Decoding Love (28 page)
Authors: Andrew Trees
Besides helping explain the success of certain literary partnerships, Gottman can even give you a rough time frame for when you might get divorced. If a couple has a lot of what he calls negative affect (i.e., nastiness toward each other), they will probably get divorced in the first seven years. But Gottman found that using this metric alone missed many couples who later divorced. So he went back and studied the videotapes again and found that a
lack
of positive affect (being nice to each other) also undermined a marriage. It didn’t work as quickly, but around the time the couple’s first child reached the age of fourteen, the couples had generally become so emotionally detached that they ended up divorcing.
lack
of positive affect (being nice to each other) also undermined a marriage. It didn’t work as quickly, but around the time the couple’s first child reached the age of fourteen, the couples had generally become so emotionally detached that they ended up divorcing.
Gottman’s fine-grained analysis has revolutionized our understanding of how and why relationships work or don’t work. In the first place, many of the traditional techniques of marital therapy have turned out to be completely ineffective. In fact, unhappy couples who had undergone therapy fell back into their dysfunctional ways at such a high rate that many considered it a crisis for the profession. To give you one example, let’s look at an approach known as active listening. This technique became so popular for a while that you didn’t just come across it in marital counseling. You were probably taught some version of it if you participated in any kind of workshop having to do with conflict resolution. Active listening involves the listener constantly checking to see if he or she has correctly understood the speaker, usually by paraphrasing and repeating what the speaker has said. The theory is that you are forced to listen and understand first, rather than respond, which—if the theory were correct—would foster understanding and communication and help defuse defensiveness. As you might imagine, this leads to incredibly stilted conversations. Here is how a typical active listening exchange might develop:
JOHN: I’m really angry that you were late tonight.LISA: I hear what you are saying. You are angry with me for being late.JOHN: Yeah, you never show up on time! It’s like my own time doesn’t matter.LISA: You feel like I don’t value your time as much as my own. Etc.
Gottman decided to put active listening to the test in his lab. The first thing he found was that happy couples don’t use anything remotely like active listening, and the vast majority of couples who had been trained to use it didn’t find that their problems were lessened. A small group did manage to adopt the techniques with some success, but follow-up studies showed that all of those couples had relapsed into their old habits within a year.
He also looked at another therapeutic technique that is probably most accurately described as the quid pro quo method. As you might expect, this approach involves responding to your partner in a tit-for-tat fashion. If your partner does something nice for you, you are supposed to do something nice back. When Gottman looked at this method, the news was even worse: the quid pro quo approach actually harmed the relationship. People generally get a warm feeling when they do something nice for someone else, but couples using the quid pro quo method found that they could no longer take pleasure in giving because it had become part of an explicit exchange and, thus, no longer felt like giving at all. It turns out that married couples should follow the wisdom of Jack Kennedy’s first inaugural speech and ask not what your spouse can do for you but what you can do for your spouse.
The good news is that Gottman has also identified what does work in a marriage. Let’s start by dismissing one item that many couples think is important but that actually isn’t: fighting. The common myth of the romantic story line is that happy couples don’t fight, but Gottman has found that fighting is not a predictor of divorce. Happy couples fight just as much as unhappy couples. While it is true that some couples rarely argue, this is probably a sign of poor communication, not of marital bliss. Arguing regularly is healthier than never fighting, so couples who fight less are also less satisfied over time. The problem for non-fighting couples is that, by never fighting, they let things build up too much—
way
too much. Couples with serious problems wait an average of six years before they seek professional help, and six years is a lot of bad juju to try to undo.
way
too much. Couples with serious problems wait an average of six years before they seek professional help, and six years is a lot of bad juju to try to undo.
What this means is that conflict and disagreement are an inescapable part of marriage. Just how inescapable? Gottman has found that most of the subjects married couples disagree about are
never
resolved. That’s right. NEVER. From his examination of thousands of couples, he has discovered that 69 percent of them never resolve their conflicts. So, if you ever have the feeling that you are caught in some bizarre version of
Waiting for Godot
and are having the same argument yet again, you’re probably right. Most couples fight about the same things as well (typically money, the division of labor, and children), so we are all caught in the same version of
Waiting for Godot.
