Why Marriages Succeed or Fail: What You Can Learn from the Breakthrough Research to Make Your Marriage Last

Book by Gottman PhD John

Chapter 1

WHAT MAKES MARRIAGE WORK?

Have you and your spouse ever planned a big romantic getaway only to find that once alone together, you fall into the same argument you've had twenty times before? Maybe it's about plans for the future -- whether to buy a bigger house, when or if to have a child, how to save for retirement. Or perhaps it's a past wound -- the way he acted on the honeymoon, or her fling with a co-worker that ended years ago. Or it could be a never-ending debate over housework, disciplining the children, when to have sex, or how to spend vacations.

I know a woman who traveled with her husband all the way to New Zealand, only to have a nasty spat the night of their arrival. He wanted to go deep-sea diving the next day; she wanted to sun on the beach.

"Your ideas are always so reckless," she fumed. "Why can't you just act like the middle-aged man you are?"

He retaliated, "You stifle my sense of adventure," adding a note of quiet contempt: "You bore me to tears."

Soon she was in tears, as their cross-fire continued for about an hour, until they finally called a truce. Stinging from one another's insults, they sat there realizing a worse pain: they could travel to the end of the earth together and still be stuck in a war that stared fifteen years ago, fighting the same battles over and over again.

Sound familiar? Or are you and your spouse more likely to avoid such skirmishes at all costs? Perhaps you're more like another couple I'm familiar with, who will float through such a vacation together, giving in to one another's wishes, carefully sidestepping any potential disagreement, burying past disappointments, stifling any complaints, ignoring any suggestion of conflict. If you and your spouse are this way, the odds are neither of you would say what's really on your minds; that way there's no friction and nobody gets hurt. These are peaceful matches -- except for this occasional, unpredictable twinge of restlessness. It might surface, say, when he tosses his jacket over his shoulder in a certain way, or when she brushes a wisp of hair from her eyes with the back of her hand. It's these small, familiar gestures that can make you remember: There used to be more passion here. You wonder what happened to all the laughter and affection. When did life together become so flat and colorless?

Or, maybe, at least sometimes, your marriage is like that of another couple I know. They go out for a Sunday afternoon in town together. She wants to do some browsing in shops; he starts to get visibly impatient. She begins to sulk, thinking, "He doesn't really want to spend time with me. He's so uncaring." Meanwhile, he broods, "She's spending too much money -- she's so selfish. Why can't we just enjoy going for a walk?" And for the rest of the afternoon the two are caught in separate ruminations about each other's faults.

Or, perhaps you and your mate are like still another couple, no longer even spending such time together. Come Sunday, she's caught up in a whirl of chores, helping the kids with school projects, trying to get the laundry done and the house in order; he's out playing softball, working on the car, or watching football on TV, or puttering somewhere. If your relationship has lots of times like this, the two of you may be living in parallel universes under the same roof.

And yet this is the person you loved so deeply when you got married, the person you sincerely meant to stick with through the joys and hardships of life. But despite your best wishes, there are moments when it seems impossible. It's as though some powerful, subterranean current takes hold of you both and leads you down a path of negative thinking, destructive feelings, painful action and reaction, drifting toward isolation and loneliness.

What is this mysterious current? Today, as we witness the dissolution of so many marriages, it becomes more crucial than ever to find an answer. And finding that answer has been the mission of my research these past two decades. Through intense, detailed observations of hundreds of couples like these, I have charted the invisible emotional currents between husbands and wives, underground streams of feeling that can burst to the surface either as a spring of harmony or a well of discontent.

In pursuit of the truth about what tears a marriage apart or binds it together, I have found that much of the conventional wisdom -- even among many marital therapists -- is misguided or dead wrong. For example, some marital patterns that even professionals often take as a sign of a problem -- such as having intense fights, or avoiding conflict altogether -- I have found can signify highly successful adjustments that will keep a couple together. And fighting -- when it airs grievances and complaints -- can be one of the healthiest things a couple can do for their relationship (indeed, how you fight is one of the most telling ways to diagnose the health of your marriage). You will see more clearly why such conventional assumptions are dead wrong as you read my explanation of the often elusive emotional dynamics of marriage, dynamics I have mapped in a simple model that can serve as a template for seeing your own marriage with new eyes.

