Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

by John M. Gottman

John Gottman’s own longitudinal newlywed study found that for those couples who have a child within an average of four years after getting married, 67 percent have a precipitous drop in marital happiness in the first three years of the baby’s life. Measuring videos of conflict, with observers blind to whether or not the couple had children, the couples with children showed an increase in hostility and conflict. But a third of all couples who became parents didn’t have a drop in relationship happiness, so John chose to look closely at both sets of couples three months after the wedding. Was there some difference he could see prior to the baby being born that could predict which group the couple would be in post-baby? What John found out in his longitudinal study of heterosexual couples was that the men who were more respectful to their wives, and more accepting of their wife’s influence or opinions, were more likely not to have a drop in marital satisfaction after children are born.