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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 I 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. I 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. I 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. I need to acknowledge the intellectual heritage upon which I draw. As Newton once wrote, "If I 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. I am also indebted to Jacob son's recent work with Andy Christensen, on acceptance in marital therapy I 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. I must also mention Clan Wile's work on marital therapy, with its superb focus on process. I love Wile's writing and thinking. They are entirely consistent with many of my research findings. I 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 the Seatle Love Lab: The Truth about Happy Marriages…………………...1 2 How I Predict Divorce ...................................................................................................... 25 3 Principle 1: Enhance Your Love Maps ....................................................................... 47 4 Principle 2: Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration ..................................... 61 5 Principle 3: Turn toward Each Other Instead of Away .................................... 79 6 Principle 4: Let Your Partner Influence You ......................................................... 99 7 The Two Kinds of Maritial Conflict .......................................................................... 129 8 Principle 5: Solve Your Solvable Problems ............................................................ 157 9 Coping with Typical Solvable Problems .................................................................. 187 10 Principle 6: Overcome Gridlock ................................................................................ 217 11 Principle 7: Create Shared Meaning ........................................................................ 243 Afterword: What Now?...................................................................................................... 259 g{x SEVEN PRINCIPLES SEVEN PRINCIPLES yÉÜ MAKING MARRIAGE MARRIAGE WORK 1 1 Inside the Seattle Love Inside the Seattle LoveLab: The Truth about The Truth about Happy Marriages Happy 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 Holter 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 overnight 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 foldout 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, I am now able to predict whether a couple will stay happily together or lose their way. I can make this prediction after listening to the couple interact in our Love Lab for as little as five minutes!