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

by John M. Gottman

Before the breakthroughs our research provided, point of view was pretty much all that anyone trying to help couples had to go on. And that included just about every qualified, talented, and well-trained marriage counselor out there. Usually a responsible therapist’s approach to helping couples was (and often still is) based on his or her professional training and experience, intuition, family history, perhaps even religious conviction. But the one thing it was not based on was hard scientific evidence. Because there really hadn’t been any rigorous scientific data about why some marriages succeeded and others collapsed.

That widely cited 50 percent rate is a general estimate of divorce over forty years of marriage. Our studies predict divorce over a much shorter time frame. For example, in a study of 130 newlywed couples, we determined which fifteen of them would divorce over the next seven years, based on our analysis of their interactions. In fact, seventeen couples divorced (including our fifteen), making our prediction rate for that study 98 percent.

What can make a marriage work is surprisingly simple. Happily married couples aren’t smarter, richer, or more psychologically astute than others. But in their day-to-day lives, they have hit upon a dynamic that keeps their negative thoughts and feelings about each other (which all couples have) from overwhelming their positive ones.

This positive attitude not only allows them to maintain but also to increase the sense of romance, play, fun, adventure, and learning together that are at the heart of any long-lasting love affair. They have what I call an emotionally intelligent marriage.

The more emotionally intelligent a couple—the better able they are to understand, honor, and respect each other and their marriage—the more likely that they will indeed live happily ever after.

One of the saddest reasons a marriage dies is that neither spouse recognizes its value until it is too late. Only after the papers have been signed, the furniture divided, and separate apartments rented do the exes realize how much they really gave up when they gave up on each other. Too often a good marriage is taken for granted rather than given the nurturing and respect it deserves and desperately needs.

people who are happily married live longer, healthier lives than either divorced people or those who are unhappily married. Scientists know for certain that these differences exist, but we are not yet sure why.

But there is growing evidence that a good marriage may also keep you healthier by directly benefiting your immune system, which spearheads the body’s defenses against illness. Researchers have known for about two decades that divorce can depress the immune system’s function. Theoretically, this decline in the system’s ability to fight foreign invaders could leave you open to more infectious diseases and cancers. Now we have found that the opposite may also be true. Not only do happily married people avoid this drop in immune function, but their immune systems may even be getting an extra boost.

When it comes to judging the effectiveness of marital therapy, it seems that the one-year mark is a pivotal point. Usually by then the couples who are going to relapse after therapy already have. Those who retain the benefits of therapy through the first year tend to continue them long-term.

Furthermore, we found that prevention workshops, in which couples worked on their relationship before conflict began to take its toll, were even three times more effective than our workshops designed for couples who were already troubled.

Perhaps the biggest myth of all is that communication—and more specifically, learning to resolve your conflicts—is the royal road to romance and an enduring, happy marriage.

Indeed, there is an important place for listening skills and problem-solving techniques in building and maintaining a relationship. But too often these approaches are considered all that couples need to succeed. And couples who don’t problem-solve “well” are considered doomed to fail. Neither of these beliefs is true.

The problem is that therapy that focuses solely on active listening and conflict resolution doesn’t work. A Munich-based marital therapy study conducted by Kurt Hahlweg and associates found that even after employing active-listening techniques the typical couple was still distressed. Those few couples who did benefit relapsed within a year.

Active listening asks couples to perform Olympic-level emotional gymnastics even if their relationship can barely walk.

After studying some seven hundred couples and tracking the fate of their marriages for up to twenty years, I now understand that the standard approach to counseling doesn’t work, not just because it’s nearly impossible for most couples to do well but, more important, because successful conflict resolution isn’t what makes marriages succeed. One of the most startling findings of our research is that couples who have maintained happy marriages rarely do anything that even partly resembles active listening when they’re upset.

Neuroses or personality problems ruin marriages. Research has found only the weakest connection between run-of-the-mill neuroses and failing at love. The reason: We all have issues we’re not totally rational about. We call these triggers “enduring vulnerabilities,” a term we borrowed from Tom Bradbury of UCLA. They don’t necessarily interfere with marriage if you learn to recognize and avoid activating them in each other.

The point is that neuroses don’t have to ruin a marriage. If you can accommodate each other’s “crazy” side and handle it with caring, affection, and respect, your marriage can thrive.

You’re not a bad person if you end a relationship with a partner who is grappling with severe psychopathology and is unable to think and function independently. What’s tricky for many couples, however, is navigating the middle ground: What do you do about mental health issues that are extremely challenging but that some relationships could possibly accommodate? This category includes addiction, clinical depression, phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder, and severe personality or mood disorders. If any of this sounds familiar, don’t rely on this book alone to make decisions about your future. Seek the additional advice and support of a knowledgeable and experienced mental health professional.

But needing to keep a running tally of who has done what for whom is really a sign of trouble in a marriage. Among happy spouses, one doesn’t load the dishwasher just as payback because the other cooked but out of overall positive feelings about the partner and relationship. If you find yourself keeping score about some issue with your spouse, that suggests it’s an area of tension in your marriage.

