry Lewis's work
focusing on the balance of autonomy and connectedness in marriage;
and the persistent work of my colleague Neil Jacob son, who is the
gold standard for marital therapy research. 1 am also indebted to
Jacob son's recent work with Andy Christensen, on acceptance in
marital therapy 1 also wish to acknowledge the contributions of Peggy
Papp and Pepper Schwartz and their feminist approach to gender
differences and egalitarian marriage, as well as the work of Ronald
Levant and Alan Booth on men in families.

1 must also mention Clan Wile's work on marital therapy, with
its superb focus on process. 1 love Wile's writing and thinking. They
are entirely consistent with many of my research findings. 1 think that



Wile is a genius and the greatest living marital therapist. I am blessed
to have been able to exchange ideas with him.

I wish to acknowledge the work of Irvin Yalom and Victor
Frankl on existential psychotherapy. Yalom has provided a great faith
in the therapeutic process itself and in the human force toward
growth. Frankl holds a special place in my heart. He and my beloved
cousin Kurt Ladner were both residents and survivors of the Dachau
concentration camp. Both found meaning in the context of intense
suffering, tyranny, and dehumanization. I hope to bring their
existential search for meaning into the marital context. Doing so can
turn conflict into a new experience of revealing and honoring life
dreams, finding shared meaning, and reaffirming the marital
friendship.

I have come to the conclusion that many insightful writers in
the marital field are basically correct. I hope my contribution will be
to honor them all, adding a bit of precision and integration to the
struggle to understand what makes close relationships work.

J.G.




Contents


1 Inside tde SeatCe Love LaB: TBie Iruth aBout J-fajjpy Marriages .i

2 3-fow I TrecCict Divorce .25

3 Trincij)Ce i: Lnliance your Love Maps .47

4 TrincipCe 2 : ^Nurture your JoncCness ancCJAdmiration . 6 i

5 TrincipCe 3 : Turn towarcCXacd Otder InsteacCof JAway .79

6 TrincipCe 4 : Let your Tartner InfCuence you .99

7 DCie Two XincCs of Mar itiaC ConfCict .129

8 TrincipCe 5 : SoCve your SoCvaBCe TroBCems .157

9 Coping witd TypicaCSoCvaBCe TroBCems .187

10 TrincipCe 6 : Overcome (gricdCock .217

11 TrincipCe 7 : Create SBarecCMeaning .243


LAfterword: AvCiat Mow?.


259
















SEVEN PRINCIPLES



MAKING

MARRIAGE

WORK




1


1

Inside tfie Seattle Love La6:
"Tfie Trutfi aBout
Ilajypy Marriages


It's a surprisingly cloudless Seattle morning as newly-weds
Mark and Janice Gordon sit down to breakfast. Outside the
apartment's picture window, the waters of Mont lake cut a deep-blue
swath, while runners jog and geese waddle along the lakeside park.
Mark and Janice are enjoying the view as they munch on their French
toast and share the Sunday paper. Later Mark will probably switch on
the football game while Janice chats over the phone with her mom in
St. Louis.

All seems ordinary enough inside this studio apartment—until
you notice the three video cameras bolted to the wall, the
microphones clipped talk-show style to Mark's and Janice's collars,
and the Hotter monitors strapped around their chests. Mark and
Janice's lovely studio with a view is really not their apartment at all.
It's a laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle, where for
sixteen years I have spearheaded the most extensive and innovative
research ever into marriage and divorce.

As part of one of these studies, Mark and Janice (as well as
forty-nine other randomly selected couples) volunteered to stay over¬
night in our fabricated apartment, affectionately known as the Love



2


Lab. Their instructions were to act as naturally as possible, despite my
team of scientists observing them from behind the one-way kitchen
mirror, the cameras recording their every word and facial expression,
and the sensors tracking bodily signs of stress or relaxation, such as
how quickly their hearts pound. (To preserve basic privacy, the
couples were monitored only from nine a.m. to nine P.M. and never
while in the bathroom.) The apartment comes equipped with a fold-
out sofa, a working kitchen, a phone. Tv VCR, and CD player.
Couples were told to bring their groceries, their newspapers, their
laptops, needlepoint, hand weights, even their pets-whatever they
would need to experience a typical weekend.

My goal has been nothing more ambitious than to uncover the
truth about marriage—to finally answer the questions that have
puzzled people for so long: Why is marriage so tough at times? Why
do some lifelong relationships click, while others just tick away like a
time bomb? And how can you prevent a marriage from going bad—or
rescue one that already has?


PREDICTING DIVORCE WITH 91 PERCENT ACCURACY

After years of research I can finally answer these questions. In fact, 1
am now able to predict whether a couple will stay happily together or
lose their way. 1 can make this prediction after listening to the couple
interact in our Love Lab for as little as five minutes! My accuracy rate
in these predictions averages 91 percent over three separate studies.
In other words, in 91 percent of the cases where 1 have predicted that
a couple's marriage would eventually fail or succeed, time has proven
me right. These predictions are not based on my intuition or
preconceived notions of what marriage "should" be, but on the data
I've accumulated over years of study.

