The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country's Foremost Relationship Expert

by John M. Gottman

Thanks to the work of researchers Lois Verbrugge and James House, both of the University of Michigan, we now know that an unhappy marriage can increase your chances of getting sick by roughly 35 percent and even shorten your life by an average of four to eight years.

The notion that you can save your relationship just by learning to communicate more sensitively is probably the most widely held misconception about happy marriages—but

If you find yourself keeping score about some issue with your spouse, that suggests it’s an area of tension in your marriage.

Friendship fuels the flames of romance because it offers the best protection against feeling adversarial toward your spouse.

“positive sentiment override,” or PSO, a concept first proposed by University of Oregon psychologist Robert Weiss. This means that their positive thoughts about each other and their marriage are so pervasive that they tend to supersede their negative feelings. It takes a much more significant conflict for them to lose their equilibrium as a couple than it would otherwise.

We say they are using a repair attempt. This term refers to any statement or action—silly or otherwise—that prevents negativity from escalating out of control.

Most of the couples who participate in our workshops are relieved to hear that almost everybody messes up during marital conflict. What matters is whether their repairs succeed.

most marital arguments cannot be resolved. Couples spend year after year trying to change each other’s mind—but it can’t be done. This is because most of their disagreements are rooted in fundamental differences of lifestyle, personality, or values.

In essence, she’s saying the problem isn’t the housekeeping, it’s him. Dara may have legitimate reasons to feel deep frustration toward her husband. But the way she expresses herself will be a major roadblock to resolving their differences. When a discussion leads off this way—with criticism and/or sarcasm, which is a form of contempt—it has begun with a “harsh start-up.”

Horseman 1: Criticism. You will always have some complaints about the person you live with. But there’s a world of difference between complaint and criticism. A complaint focuses on a specific behavior or event. “I’m really angry that you didn’t sweep the kitchen last night. We agreed that we’d take turns. Could you please do it now?” is a complaint. Like many complaints, it has three parts: (1) Here’s how I feel (“I’m really angry”); (2) About a very specific situation (“you didn’t sweep last night”); (3) And here’s what I need/want/prefer (“Could you do it now?”). In contrast, a criticism is global and expresses negative feelings or opinions about the other’s character or personality:

Horseman 2: Contempt. The second horseman arises from a sense of superiority over one’s partner. It is a form of disrespect.

Horseman 3: Defensiveness.

One common form of defensiveness is the “innocent victim” stance, which often entails whining and sends the message: “Why are you picking on me? What about all the good things I do? There’s no pleasing you.”

Horseman 4: Stonewalling. In marriages where discussions begin with a harsh start-up, where criticism and contempt lead to defensiveness and vice versa, eventually one partner tunes out. This trumpets the arrival of the fourth horseman.

To this day, the male cardiovascular system remains more reactive than that of the female and slower to recover from stress.

Principle 1: Enhance Your Love Maps

emotionally intelligent couples are intimately familiar with each other’s world. I call this having a richly detailed love map—my term for that part of your brain where you store all the relevant information about your partner’s life.

Principle 2: Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration

reflect with pride on his or her many wonderful traits? Such thoughts comprise cherishing, which is a critical component of a couple’s fondness-and-admiration system. Cherishing is a habit of mind in which, when you are separated during the course of the day, you maximize thoughts of your partner’s positive qualities and minimize thoughts of negative ones.

Principle 3: Turn Toward Each Other Instead of Away

I watch filled with suspense because I know: couples who engage in lots of such interaction tend to remain happy. What’s really occurring in these brief exchanges is that the husband and wife are connecting—they are attuning by turning toward each other.

I’m not suggesting that it is never appropriate to problem-solve when your partner is upset. But to paraphrase psychologist Haim Ginott, the cardinal rule is “Understanding must precede advice.”

I have worked with couples who find that the de-stressing exercise above actually adds to their stress because one or both of them feel very uncomfortable listening to the other express negative emotions, even when they aren’t the target. This is a form of turning away.

