and

The Seven Principles For Making Marriage Work

"I have found that much of the conventional wisdom
- even among many marital therapists -
is misguided or dead wrong."
- John Gottman

Why Marriages Succeed or Fail
The Seven Principles For Making Marriage Work
The Relationship Cure: A Five-Step Guide to Strengthening Your Marriage, Family, and Friendships

Here at the secret LiveReal headquarters
we continue our undaunted, brazen, and tireless pursuit
of real answers
to those simple questions . . .

What really does make a marriage succeed . . . or fail?
What causes divorce . . . and how can it be prevented?
What - if any - are the "secrets" or principles to a happy marriage?

LiveReal In the Jungle

Since embarking onto our harrowing adventure, we have discovered that the mountain of information, confusion, smoke-and-mirrors, and outright nonsense would be hopelessly daunting to any but the most hardy, valiant, and determined of seekers.

OK, we'll quit the self-promotion.

There seems to be an unwritten rule: "If you need some extra money . . . if your career/status rank is slipping . . . if you have a well-known name and a little extra time on your hands . . . then write a self-help book." The result is a fog of confusion that would blanket South America.

You might think that the more information and advice about keeping marriages together, the better; in fact, it's just about the opposite: the more information, the more misinformation, and the more work it takes to sort through it all.

So, in the blizzard of information and opinions . . . who's right? Who do we trust? Which of all these dogs can hunt, and which would get treed by a coon?

A Solid Fortress In the Jungle

During long hours of wearily sorting through the virtual avalanche of books, tapes, and not-so-ancient manuscripts, we came across the name "John Gottman" . . . and quickly recognized Gottman as a kindred spirit.

How? Well, for starters, he didn't hesitate to point out that the lion's share of his work lies in sorting through all the mountains of crap (our words, not his) and finding out what actually works.

Fortunately, LiveReal discovered what we believe (as of now) to be an island of sanity in a sea of cliches . . . and so far, the best that scientific, mainstream psychology has to offer.

Our verdict: Gottman's work, as outlined in his books Why Marriages Succeed Or Fail, The Seven Principles Of Making Marriage Work, and most recently, Relationship Cure: A Five-Step Guide for Building Better Connections with Family, Friends and Lovers .

Why Gottman?

Well, in a word, "it's scientific." (OK, that's two words.) In this aspect, it stands alone.

According to our current research, using the word "scientific" makes all the other contestants drop their hands and go home. What sets Gottman apart is his approach of using precise and objective measurements (subtle facial expressions, fidgets, sweat, gestures, breathing rates, heart rates . . . along the "emotional intelligence" line of thought) to develop a keen and watchfuleye for what exactly goes on in marriages that work and marriages that don't work, and to try to nail down the exact differences between them.

That's why we feel Gottmans' work is so refreshing: instead of taking his own gut feelings, hunches, opinions, intuitions, anecdotal evidence, and what his mom told him . . . wrapping them in a coat of "M.D. and Ph.D." and presenting them as authoritative dictums on the human condition. Instead, he produces mounds of real data, gathered by objectively measuring interactions between couples.

This produces one of the rare bodies of research in marital therapy, and one of the few bodies of thought that are solidly scientific by practically everyone's standards (it's verifiable, replicatable, falsifiable, etc), and most importantly, it makes sense, and seems to actually work in helping married folks stay married.

So, if we had to make a guess, this type of work - subtle measurements along the "emotional intelligence" lines of thought - will lay a solid foundation for the kind of study that could take us well into the future.

So, what is this evidence, exactly? According to, well, Gottman,

Gottman claims, with credible evidence,
the ability to predict
with 91 percent accuracy
which people will stay married
and which will divorce.

So, here we go.

A Thumbnail Sketch of Gottman's Work

*Note: This is not a substitute for exploring Gottman's work directly. Gottman's books are full of exercises, quizzes, and in-depth explanations, so this review is only a paper-thin dig into them. We, as usual, recommend going to the source.

Here is a short summary of what he found.

Common Myths About Relationships

Like we've said, with the dizzying hurricane of misinformation and outright lies concerning the area of relationships, it's no wonder most marriages fail nowadays - especially if they go to bookstores looking for help. You're lucky to find a marriage counselor who hasn't been through three divorces themselves.

