I heard a story that Dr John Gottman didn’t set out at first to study marriages. He was, in fact, actively engaged in research of emotional and personality development in children in the 1970’s. So the story goes, he was getting frustrated that his experiments (with child subjects) kept getting disrupted by the marital discord in the parents’ relationships. He looked at the literature to see if he could find some good interventions for the parents to keep them from torpedoing his work and he found…nothing. No credible research had been done on relationship dynamics or on why some relationships were stable and happy while other’s weren’t. In fact, it was a commonly held belief in the field at that time that you couldn’t study relationships at all, they were too complex and chaotic to find discernible and repeatable patterns of behavior.
A new way to study relationships
Dissatisfied with this, Dr Gottman set out to find out just what makes marriages succeed or fail. He teamed up with a colleague at the University of Washington, Dr Robert Levenson, and together they began studying relationships in what the media dubbed “The Love Lab.”
The Love Lab was an apartment wired for video and sound, where they could observe how couples interact while alone. Volunteer couples would stay in the apartment for several days at a stretch. The researchers poured over hours of video and audio recordings for each couple, carefully cataloging types of interactions and their effect. Over several decades, and with thousands of couples, they discovered that relationship behaviors are incredibly stable over time and that the same behavior sets were observed in all couples. Further, it became clear that a couple’s happiness and satisfaction could be accurately predicted based solely on those observed behaviors. Dr Gottman is famous for, among other things, being able to predict the chances of a couple divorcing with a 90% accuracy, just by observing their interactions for six minutes.
Later studies found that couples face many of the same problems, and with the same behavior sets, across culture and language barriers as well as sexual orientation.
A better way to help couples change
Working with his wife, clinical psychologist Dr Julie Schwartz Gottman, he took this research as a foundation for a methodology of interventions to help couples exchange negative interactional patterns for ones that they knew worked for other people. They developed the Gottman Sound Relationship House as a way of visualizing the nine core principles that went into building a satisfying and long-lasting relationship.
Most couples will agree that communication is a key part of a good relationship. That’s a good start. In addition, couples must build a solid friendship. They must build a culture of respect and admiration of each other. They must support each other in pursuit of dreams both big and small, and they must know (or learn) how to soothe themselves in conflict so that disagreements don’t become toxic, or sources of long-lasting hurts and unmet needs.
One of the most important findings of the Gottmans’ research is that 69% of couple conflict is unsolvable. Meaning that a majority of things you disagree about today, you still disagree about twenty years from now. Learning how to dance with that conflict (without avoiding or competing with each other), is what makes the difference between the relationship masters and the relationship disasters.