The good news is that a failure to resolve conflicts is not a sign of marital failure.
never
resolved. That’s right. NEVER. From his examination of thousands of couples, he has discovered that 69 percent of them never resolve their conflicts. So, if you ever have the feeling that you are caught in some bizarre version of
Waiting for Godot
and are having the same argument yet again, you’re probably right. Most couples fight about the same things as well (typically money, the division of labor, and children), so we are all caught in the same version of
Waiting for Godot.
The good news is that a failure to resolve conflicts is not a sign of marital failure.
What matters is not whether you fight but
how
you fight, and once again, marital therapists had been peddling snake oil to an unsuspecting public. Traditionally, in a therapist’s office, conflict is dealt with forthrightly and unrelentingly. When one person gets uncomfortable and wants to change the subject, he or she is forced to stay the course and keep slogging through the argument, which may be a useful way to run a meeting in a corporation but is a disaster for a marriage. Gottman found that happy couples didn’t follow this method and disrupted their arguments in all sorts of ways. They told jokes or went off on irrelevant tangents for a while (they also didn’t escalate the argument; “Pick up your clothes” never became “you’re a bad person”). They did all sorts of things while they were arguing that many marital therapists would put a stop to. But it turns out that there are some very good reasons for changing the subject. Remember all those sensors that Gottman attached to couples in the love lab? He was measuring their physiological response during the conversation, and what he discovered was that our ability to argue is dependent on our ability to remain calm. Once the argument starts to get heated, and the person’s heart rate goes above one hundred, that person loses the ability to argue in a reasonable fashion. In effect, the body goes on tilt and swamps the person’s ability to be rational. So, all those conversational dodges that happy couples resort to when they are disagreeing serve a useful purpose—they give the couples a chance to catch their breaths and to keep their bodies from rocketing past the physiological breaking point.
how
you fight, and once again, marital therapists had been peddling snake oil to an unsuspecting public. Traditionally, in a therapist’s office, conflict is dealt with forthrightly and unrelentingly. When one person gets uncomfortable and wants to change the subject, he or she is forced to stay the course and keep slogging through the argument, which may be a useful way to run a meeting in a corporation but is a disaster for a marriage. Gottman found that happy couples didn’t follow this method and disrupted their arguments in all sorts of ways. They told jokes or went off on irrelevant tangents for a while (they also didn’t escalate the argument; “Pick up your clothes” never became “you’re a bad person”). They did all sorts of things while they were arguing that many marital therapists would put a stop to. But it turns out that there are some very good reasons for changing the subject. Remember all those sensors that Gottman attached to couples in the love lab? He was measuring their physiological response during the conversation, and what he discovered was that our ability to argue is dependent on our ability to remain calm. Once the argument starts to get heated, and the person’s heart rate goes above one hundred, that person loses the ability to argue in a reasonable fashion. In effect, the body goes on tilt and swamps the person’s ability to be rational. So, all those conversational dodges that happy couples resort to when they are disagreeing serve a useful purpose—they give the couples a chance to catch their breaths and to keep their bodies from rocketing past the physiological breaking point.
Gottman also found something else that will come as a surprise to those who view women as the more emotional sex. During arguments, men are much more likely to be overwhelmed by their physiological response, to become, in Gottman’s words, “flooded.” That helps explain why men are more likely to avoid getting into an argument with their wives and to engage in what Gottman calls stonewalling—they simply can’t handle their body’s physical response to an argument. They know that their blood pressure will ratchet up, and their heart will start pounding, and they will lose it. So, in the classic choice of fight or flight, they choose flight. Because of this, the burden of raising these issues is on women. Gottman has found that more than 80 percent of the time, the wife is the one who brings up difficult issues. And that’s true of the happy marriages as well.