The good news is that if you become familiar with these maps of what shapes the emotional currents in marriage for better or worse, the seemingly elusive forces that are at work in your own relationship need not be so mysterious to you, nor are you at their mercy anymore. In this book I will show you how to detect these forces in your own relationship so that you can see the hidden emotional profile of your marriage as though through an X ray. By making these hidden forces visible, you can start to control the direction of your marital journey -- calling a final truce on destructive arguments, corrosive ways of thinking about each other, and the downward spiral of reactions that can destroy a marriage. Instead, you can open the door to a more vital, fulfilling relationship.

DEMYSTIFYING THE MARRIAGE CRISIS

If you are worried about the future of your marriage you have plenty of company. There's no denying that this is a frightening time for American couples. More than half of all first marriages end in divorce. Second marriages do worse, failing at a rate of about 60 percent. Although many social scientists believed that divorce rates had leveled off in the 1980s, new data suggest the opposite: the divorce rate is actually getting worse as time goes on. A 1989 study of U.S. Census records by researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that, based on 1985 data, divorce among recent first marriages stood at a shocking 67 percent. In other words, two out of every three new couples are headed for divorce -- unless something changes. That "something" is what this book is about -- how to change your marriage to save it.

There's no question that the statistics are distressing, especially if you fear that your own marriage may be in danger. What makes the numbers even more disturbing is that no one seems to understand why our marriages have become so fragile. It is as if some hidden, evil force is loose in America that is making marriages fall apart. But the reason marriage and its troubles seem so mysterious is really quite simple: until recently, almost no scientific studies of this complex relationship had been done. The vast majority of books of advice to couples have been based, at best, on the insights marital therapists have gained from the couples they happened to see, and, at worst, on mere anecdote and theoretical musings.

And most of the research on marriage has suffered, in my opinion, from a number of flaws ranging from asking the wrong questions to conclusions that are simply not valid. The solution, of course, is to conduct solid experiments that examine stable and troubled marriages, systematically tracing the emotional currents that lead one couple to drift apart and another to flow through life together. For the past two decades my research teams have been doing just that. The result has been a number of surprising, scientifically sound findings that go a long way to filling in the knowledge gap. I have written this book to share our latest results with you and to offer my best understanding of just how you can strengthen your marriage, no matter how rocky it may seem.

Of course, not all couples ought to stay married. But I do think it's disturbing that the majority of people marrying today will be unsuccessful at nurturing and holding onto their most precious relationship -- all the more disturbing because, I believe, an accurate diagnosis of the fault lines in a marriage can help any couple build a stronger union.

On your wedding day you had hopes for a happy, blissful union, and I believe that despite the rising divorce rate you can still fulfill that dream -- even if your marriage has started to show signs of trouble. Although our research is far from complete, our current findings offer the most accurate picture available of why some marriages succeed and others fail -- and what you can do to improve your own chances of ending up on the positive side of the odds.

BOB AND WENDY: THE PIONEERS

Early in my career as a psychologist, a young couple came to me for help with their ailing marriage. Bob and Wendy, as I'll call them, were a passionate, loving pair who had been attracted to each other's opposite nature. Wendy was energetic, spontaneous, and had a flair for design. Bob was more conservative, intellectual, with a penchant for order. He loved her vivaciousness and found her exciting -- "a hit of a gypsy." She was drawn to his reason, his dependability, his even temper.

But once they were married with a child, the stresses of family life began to bear down. Wendy worked full time in a fast-paced media job. Bob was struggling to get through graduate school while caring for the baby and the house. By the time I met them, rather than marveling in the charms that had drawn them together, they had begun to disdain one another's habits.

"I don't know how you can be so sloppy," Bob fumed. "You don't even appreciate all the work I do to maintain your house."

"My house?" Wendy countered. "We both live here, but because I'm a woman, you automatically assume that housework is my responsibility."

