The Man's Guide to Women: Scientifically Proven Secrets from the Love Lab About What Women Really Want

by John M. Gottman

What trustworthiness looks like in dating and mating is this: You are who you say you are and you do what you say you are going to do.

The fights of many couples result from men dismissing women’s emotions instead of attuning to them. You dismiss a woman’s emotions every time you try to fix them, distract her from them, minimize them, mock them, or ignore them altogether.

Emotions are opportunities for intimacy. This bears repeating. They are opportunities to build emotional connection, and they are opportunities to demonstrate your trustworthiness.

“You are beautiful no matter what you wear.”

Hold her. Hold her before sex, during sex, after sex. Hold her when you’re dating. Hold her when you’re married. Hold her when she’s upset. Hold her when she’s happy. Hold her when she’s scared. Hold her when she feels unworthy of being held, and hold her when she’s mad. Hold her every time she needs to be held, and you will always be her best lover ever. It’s as simple as that.

Her research found that the causes of women’s anger could be rooted in one or more of three categories: powerlessness, injustice, and the irresponsibility of other people.

We’re going to let you in on two secrets we discovered in the Love Lab. First, men get more emotionally flooded and overwhelmed than women do in a conflict situation. And second, once flooded, only men who are able to reduce their heart rates are able to decrease the amount of criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling they contribute to the conflict. These four things are what we call the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in a relationship. If you escalate any conflict by responding with criticism, defensiveness, contempt, or stonewalling, there’s an 81 percent chance you are ushering in the End of Days for your relationship or marriage.

Does any of this sound familiar? These are all ways of escalating conflict. If your goal is to have less conflict with the woman in your life, avoid responding to her with stonewalling, defensiveness, criticism, or contempt.

It’s called diffuse physiological arousal (DPA), and in our study of more than 3,000 couples, we found that it is impossible to communicate when in this physiologically aroused state. You know you are flooded if your heart rate is over 100 beats per minute (or 80, if you are in great physical shape). That’s the point at which you start secreting adrenaline and launch into DPA. In DPA, you lose access to your sense of humor, cannot listen very well (hearing and peripheral vision are compromised), and tend to repeat yourself (which we call “the summarizing yourself syndrome”).

In our research, we showed that after conflict a man’s heart rate did not lower when he thought about his wife’s negative qualities. Surprisingly, it also didn’t lower when he spent 20 minutes thinking about his wife’s positive qualities. Guess what lowered the heart rate of our participants: reading a magazine. What you need when you’re emotionally flooded is a distraction. You need to think about anything but the person you are in conflict with and the conversation that caused the emotional flooding. It’s about self-soothing and down-regulating your nervous system. Think about your golf game. Think about baseball. Think about England. Think about anything that has nothing to do with your conflict, and you will soon be able to think clearly. Doing something physical can also help. You can take a walk, read a book, listen to music, go for a run, do some yoga, or meditate.

A Hero tries to find out where it hurts, and he does so by asking one or more of the following three important questions: 1.What do you need? 2.What are you concerned about? 3.What are you feeling?

But here’s a little secret learned in the Love Lab: The way you respond to your partner in times when there’s no conflict and the quality of the friendship between you are what will make a woman less critical and more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt when issues do arise. Investing in the nonconflict time is like money in the bank. It will make times of conflict go a lot smoother and happen less frequently.

You can learn to downregulate your anger by remembering to breathe, counting to 10, and taking a break.

We know from the Love Lab that while we can teach couples all the skills necessary to communicate, deal with conflict, show love and affection, express emotion, and navigate power struggles, if there isn’t an inherent “rightness” to the person, no skill set will make up for that. In over 40 years of research and work with couples, we have come to believe that you can’t make it work with just anybody.

A guide to women is a guide to understanding yourself. You are at your best when you are in a loving, exciting, and life-changing relationship with a woman.