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October 12 - December 27, 2020
One important message of these findings is that it is not wise to stay in a bad marriage for the sake of your children. It is clearly harmful to raise kids in a home that is consumed by hostility.
Too often there is mutual enmity between the parents that continues after the breakup. For that reason, children of divorce often fare just as poorly as those caught in the crossfire of a miserable marriage.
The most common method recommended for resolving conflict—used in one guise or another by most marital therapists—is called active listening. For example, a therapist might urge you to try some form of the listener-speaker exchange.
The problem is that therapy that focuses solely on active listening and conflict resolution doesn’t work.
in the long run, marital therapy did not benefit the majority of couples.
Active listening asks couples to perform Olympic-level emotional gymnastics even if their relationship can barely walk.
couples who have maintained happy marriages rarely do anything that even partly resembles active listening when they’re upset.
At the heart of the Seven Principles approach is the simple truth that happy marriages are based on a deep friendship.
Over time, irritation, resentment, and anger build to the point that the friendship becomes more and more of an abstraction. The couple may pay lip service to it, but it is no longer their daily reality. Eventually they end up in “negative sentiment override.”
In our research, we have a technical name for what Olivia and Nathaniel are doing. 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.
When a couple have a strong friendship, they naturally become experts at sending each other repair attempts and at correctly reading those sent their way.
most quarrels are really not about whether the toilet lid is up or down or whose turn it is to take out the trash. There are deeper, hidden issues that fuel these superficial conflicts and make them far more intense and hurtful than they would otherwise
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. By fighting over these differences, all they succeed in doing is wasting their time and harming their marriage. Instead,
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.”
Certain kinds of negativity, if allowed to run rampant, are so lethal to a relationship that I call them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Usually these four horsemen clip-clop into the heart of a marriage in the following order: Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling.
Contempt is fueled by long-simmering negative thoughts about the partner. You’re more likely to have such thoughts if your differences are not resolved.
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.
Think of the husband who comes home from work, gets met with a barrage of criticism from his stay-at-home wife, and responds by turning on the TV. The less responsive he is, the more she yells. Eventually he gets up and leaves the room. Rather than confronting his wife, he disengages. By turning away from her, he is avoiding a fight, but he is also avoiding his marriage. He has become a stonewaller.
may seem to Rita that her criticism and contempt have no effect on Mack. But nothing could be further from the truth. Usually people stonewall as a protection against feeling psychologically and physically overwhelmed, a sensation we call flooding. It occurs when your spouse’s negativity is so intense and sudden that it leaves you shell-shocked. You feel so defenseless against this sniper attack that you learn to do anything to avoid a replay.
That’s why all Mack can think about is protecting himself from how awful Rita’s onslaught makes him feel. And the way he does that is to disengage emotionally from the relationship.
Frequently feeling flooded leads almost inevitably to emotional distancing, which in turn leads to feeling lonely. Without help, the couple will end up divorced or living in a dead marriage in which they maintain separate, parallel lives in the same home.
Repair attempts save marriages not just because they decrease emotional tension between spouses, but because by lowering the stress level they also prevent your heart from racing and making you feel flooded. When the four horsemen rule a couple’s communication, repair attempts often don’t even get noticed. Especially when you’re feeling flooded, you’re not able to hear a verbal white flag.
Sometimes a couple at this end stage of marriage will come for counseling. On the surface, it may seem like nothing much is wrong because they don’t argue, act contemptuous, or stonewall. The four horsemen are completely absent. Instead, they talk calmly and distantly about their relationship and their conflicts. An inexperienced therapist could easily assume that their problems don’t run very deep. But actually, one or both of them has already disengaged emotionally from the marriage. Our lab studies indicate that these emotionally distant couples do divorce—but they split after an average of
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If a couple still have a functioning fondness and admiration system, their marriage is salvageable.
If a marriage is troubled, asking the couple about the current state of affairs is not likely to elicit much mutual praise. But query them about the past and you can often detect embers of positive feelings.
In such a case, the key to reinvigorating fondness and admiration is to get in the habit of scanning for qualities and actions that you can appreciate.
Catch your partner doing some little thing right and then offer a genuine appreciation like “I love the way you handled the teacher conference yesterday” or “Thanks for making my sister feel welcome here” or even “You look so hot in that outfit, I’m having all kinds of bad thoughts.”