Perhaps most important, happy couples manage to maintain a remarkably high level of positive to negative comments—fully five to one—even when they are fighting! The contrast with failing relationships couldn’t be more stark. Unhappy couples generally don’t even achieve a ratio of one to one (averaging roughly 0.8 positive comments to every one negative comment). That sounds impossible. How do couples maintain a positive ratio during the fight itself? The key is that happy couples never go for broke in an argument. They never find themselves in that fatal position when each partner is simply trying to wound the other because of how angry he or she is. A woman in a happy couple will say, “I appreciate how hard you work at the office, but I still think I deserve more help at home,” rather than “You never help me at home, and you don’t even make enough money so that we can afford a cleaning lady.” So, the key for a married couple is not to avoid fighting but simply to fight well, abiding by a marital version of the Marquee de Queens-bury rules.
To look at the ways unhappy couples go wrong, let’s take another representative couple from literature, Martha and George from Edward Albee’s
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
MARTHA: I don’t know what you’re so tired about . . . you haven’t
done
anything all day; you didn’t have any classes, or anything. . . .Notice the harsh opening. She doesn’t just ignore his previous complaint about being tired. She argues that his complaint is without any legitimacy and then turns it into a criticism of him for not being more active.GEORGE: Well, I’m tired . . . If your father didn’t set up these goddamn Saturday night orgies all the time . . .George is defensive. Rather than respond to her remarks, he opens up a new line of attack about her father and about the life her father forces them to lead.MARTHA: Well, that’s too bad about you, George . . .A line dripping with sarcasm and filled with contempt for George’s inability to be more vital.GEORGE (crumbling): Well, that’s how it is, anyway.A defensive repetition.MARTHA: You didn’t
do
anything; you never
do
anything; you never
mix.
You just sit around and
talk.She heightens the conflict, moving to a general character assassination. Whereas she complained a few lines earlier that he didn’t do anything all day, now she complains that he
never
does anything.GEORGE: What do you want me to do? Do you want me to act like you? Do you want me to go around all night
braying
at everybody the way you do?This leads not just to more defensiveness but to his own contempt and sarcasm. Although more restrained, his choice of the word bray with its connotations of being loud and uncouth is designed to wound.MARTHA (BRAYING): I DON’T BRAY!And it has the desired effect—driving Martha to a mini-tantrum.
A textbook example of how
not
to fight.
not
to fight.
If you do want to look for signs of divorce, don’t focus your attention on fighting; instead, focus on the emotions you express toward each other. If either partner regularly expresses negative, judgmental emotions, that is a clear warning sign that a marriage is headed for failure. Gottman narrows it down even more and argues that the real culprits are four key emotions, what he calls the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The first is criticism. But Gottman is only interested in a certain kind of criticism. Concrete criticisms about a specific behavior are fine, but criticisms that attack someone’s character are not. The other three emotions to watch for are defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling. As you might expect, most stonewallers are husbands—85 percent—and this type of behavior is particularly destructive because emotional distance, rather than conflict, is usually what determines whether a marriage will succeed or not. If couples can’t fight in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the husband emotionally, he is likely to resort to stonewalling. There is one final relationship killer to add to the mix: repairing. During and after fights, happy couples often make attempts to repair the damage. Unhappy couples also make those attempts. The problem is that they usually fail. Either the other person rejects them, or the repair comes with a sting attached. If couples have unleashed the four horsemen and are failures at repairing, that is a guaranteed recipe for divorce. If all of this is a little complicated to keep track of, Gottman has a simpler method: ask a couple about their marital history. He found that if the couple has a positive memory of their life together, they are very likely to have a happy future as well (94 percent likely—not too shabby).
Besides avoiding the four horsemen, there are several things that couples can do to improve their marital happiness. The first is simply to pay better attention to your spouse. According to Gottman, there are key moments every day when your partner asks for your interest in something, and you can either respond positively or not. Although these are generally small matters (a discussion of what to eat for dinner or a problem at work), they can quickly become a pattern of behavior so that couples either regularly show interest in each other or consistently ignore each other. You would be surprised by how little time it can take over the course of the week to develop this pattern. And husbands really do need to listen to their wives. Happier marriages generally have men who are willing to accept the influence of their spouses. Couples also have to be good at calming each other down so that arguments don’t rage out of control. There is even a division of labor when it comes to marital arguments. Husbands are usually the ones who de-escalate a low-intensity conflict, while wives are the ones who de-escalate a high-intensity conflict.
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