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

by John M. Gottman

If you’re not sure whether you’re gridlocked over a perpetual problem or are coping well with it, this checklist will help. The characteristics of a gridlocked problem are: • The conflict makes you feel rejected by your partner. • You keep talking about it but make no headway. • You become entrenched in your positions and are unwilling to budge. • When you discuss the subject, you end up feeling more frustrated and hurt. • Your conversations about the problem are devoid of humor, amusement, or affection. • You become even more “unbudgeable” over time, which leads you to vilify each other during these conversations. • This vilification makes you all the more rooted in your positions and polarized, more extreme in your views, and all the less willing to compromise. • Eventually you disengage from each other emotionally.

Although it is stressful to listen to your partner’s negative feelings, remember that successful relationships live by the motto “When you are in pain, the world stops and I listen.” This is true even when your partner’s anger, sadness, disappointment, or fear is directed at you. Negative emotions hold important information about how to love each other better. It takes a lot of understanding and proficiency in attunement to be able to really hear what your partner is saying when he or she is upset.

No one is right. There is no absolute reality in marital conflict, only two subjective ones. This is true whether the disagreement is solvable or perpetual. As my friend Dan Siegel says, “There is no immaculate perception.” It will help you resolve your differences if you remember this basic truth.

Acceptance is crucial. It is virtually impossible for people to heed advice unless they believe the other person understands, respects, and accepts them for who they are. When people feel criticized, disliked, or unappreciated, they are unable to change. Instead, they feel under siege, and they dig in. Therefore, the basis for coping effectively with relationship issues, whether solvable or perpetual, is to communicate basic acceptance of your partner’s personality. Before you ask your spouse to change the way he or she drives, eats, vacuums, or makes love, you must make sure your partner feels known and respected rather than criticized or demeaned.

When you let children know that all their emotions, including the negative ones, are okay to have, you are also communicating that they themselves are acceptable even when sad, crabby or scared. This helps children feel positive about themselves, which makes growth and change possible. The same is true for adults. In order to improve our relationship, we need to express acceptance of our partner.

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.

Every marriage is faced with certain emotional tasks that spouses need to accomplish together for the marriage to grow and deepen. These missions come down to attaining a rich understanding between partners that will allow both of them to feel safe and secure in the relationship. When these tasks are not accomplished, the marriage doesn’t feel like a port in the storm of life. It feels like just another storm.

At the very least, such rules ought to include a ban on texting, checking e-mail, or other “cyber crimes” during mealtime, date night, or when either of you needs to talk. 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. Some couples may also want to make ironclad rules about privacy to avoid disagreements over what information or images are appropriate to post online.

It’s little surprise to me, therefore, that research indicates habitual porn use hurts the nature and quality of sex in relationships—particularly when (as is usually the case) a partner is viewing porn alone and not as part of a couple’s mutual sexual enjoyment.

Less frequent sex. In general, when one partner is a habitual porn user, the couple will have sex less often. This is not so when masturbation is used without porn; in that case, couples are likely to have sex more often.

Less sexual communication. Because it doesn’t require interaction with a partner or any awareness or discussion of another person’s desires, porn use obviously does not entail two-way communication.

Less mutually satisfying sex. If you are frequently having orgasms in response to a specific image and fantasy, a conditioning takes place that leads you to seek out that same stimulation in real life. In part, this conditioning comes courtesy of oxytocin and dopamine, the “bonding and pleasure hormones” that the body releases during orgasm.

So it would be wise for couples to discuss porn usage and whether either of them perceives any adverse effects on their relationship. Without explicit agreement, the use of porn is really a form of relationship betrayal.