A few of the popular myths regarding marriage that Gottman disputes:

• That neurosis or personality problems ruin marriages (they don't)
• That common interests keep you together (they don't)
• Avoiding conflict ruins marriages (it doesn't)
• Affairs are the root cause of divorce (they're often a symptom, not a cause)
• Men are not biologically built for marriage (nice try)
• Men and women are from different planets (a knock at the competition)

The Core of the Message

"A lasting marriage results from a couple's ability to resolve the conflicts that are inevitable in any relationship."

OK, so while that might not exactly make your toes curl, hey - we're trying to be scientific here. You can learn a lot about a couple by watching how they interact, how they converse, and especially, how they fight.

How He Predicts Divorce

So, how can you learn how to predict which marriages will last, and which won't?

Watch them fight.

How individuals discuss disagreements, how they communicate overall, can tell you a lot.

In scanning for signs of a divorce looming in the future, Gottman checks for telltale signs:

• First Sign: The Harsh Startup
  (Is the tone immediately negative, accusatory, tense?)
• Second Sign: "The Four Horsemen"
  ("lethal negativities that can run rampant and ruin a relationship")
  Criticism (instead of complaint; Example: "What's wrong with you?")
  Contempt (sarcasm, disgust, etc)
  Defensiveness (exclusively blaming the other person, which escalates the conflict)
  Stonewalling (eventually, one partner just tunes out)
• Third Sign: Flooding
  (The reason why people stonewall is to protect themselves from being flooded or overwhelmed by an onslaught of turbulent negativity that causes one partner to disengage emotionally, a.k.a."stonewalling.")
• Fourth Sign: Body Language
  (In the heat of battle, hearts racing, pulses pounding - our bodies signal what's really going on)
• Fifth Sign: Failed Repair Attempts
  (Do attempts to break the tension and make peace succeed or fail?)
• Sixth Sign: Bad Memories
  (In happy marriages, couples tend to look back on early days and sigh happily. In less-than-happy marriages, well . . . any happy sighs have probably been replaced by grim frowns.)

Gottman's Cure

A brief, really brief sketch of the major solutions Gottman proposes to heal dissolving marriages and to preserve the strength of strong ones:

(Again, this is only a paper-thin overview; to really dig into this, our motto is, go to the source itself.)

• Principle 1: Enhance Your "Love Maps"
  Example: At one extreme, take a husband who doesn't know what color his wife's eyes are, has lost track of how many kids they have or what their names are . . . you get the picture.
  
  At the other extreme, take a husband who knows that his wife loves a gentle rub on the back of the neck, really loves a phone call for no reason at all, and loooooves spending a night during the week alone together, away from the world.
  
  The point is simple but important: the depth and detail of each partners' "map" of the others' likes and dislikes, values and goals, the less it's a guessing game what makes the other happy.
  
  
• Principle 2: Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration
  What do you like or love about the other person? Every relationship has positive qualities that brought the two individuals together; those qualities can either be kept alive (food, water, and sunshine where they grow lavishly) . . . or the can wither away from neglect. A good practice is to deliberately tend to and nurture them.
  
  
• Principle 3: Turn Toward Each Other Instead of Away
  "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" applies to relationships as well, not just journey of thousands of miles.
  In other words, a positive relationship, according to Gottman, is less a matter of huge, grand, sweeping gestures, but the small, everyday interactions that might seem like insignificant details. The details are all-important. Chitchat isn't just chitchat - it's a way of building and maintaining a connection of emotional engagement.
  
  
• Principle 4: Let Your Partner Influence You
  This is an often misunderstood way of saying that both partners should have a fundamental mutual respect.
  
  
• Principle 5: Solve Your Solvable Problems
  Some marital problems - who takes out the garbage, takes care of the kids - are solvable; others (issues about children, sex, religious faith) are more perpetual. Gottman states that you don't have to resolve your major marital conflicts for your marriage to thrive; but solving the ones that can be solved is important.
  Here he outlines well-known problem-solving strategies to help determine and overcome the problems that are solvable.
  
  
• Principle 6: Overcome Gridlock
  Gridlock: being stuck in seemingly insolvable problems with arguments you've had a hundred times. It's the Mexican Standoff of relationships, that wastes years of our lives.
  Gottman explains that the underlying reason behind gridlock is that each partner has core underlying dreams for their life which fuel the conflict, and those dreams aren't being addressed or respected by the other.
  Gottman outlines ways to uncover the underlying cause of the gridlock.
  