At first you might be tempted to shrug off my research results
as just another in a long line of newfangled theories. It's certainly easy
to be cynical when someone tells you they've figured out what really
makes marriages last and can show you how to rescue or divorce-
proof your own. Plenty of people consider themselves to be experts



3


on marriage—and are more than happy to give you their opinion of
how to form a more perfect union.

But that's the key word-opinion. Before the breakthroughs my
research provided, point of view was pretty much all that anyone
trying to help couples had to go on. And that includes just about
every qualified, talented, and well-trained marriage counselor out
there. Usually a responsible therapist's approach to helping couples is
based on his or her professional training and experience, intuition,
family history, perhaps even religious conviction. But the one thing
it's not based on is hard scientific evidence. Because until now there
really hasn't been any rigorous scientific data about why some
marriages succeed and others flop.

For all of the attention my ability to predict divorce has earned
me, the most rewarding findings to come out of my studies are the
Seven Principles that will prevent a marriage from breaking up.


EMOTIONALLY INTELLIGENT MARRIAGES

What can make a marriage work is surprisingly simple. Happily
married couples aren't smarter, richer, or more psychologically astute
than others. But in their day-to-day lives, they have hit upon a
dynamic that keeps their negative thoughts and feelings about each
other (which all couples have) from overwhelming their positive
ones. They have what 1 call an emotionally intelligent marriage.


lean predict whether a couple will divorce after
watching and listening to them for just five minutes.

Recently, emotional intelligence has become widely recognized
as an important predictor of a child's success later in life. The more in
touch with emotions and the better able a child is to understand and
get along with others, the sunnier that child's future, whatever his or
her academic IQ. The same is true for relationships between spouses.
The more emotionally intelligent a couple — the better able they are to
understand, honor, and respect each other and their marriage — the



4


more likely that they will indeed live happily ever after. Just as
parents can teach their children emotional intelligence, this is also a
skill that a couple can be taught. As simple as it sounds, it can keep
husband and wife on the positive side of the divorce odds.


WHY SAVE YOUR MARRIAGE?


Speaking of those odds, the divorce statistics remain dire. The
chance of a first marriage ending in divorce over a forty-year period is
67 percent. Half of all divorces will occur in the first seven years.

Some studies find the divorce rate for second marriages is as
much as 10 percent higher than for first-timers. The chance of getting
divorced remains so high that it makes sense for all married couples—
including those who are currently satisfied with their relationship—to
put extra effort into their marriages to keep them strong.

One of the saddest reasons a marriage dies is that neither
spouse recognizes its value until it is too late. Only after the papers
have been signed, the furniture divided, and separate apartments
rented do the exes realize how much they really gave up when they
gave up on each other. Too often a good marriage is taken for granted
rather than given the nurturing and respect it deserves and
desperately needs. Some people may think that getting divorced or
languishing in an unhappy marriage is no big deal—they may even
consider it trendy. But there's now plenty of evidence documenting
just how harmful this can be for all involved.

Thanks to the work of researchers like Lois Verbrugge and
James House, both of the University of Michigan, we now know that
an unhappy marriage can increase your chances of getting sick by
roughly 35 percent and even shorten your life by an average of four
years. The flip side: People who are happily married live longer,
healthier lives than either divorced people or those who are
unhappily married. Scientists know for certain that these differences
exist, but we are not yet sure why.



5


Part of the answer may simply be that in an unhappy marriage
people experience chronic, diffuse physiological arousal—in other
words, they feel physically stressed and usually emotionally stressed
as well. This puts added wear and tear on the body and mind, which
can present itself in any number of physical ailments, including high
blood pressure and heart disease, and in a host of psychological ones,
including anxiety, depression, suicide, violence, psychosis, homicide,
and substance abuse.

Not surprisingly, happily married couples have a far lower rate
of such maladies. They also tend to be more health-conscious than
others.Researchers theorize that this is because spouses keep after
each other to have regular checkups, take medicine, eat nutritiously,
and so on.


People who stay married live four years
longer than people who don t


Recently my laboratory uncovered some exciting, preliminary
evidence that a good marriage may also keep you healthier by
directly benefiting your immune system, which spearheads the
body's defenses against illness. Researchers have known for about a
decade that divorce can depress the immune system's function.
Theoretically this lowering in the system's ability to fight foreign
invaders could leave you open to more infectious diseases and
cancers. Now we have found that the opposite may also be true. Not
only do happily married people avoid this drop in immune function,
but their immune systems may even be getting an extra boost.

When we tested the immune system responses of the fifty
couples who stayed overnight in the Love Lab, we found a striking
difference between those who were very satisfied with their
marriages and those whose emotional response to each other was
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