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

by John M. Gottman

If you can, tell your partner that you support his or her dream. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you believe the dream can or should be realized.

Marriage isn’t just about raising kids, splitting chores, and making love. It can also have a spiritual dimension that has to do with creating an inner life together—a culture rich with symbols and rituals, and an appreciation for your roles and goals that link you and that lead you to understand who you are as a family.

A crucial goal of any marriage, therefore, is to create an atmosphere that encourages each person to talk honestly about his or her convictions. The more you speak candidly and respectfully with each other, the more likely there is to be a blending of your sense of meaning.

Your marriage will feel more profound to the degree that your expectations of each other—what you feel your partner’s place in your family ought to be—are similar. We’re not talking here about seemingly superficial issues like who washes the dishes; we’re talking about your deep expectations of yourself and your spouse.

Not only will you increase the intimacy of your marriage by sharing your deepest objectives with your spouse, but to the extent that you work together to achieve shared goals, they can be a path toward making your union even richer.

Feeling a sense of unity with your spouse on the deepest issues is unlikely to occur overnight. Exploring together is really an ongoing, lifelong process. The goal shouldn’t be to agree on every aspect of what is profoundly meaningful to you, but to have a marriage where you are both open to each other’s most dearly held beliefs. The more you create a marriage where these convictions can be readily divulged, the more joyous will be the life that you share.

Improving your marriage is a kind of journey. Like all voyages, it begins by suspending disbelief, taking one small step, and then seeing where you are and taking the next step.

But Donald Baucom of the University of North Carolina has debunked this idea by studying couples’ standards and expectations of each other. He has found that people with the greatest expectations for their marriage usually wind up with the highest-quality marriages. This suggests that by holding your relationship to high standards, you are far more likely to achieve the kind of marriage you want than you are by looking the other way and letting things slide.

And let’s face it: anyone you marry will be lacking in certain desirable qualities. The problem is that we tend to focus on what’s missing in our mate and overlook the fine qualities that are there—we take those for granted.