Behind most anger is the feeling of being blocked from reaching a goal.

Marriage is something of a dance. There are times when you feel drawn to your loved one and times when you feel the need to pull back and replenish your sense of autonomy.

Principle 4: Let Your Partner Influence You

He respects and honors his wife and her opinions and feelings. He understands that for his marriage to thrive, he has to share the driver’s seat.

So although it certainly makes sense for both partners to avoid intensifying conflicts in this way, the bottom line is that husbands need to be particularly vigilant about accepting their wives’ influence.

From then till puberty, the sexes will have little or nothing to do with each other. This is a worldwide phenomenon. Many explanations have been given for this voluntary segregation. Maccoby offers an intriguing theory that dovetails with my findings on accepting influence. She has found that even at very young ages (one and a half years), boys will accept influence only from other boys when they play, whereas girls accept influence equally from girls or boys. At around ages five to seven, girls become fed up with this state of affairs and stop wanting to play with boys.

More than 80 percent of the time, it’s the wife who brings up sticky marital issues, while the husband tries to avoid discussing them. This isn’t a symptom of a troubled marriage—it’s true in most happy marriages as well.

Too often couples feel mired in conflict or distance themselves from each other as a protective device.

all marital conflicts, ranging from mundane annoyances to all-out wars, really fall into one of two categories: either they can be resolved, or they are perpetual,

Despite what many therapists will tell you, you don’t have to resolve your major marital conflicts for your marriage to thrive.

But because they keep acknowledging the problem and talking about it, they prevent it from overwhelming their relationship.

“When choosing a long-term partner … you will inevitably be choosing a particular set of unsolvable problems that you’ll be grappling with for the next ten, twenty, or fifty years.”

So although they communicate to each other every emotion in the spectrum, including anger, irritability, disappointment, and hurt, they also communicate their fundamental fondness and respect.

Principle 5: Solve Your Solvable Problems

My fifth principle entails the following steps: 1. Soften your start-up. 2. Learn to make and receive repair attempts. 3. Soothe yourself and each other. 4. Compromise. 5. Process any grievances so that they don’t linger.

Only 40 percent of the time do couples divorce because they are having frequent, devastating fights. More often marriages end because, to avoid constant skirmishes, husband and wife distance themselves so much that their friendship and sense of connection are lost.

If your heart rate exceeds 100 beats per minute (80 if you’re an athlete), you won’t be able to hear what your spouse is trying to tell you no matter how hard you try. Take a twenty-minute break before continuing.

Unlike cherishing, which nurtures gratitude for what you have, “if only” nurtures resentment for what you don’t have.

It is perfectly normal to have past emotional injuries that need talking about, or “processing.” If this has happened to you when you disagreed or hurt each other, the culprit is not what you were fighting about but how you were fighting.

After all, most of us readily turn off our devices at houses of worship or theaters. We need to extend that same respect and courtesy to our spouses.

If you are feeling suddenly outraged by something your spouse did, realize that the incident may be overblown in your mind because you’re feeling so tense. Likewise, if your spouse comes home with a cloud over his or her head and your “What’s wrong?” gets answered with a snarl, try not to take it personally.

While money buys pleasure, it also buys security. Balancing these two economic realities can be work for any couple, since our feelings about money and value are so personal and often idiosyncratic.

“A child is a grenade. When you have a baby, you set off an explosion in your marriage, and when the dust settles, your marriage is different from what it was. Not better, necessarily; not worse, necessarily; but different.”

Some small, well-timed doses of gentle advice-giving are fine (don’t forget to use a softened start-up), but lectures and criticism will backfire.

“Every Positive Thing You Do in Your Relationship Is Foreplay.”)

Principle 6: Overcome Gridlock

Neither of you has to “give in” or “lose.” The goal is to be able to acknowledge and discuss the issue without hurting each other.