"That's not true," was his comeback. "It's just that you've done all the decorating. I don't give a damn about all this furniture and all this...stuff! I'm just doing my best to keep up."

"So it's my fault that you don't value living in a beautiful environment? You know what your problem is? You're always afraid of anything the least bit adventurous or new!"

And so it went day after day. Despite their best intentions, conversations seemed to deteriorate into an endless loop of criticism over housework, child care, and personal habits. And once they took their positions, they felt trapped, as if there was no way to break out of their defensiveness and anger. One day, on a hunch, I suggested that we videotape their discussions so I could take a closer look at the dynamics of their interaction.

We made three tapes in all. For the first one, I proposed that they play a game called "The NASA Moon Shot Problem," in which two people rank in order a set of items needed for survival on a trip to the moon. Here, the couple shined. They had a lively, productive discussion, filled with lots of laughs. They got superb scores for cooperation and problem solving. But perhaps more important, their affection for one another was palpable. Clearly, this was the pair who had met years ago and fallen in love.

With the second tape, however, the harmony faded. I asked them to discuss a major problem in their marriage, and before long, they were back to bickering, pouting, whining, feeling angry and bitter. The third session, which they recorded on an audiotape at home, was even worse. They rehashed the same issues over and over again. Each time they got anywhere near a solution, one of them inevitably would sabotage the process. When the tape finally ended, Bob and Wendy were exhausted and full of despair.

I watched and listened to these tapes over and over again. Then I listened to them with Bob and Wendy. I asked them to tell me what they were thinking and feeling at certain critical or puzzling moments in the conversation. What I detected hidden beneath their seemingly trivial skirmishes was a rich and painful history of unresolved issues concerning his need for autonomy and her need to feel valued by him. I learned that Bob and Wendy, like most couples I've worked with over the years, really wanted just two things from their marriage -- love and respect. But, also like so many distressed couples, their communication had become distorted. With increasing frequency, they would find themselves cornered into interactions where all each one could hear was the other one's criticism and contempt. The recurring episodes scared both of them. Although neither one wanted to divorce, each feared that's where they were headed.

Still, Bob and Wendy were committed to saving their marriage and they had gained insights about their interactions from our work together. Determined to find better ways to express their needs to one another, they worked hard in therapy. When I last saw them some twenty years ago, they seemed to be on track toward a mote stable relationship. And, thanks in part to their willingness to help me with this videotaped experiment, I was on a new track as well. I was determined to find out why some marriages fall apart while other marriages thrive. I felt that a better understanding of the destructive interactions that lead to divorce might help save couples who feel trapped in a downward spiral of hostility and bitterness.

PREDICTING DIVORCE

This was uncharted territory in the early 1970s, a time when divorce rates were already soaring. There was a plethora of psychological theories about how to fix broken marriages. The problem was these theories were based mostly on psychologists' intuition and experience with their own clients. That's not to say their ideas were bad. But preventing divorce can be compared to preventing heart disease. You wouldn't rely solely on the knowledge of a doctor who had treated a dozen heart attacks; you'd turn to a body of scientific work based on carefully designed experiments with hundreds of people -- some with heart disease and others without. The same could be said for treating the heartbreak of a marriage in distress. But this sound, systematic research had not been conducted among divorced and stable couples, to tease out the differences between them. Trained as a mathematician and a research psychologist, I decided to take such an approach. Using scientific methods, I would observe the conversations of husbands and wives, distilling out of the mists and confusions of anger, frustration, and isolation the differences that lead some couples to stay married and others to divorce.

Two decades later, this strategy has reaped an enormous reward. For the first time we can name with precision the subtle early warning signs of a troubled marriage, and tell you how to put these insights to good use, setting your own marriage on the right track and keeping it there for years to come.

X RAY OF A MARRIAGE

My laboratory conducts what amounts to the most intensive studies of couples interacting ever attempted, something akin to an X ray or CAT scan of a living relationship. My research teams have compared, microsecond to microsecond, how couples talk to one another. We've examined their facial expressions, mo...