  
• Principle 7: Create Shared Meaning
  What often brings people together (well, aside from sex, money, loneliness, and convenience) is agreement about a deep way of life, sense of meaning and purpose. An important part of a marriage pact means getting the big picture straight ("What am I doing with my life, and why?") and respecting the meaning each other is living.

In Sum

Again, this sorry preview has barely stuck the edge of one toe into Gottman's work, so if this sounds warm at all . . . well, get the book.

Overall, Gottman's work seems to be paving the way for a future of marital experts who really know what they're doing.

That being said, it's now time to go to . . .

Critic's Corner

As is LiveReal's famous policy, we have not found any individual or philosophy that can be endorsed wholeheartedly and completely without reservation.

Here are some of our reservations.

What Gottman Does and Does Not Do

First of all, a clarification:
Gottman claims the ability to predict with 92% accuracy which couples will divorce and which will stay married. This does not mean that he is able to take 92% of couples and make sure they stay married. In other words, he is good a predicting what will happen with scientific certainty; yet he does not claim to have developed or discovered a 92% rate of marital success. An important distinction.

In Gottman's words: the "accuracy of prediction does not mean I understand the process involved in the maintenance or deterioration of a marriage."

Further, Gottman rarely mentions some of the unique societal trends today - which are perhaps the most important factors in dating, courtship, marriage, and divorce today.

The Limits of Science so far

In our opinion, Gottman is at the frontier of mainstream psychology. So, while being way ahead of the game, this also exposes the limits of mainstream psychology.

In other words, in order to be deemed "scientific," he must restrict himself to what is scientifically measurable. With the greatest-strength-being-the-greatest-weakness thing, he limits himself to what can be measured, and proven, is replicatable, falsifiable, and so forth.

One way we think about it is this: If the tools of scientists are, say, a slide rule and a microscope, and scientists are trying to look at - say, an ocean, or something that can't be measured by either of their tools . . . then well,sometimes they take what they're trying to measure, and throw it away, ignore it, or insist that it doesn't exist.

When taken to an extreme, then, in the eyes of "objective-measuring" science, such "subjective, immeasurable" things such as emotions, beliefs, thoughts, souls, are not real. But blood pressure, heart rate, galvanic skin responses are "real." This approach, which is so typical today, has a lopsided view of the universe built-in.

Further, when dealing with complex human interactions such as marriage, these "human interactions" are things that human beings engage in; so, a full and complete understanding of the interactions of human beings must be rooted in a full understanding of the nature of human beings themselves . . . essentially, "human nature." Without an underlying context of understanding human nature, we see only an isolated piece of the puzzle.

Practically, this translates into the fact that "marriage counseling" sometimes bleeds into areas where Gottman doesn't roam (and to be fair, it isn't his job to roam): for example, alcoholism, physical abuse, adultery, family tragedies, conflictory coping strategies, chronic unemployment, drug abuse, sexual or emotional abuse . . .

And there's also the practical application of this knowledge in real life - again, which takes us into realms outside of the marital therapists office. For example, some moments, you aren't exactly able to interrupt a fight with your spouse to take inventory of the Four Horsemen. Rather, you feel more like running for your life.

Alternative Routes

So, Gottman's work definitely has it's uses. But, if you want to go deeper into the real nuts and bolts of what makes marriages succeed or fail . . .

Since we have reached the outer limits of known scientific thought (how cool is that?) we now have three choices:

1. Stay within mainstream science (read no further);
2. Wait, for years or decades, while scientists keep working, until they find, study, understand, and explain marriages and then bring that knowledge into the mainstream, or,
3. Pursue "alternative" routes, that possibly are ahead of science but not yet anointed by the mainstream . . . to see what works.

The choice is yours.

. . . and if you want Option 3, well, we've been digging through that avalanche as well (and boy, it gets pretty hairy out there) . . . but we have some other interesting findings to offer . . .

The Limits of Marital Therapy

As we stated before, in digging into the root causes of divorce and unhappy marriage, a marital therapist wouldn't have to go too deep before he is out of his area of expertise.