Gender differences may contribute to marital problems, but they don’t cause them.

The determining factor in whether wives feel satisfied with the sex, romance, and passion in their marriage is, by 70 percent, the quality of the couple’s friendship. For men, the determining factor is, by 70 percent, the quality of the couple’s friendship. So men and women come from the same planet after all.

I’m not suggesting that marriage is easy. We all know it takes courage, determination, and resilience to maintain a long-lasting relationship. But once you understand what really makes a marriage tick, saving or safeguarding your own will become simpler.

Happily married couples may not be aware that they follow these Seven Principles, but they all do. Unhappy marriages always came up short in at least one of these seven areas—and usually in many of them. By mastering these Seven Principles, you can ensure that your own marriage will thrive.

At the heart of the Seven Principles approach is the simple truth that happy marriages are based on a deep friendship.

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

technically as “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. Their positivity causes them to feel optimistic about each other and their marriage, to have positive expectations about their lives together, and to give each other the benefit of the doubt.

Once your marriage gets “set” at a high degree of positivity, it will take far more negativity to harm your relationship than if your “set point” were lower. And if your relationship becomes overwhelmingly negative, it will be more difficult to repair.

Most marriages start off with such a high set point that it’s hard for either partner to imagine their relationship derailing. But far too often this blissful state doesn’t last. 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.” Everything gets interpreted in an increasingly negative manner.

I call this connection attunement. The more highly skilled at achieving it that partners become, the more resilient their friendship and the more solid and promising their future. Some couples are naturals at attunement. But others (most of us!) need to work at it somewhat. It is well worth the effort.

The Seven Principles comprise the Sound Relationship House’s many floors or levels. These principles are intricately connected to trust and commitment, which form the house’s protective, weight-bearing walls.

Betrayal is, fundamentally, any act or life choice that doesn’t prioritize the commitment and put the partner “before all others.”

betrayal lies at the heart of every failed relationship.

The key is learning how to better attune to each other and make friendship a top priority.

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. Repair attempts are a secret weapon of emotionally intelligent couples—even though many of these couples aren’t aware that they are employing something so powerful. 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.

The success or failure of a couple’s repair attempts is one of the primary factors in whether their marriage is likely to flourish or flounder.

In the strongest marriages, husband and wife share a deep sense of meaning. They don’t just “get along”—they also support each other’s hopes and aspirations and build a sense of purpose into their lives together.

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, they need to understand the bottom-line difference that is causing the conflict—and to learn how to live with it by honoring and respecting each other. Only then will they be able to build shared meaning and a sense of purpose into their marriage.

The research shows that if your discussion begins with a harsh start-up, it will inevitably end on a negative note, even if there are a lot of attempts to “make nice” in between. Statistics tell the story: 96 percent of the time you can predict the outcome of a conversation based on the first three minutes of the fifteen-minute interaction! A harsh start-up simply dooms you to failure. So if you begin a discussion that way, you might as well pull the plug, take a breather, and start over.

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.

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.

Recurring episodes of flooding lead to divorce for two reasons. First, they signal that at least one partner feels severe emotional distress when dealing with the other. Second, the physical sensations of feeling flooded—the increased heart rate, sweating, and so on—make it virtually impossible to have a productive, problem-solving discussion.

When a pounding heart and all the other physical stress reactions happen in the midst of a discussion with your mate, the consequences are disastrous. Your ability to process information is reduced, meaning it’s harder to pay attention to what your partner is saying. Creative problem solving and your sense of humor go out the window. You’re left with the most reflexive, least intellectually sophisticated responses in your repertoire: to fight (act critical, contemptuous, or defensive) or flee (stonewall). Any chance of resolving the issue is gone. Most likely, the discussion will just worsen the situation.

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. They may go through the motions of togetherness—attending their children’s plays, hosting dinner parties, taking family vacations. But emotionally they no longer feel connected to each other. They have given up.

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.

Usually in this situation—when the four horsemen are present but the couple’s repair attempts are successful—the result is a satisfying marriage. In fact, 84 percent of the newlyweds who were high on the four horsemen but repaired effectively were in stable, happy marriages six years later. But if there were no repair attempts—or if the attempts were not able to be heard—the marriage faced serious danger.

In marriages in which the four horsemen have moved in for good, even the most articulate, sensitive, well-targeted repair attempt is likely to fail abysmally.

Ironically, we see more repair attempts between troubled couples than between those whose marriages are going smoothly. The more that repair attempts fail, the more these couples keep trying. It can be poignant to hear a partner offer up one repair after another, all to no avail.

When the four horsemen overrun a home, impairing the communication, the negativity mushrooms to such a degree that everything a spouse does—or ever did—is recast in a negative light.

Whatever the route, there are four final stages that signal the death knell of a relationship. 1. The couple see their marital problems as severe. 2. Talking things over seems useless. Partners try to solve problems on their own. 3. The couple lead parallel lives. 4. Loneliness sets in.

As bleak as this sounds, I am convinced that far more marriages can be saved than currently are. Even a marriage that is about to hit bottom can be revived with the right intervention.