Contempt is a corrosive that, over time, breaks down the bond between husband and wife. The better in touch you are with your deep-seated positive feelings for each other, the less likely that you will act with contempt toward your spouse when you have a difference of opinion.
How often do you think happily about your partner when you’re apart? Do you 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.
This exercise is designed to get you into the habit of cherishing your partner. If you are angry, stressed, or feeling distant from your spouse, you may tend to focus on his or her negative characteristics. This leads to distress-maintaining thoughts, which in turn leave you feeling ever more distant and isolated in your marriage.
In marriage, couples are always making what I call “bids” for each other’s attention, affection, humor, or support. Bids can be as minor as asking for a backrub or as significant as seeking help in carrying the burden when an aging parent is ill. The partner responds to each bid either by turning toward the spouse or turning away.
A tendency to turn toward your partner is the basis of trust, emotional connection, passion, and a satisfying sex life.
In our six-year follow-up of newlyweds, we found that couples who remained married had turned toward their partner’s bids an average of 86 percent of the time in the Love Lab, while those who ended up divorced had averaged only 33 percent. It’s
There’s a reason that seemingly small events are fundamental to a relationship’s future: Each time partners turn toward each other, they are funding what I’ve come to call their emotional bank account.
For many couples, just realizing that they shouldn’t take their everyday interactions for granted makes an enormous difference in their relationship.
Many people think that the secret to reconnecting with their partner is a vacation by the sea. But a romantic outing only turns up the heat if a couple has kept the pilot light burning by staying in touch in the little ways.
So before you reply defensively to your partner, pause for a moment and search for a bid underneath your partner’s harsh words. Then, focus on the bid, not the delivery.
In some cases, constantly checking e-mails, postings, tweets, and text messages can lead to a sort of addiction in which distraction itself becomes a habit. In his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr documents research that indicates self-distraction has become a permanent, unconscious habit for many people. All of those electronic devices have gotten us used to having our concentration and focus interrupted. This culture of distraction doesn’t benefit intimate relationships, which require the opposite: the habit of being aware and paying attention.
The old cliché of the husband who hides behind the newspaper has been replaced by the spouse of either gender who is tapping out texts, scanning social media, or engrossed in one of those irresistible cell-phone games.
Communicate your understanding. Let your spouse know that you empathize. If you tend to be on the quiet side or aren’t in the habit of sharing emotions, you might be uncertain about what to say to show understanding. So here’s a list of suggested phrases—use any that feel comfortable to you.
Take your partner’s side. This means expressing support even if you think his or her perspective is unreasonable. Don’t back the opposition—this will make your spouse resentful or dejected.
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. I can’t emphasize enough how beneficial it will be to your relationship to give your partner the gift of being there when he or she is upset. After years of studying couples in the lab and working with them directly, it has become clear to me that happy couples live by the credo “When you are in pain, the world stops and I
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Don’t ask “Why?” Here is a major exception to the suggestion that you ask open-ended questions: Avoid queries that start with “Why?”
People who come from a problem-solving orientation tend to love this word. But in a discussion about what your partner is feeling, “Why?” will almost always sound like criticism. When you ask, “Why do you think that?” the other person is likely to hear, “Stop thinking that, you’re wrong!” A more successful approach would be, “What leads you to think that?” or, “Help me understand how you decided that.”
Don’t try to cheer up your partner. When someone is sad, it’s a common response to attempt to make them smile, laugh, or otherwise erase their blues. But unless your partner asks for assistance in shaking the mood, it’s usually more helpful to listen to sadness rather than trying to relieve it.
Don’t ever tell your partner to “calm down.”
If you feel like your spouse gives you the cold shoulder in little ways throughout the day, or if your spouse’s concept of closeness feels more like suffocation to you, the best thing you can do for your marriage is to talk it out.
When a husband accepts his wife’s influence, he also strengthens their friendship. This occurs not just because the absence of frequent power struggles makes the marriage more pleasurable, but because such a husband is open to learning from his wife.
These couples intuitively understand that some difficulties are inevitable, much the way chronic physical ailments are unavoidable as you get older. They are like a trick knee, a bad back, an irritable bowel, or tennis elbow. We may not enjoy having these problems, but we are able to cope by avoiding situations that worsen them, and by developing strategies and routines that help ease them.
If a couple doesn’t possess effective techniques for conquering a solvable problem, it can cause excessive tension.