For example, say, why do certain women, consistently and continually get involved with, say, unavailable men? Alcoholic? Guys who abuse her?

What about, say, when marriages fail because people have personal "issues," or psychological aspects of themselves that context of marriage helps to reveal?

Hypothesis: Marriage, or any serious committed relationship, in time, confronts an individual with his or her deepest fears, weaknesses, flaws, and shortcomings.

If this is true, then if the person (or the couple) is not prepared to deal with these issues, or lacks the "know-how" to do so, the situation will inevitably lead to problems.

Different Schools of Thought

This brings up another topic which neither Gottman nor many marital therapists rarely address:
why are certain people attracted to each other to start with? (Check out "Why Are We Attracted To the People We Are?")

Example: Pamela is a successful woman who, with a grin and a wiggle, reduces most men to drooling infants. An whole herd of guys would donate their cut out their lungs with spoons for the possibility of a date with her. Yet, out of the vast lot of men she has to choose from, she picks Tom, someone who beats her.

Why?

Different psychologists would offer various reasons, but again, well, this is an area Gottman and mainstream science does not venture into, at least in their current published literature. Yet, for example, other schools of thought would offer this theory:

"Each person in a serious relationship is attracted to the other because of an unconscious drive to get old, residual childhood needs met."

Whether this seems true or not, it's a really interesting theory (while, at the same time, being frustratingly difficult to either prove or disprove). And, it's a theory that part of psychology completely ignores and dismisses as unscientific psychobabble, and another assumes at the starting point, as essentially self-evident. Which is why LiveReal gets paid the big bucks (pardon, are you through chewing that gum? We haven't had dinner yet. . .)

To Go Deeper

LiveReal has discovered a few interesting characters who have some interesting things to say on the issue: Roy Masters, David Deida, and Barry Long.

Click here to visit the LiveReal Introductions to these individuals:

An Introduction to Roy Masters

An Introduction to David Deida

An Introduction to Barry Long

These three figures do address the situations of marriages directly, in addition to the larger contexts and situations that surround marriages, in striking, refreshing, controversial, and often, penetratingly insightful ways.

To tour a few of the hard-hitting thoughts from these guys, if you think you can handle it . . .

For example, if:

• One of the partners is an alcoholic or drug addict (See Masters).
• A wife disrespects her husband because, essentially, she wants a real man - and he's not one. (Masters, Deida, Long, all have positions on this one)
• In the relationship there is an unhealthy imbalance of power: As the relationship grows, one partner gets stronger and stronger, the other gets weaker and weaker. (Masters, also work by Patricia Evans)
• The man does not understand sex, or how to sexually love his wife properly (Long and Deida)
• The reason one partner does not respect the other is because they is needy, clinging, and, well, pathetic. (Masters, Long, Deida all cover this.)
• The husband has become emotionally dependent/addicted to his wife's approval and ego-support; she holds a great deal of power over him, and so, loses respect for him. (Masters)
• The relationship dissolves down into a love-hate downward spiral of a mutually degrading cycle (Masters)
• The husband is not able to handle his wife's criticism and testing (Masters, Deida)
• One or both parties is a selfish jerk

Take an example of a wife being critical and unhappy towards her husband . . . and Gottman's "Four Horsemen of Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling" ride in . . .

What causes a wife to be critical of her husband? This is an land where Gottman primarily avoids. Could it be, for example, that her husband just does not know how to love her properly? Say, if he is too weak (a wimp) or too violent (emotionally or physically violent, or distant), and so, she is unhappy with him?

What causes contempt? Again, Gottman avoids this area. What can a scientist say, for example, when a man is not able to reach her, when he is not able to love her properly, or when he is weak and needy?

What causes stonewalling and defensiveness? Say, a husband can't handle his wife's outbursts or arguments, and he "turns off" and stonewalls. How does this happen, and why? Can a man build the ability and capacity to handle emotion? Can a man improve his ability to handle emotional outbursts with clarity and compassion? If a husband loves a woman properly, will outbursts be prevented to begin with?

These are some of the areas these guys address, which may very well be areas where outside of the mainstream may very well be ahead of the mainstream.

So, if you're interested in the safe-and-mainstream areas of relationships, check out Gottman. And if you're interested in going beyond, keep going . . .

Talk about it.
info@livereal.com

The Official John Gottman Web Site: