Masters of Love - The Atlantic. Every day in June, the most popular wedding month of the year, about 1. American couples will say . The majority of marriages fail, either ending in divorce and separation or devolving into bitterness and dysfunction.
Of all the people who get married, only three in ten remain in healthy, happy marriages, as psychologist Ty Tashiro points out in his book The Science of Happily Ever After, which was published earlier this year. Social scientists first started studying marriages by observing them in action in the 1. Married couples were divorcing at unprecedented rates. Worried about the impact these divorces would have on the children of the broken marriages, psychologists decided to cast their scientific net on couples, bringing them into the lab to observe them and determine what the ingredients of a healthy, lasting relationship were. Was each unhappy family unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy claimed, or did the miserable marriages all share something toxic in common? Having a conversation sitting next to their spouse was, to their bodies, like facing off with a saber- toothed tiger.
Psychologist John Gottman was one of those researchers. For the past four decades, he has studied thousands of couples in a quest to figure out what makes relationships work. I recently had the chance to interview Gottman and his wife Julie, also a psychologist, in New York City. Together, the renowned experts on marital stability run The Gottman Institute, which is devoted to helping couples build and maintain loving, healthy relationships based on scientific studies. John Gottman began gathering his most critical findings in 1.
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Gottman and Levenson brought newlyweds into the lab and watched them interact with each other. With a team of researchers, they hooked the couples up to electrodes and asked the couples to speak about their relationship, like how they met, a major conflict they were facing together, and a positive memory they had. As they spoke, the electrodes measured the subjects' blood flow, heart rates, and how much they sweat they produced. Then the researchers sent the couples home and followed up with them six years later to see if they were still together. From the data they gathered, Gottman separated the couples into two major groups: the masters and the disasters. The masters were still happily together after six years. The disasters had either broken up or were chronically unhappy in their marriages.
When the researchers analyzed the data they gathered on the couples, they saw clear differences between the masters and disasters. The disasters looked calm during the interviews, but their physiology, measured by the electrodes, told a different story. Their heart rates were quick, their sweat glands were active, and their blood flow was fast. Following thousands of couples longitudinally, Gottman found that the more physiologically active the couples were in the lab, the quicker their relationships deteriorated over time. But what does physiology have to do with anything? The problem was that the disasters showed all the signs of arousal.
Having a conversation sitting next to their spouse was, to their bodies, like facing off with a saber- toothed tiger. Even when they were talking about pleasant or mundane facets of their relationships, they were prepared to attack and be attacked. This sent their heart rates soaring and made them more aggressive toward each other.
For example, each member of a couple could be talking about how their days had gone, and a highly aroused husband might say to his wife, . They felt calm and connected together, which translated into warm and affectionate behavior, even when they fought. Isolation: The Battle for Our Lives. Gottman wanted to know more about how the masters created that culture of love and intimacy, and how the disasters squashed it.
In a follow- up study in 1. University of Washington campus to look like a beautiful bed and breakfast retreat. He invited 1. 30 newlywed couples to spend the day at this retreat and watched them as they did what couples normally do on vacation: cook, clean, listen to music, eat, chat, and hang out. And Gottman made a critical discovery in this study. He might say to his wife, .
She can respond by either . Though the bird- bid might seem minor and silly, it can actually reveal a lot about the health of the relationship. The husband thought the bird was important enough to bring it up in conversation and the question is whether his wife recognizes and respects that. People who turned toward their partners in the study responded by engaging the bidder, showing interest and support in the bid. Sometimes they would respond with overt hostility, saying something like, . Couples who had divorced after a six- year follow up had . Only three in ten of their bids for emotional connection were met with intimacy.
The couples who were still together after six years had . Nine times out of ten, they were meeting their partner. Much of it comes down to the spirit couples bring to the relationship. Do they bring kindness and generosity; or contempt, criticism, and hostility? They are building this culture of respect and appreciation very purposefully.
Disasters are scanning the social environment for partners. People who are focused on criticizing their partners miss a whopping 5. People who give their partner the cold shoulder. And people who treat their partners with contempt and criticize them not only kill the love in the relationship, but they also kill their partner's ability to fight off viruses and cancers. Being mean is the death knell of relationships. Kindness, on the other hand, glues couples together. Research independent from theirs has shown that kindness (along with emotional stability) is the most important predictor of satisfaction and stability in a marriage.
Kindness makes each partner feel cared for, understood, and validated. You can think about it as a fixed trait: either you have it or you don.
Or you could think of kindness as a muscle. In some people, that muscle is naturally stronger than in others, but it can grow stronger in everyone with exercise. Masters tend to think about kindness as a muscle. They know that they have to exercise it to keep it in shape. They know, in other words, that a good relationship requires sustained hard work. Neglect creates distance between partners and breeds resentment in the one who is being ignored. The hardest time to practice kindness is, of course, during a fight.
Letting contempt and aggression spiral out of control during a conflict can inflict irrevocable damage on a relationship. You can throw spears at your partner. Or you can explain why you. So appreciate the intent. While those are great examples of generosity, kindness can also be built into the very backbone of a relationship through the way partners interact with each other on a day- to- day basis, whether or not there are back rubs and chocolates involved.
One way to practice kindness is by being generous about your partner. From the research of the Gottmans, we know that disasters see negativity in their relationship even when it is not there.
An angry wife may assume, for example, that when her husband left the toilet seat up, he was deliberately trying to annoy her. But he may have just absent- mindedly forgotten to put the seat down. Or say a wife is running late to dinner (again), and the husband assumes that she doesn. But it turns out that the wife was running late because she stopped by a store to pick him up a gift for their special night out.
Imagine her joining him for dinner, excited to deliver her gift, only to realize that he. The ability to interpret your partner. So appreciate the intent. One of the telltale signs of the disaster couples Gottman studied was their inability to connect over each other. When one person in the relationship shared the good news of, say, a promotion at work with excitement, the other would respond with wooden disinterest by checking his watch or shutting the conversation down with a comment like, . But research shows that being there for each other when things go right is actually more important for relationship quality. How someone responds to a partner.
They psychologists wanted to know how partners would respond to each other. They found that, in general, couples responded to each other.
She would say something like . For example, he might say something like: ! I won a free t- shirt! A typical passive constructive response is saying ? And what about the cost? Med school is so expensive!
If her partner responded in this way, he stopped what he was doing and engaged wholeheartedly with her: ! When did you find out? What classes will you take first semester? While the other response styles are joy- killers, active constructive responding allows the partner to savor her joy and gives the couple an opportunity to bond over the good news. In the parlance of the Gottmans, active constructive responding is a way of . In the 2. 00. 6 study, Gable and her colleagues followed up with the couples two months later to see if they were still together.
The psychologists found that the only difference between the couples who were together and those who broke up was active constructive responding. Those who showed genuine interest in their partner. In an earlier study, Gable found that active constructive responding was also associated with higher relationship quality and more intimacy between partners. There are many reasons why relationships fail, but if you look at what drives the deterioration of many relationships, it.
As the normal stresses of a life together pile up. In most marriages, levels of satisfaction drop dramatically within the first few years together.
But among couples who not only endure, but live happily together for years and years, the spirit of kindness and generosity guides them forward.