1
It’s a surprisingly cloudless Seattle morning as newlyweds Mark and Janice sit down to breakfast. Outside the apartment’s picture window, the waters of Montlake cut a deep-blue swath, while runners jog and geese waddle along the lakeside park. Mark and Janice are enjoying the view as they munch on their French toast and share the Sunday paper. Later Mark will probably switch on the football game while Janice chats over the phone with her mom in St. Louis.
All seems ordinary enough inside this studio apartment—until you notice the three video cameras bolted to the wall, the microphones clipped talk-show style to Mark and Janice’s collars, and the Holter monitors strapped around their chests. Mark and Janice’s lovely studio with a view is really not their apartment at all. It’s a laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle, where for sixteen years I spearheaded the most extensive and innovative research ever into marriage and divorce.
As part of one of these studies, Mark and Janice (as well as forty-nine other randomly selected couples) volunteered to stay overnight in a fabricated apartment, affectionately known as the Love Lab. Their instructions were to act as naturally as possible,
despite my team of scientists observing them from behind the one-way kitchen mirror, the cameras recording their every word and facial expression, and the sensors tracking bodily signs of stress or relaxation, such as how quickly their hearts pounded. (To preserve basic privacy, the couples were monitored only from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. and never while in the bathroom.) The apartment came equipped with a foldout sofa, working kitchen, phone, TV, and music player. Couples were told to bring their groceries, books, laptops, needlepoint, hand weights, even their pets—whatever they would need to experience a typical weekend.
Our goal was nothing more ambitious than to uncover the truth about marriage—to finally answer the questions that have puzzled people for so long: Why is marriage so tough at times? Why do some lifelong relationships click, while others just tick away like a time bomb? And how can you prevent a marriage from going bad—or rescue one that is already in trouble?
Thanks to decades of research, these questions can finally be answered. In fact, I can predict with great precision whether a couple will stay happily together or lose their way after listening to them interact for as little as fifteen minutes! Over seven separate studies, my accuracy rate in making such predictions has averaged 91 percent. In other words, in 91 percent of the cases where I predicted that a couple’s marriage would eventually either fail or succeed, time proved me right. I don’t think my success in foretelling divorce earns me any bragging rights because it isn’t due to some superhuman perception or intuition. Instead, it rests solely on the science: the decades of data my colleagues and I accumulated.
At first you might be tempted to shrug off our research results as just another in a long line of newfangled theories. Skepticism is certainly called for when someone tells you they’ve figured out what really makes marriages last and can show you how to rescue or divorce-proof your own. Plenty of people consider themselves
to be experts on marriage—and are more than happy to give you their opinion of how to form a more perfect union. But that’s the key word—
opinion. 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.
Predicting divorce makes for great headlines, but sometimes the statistics can be confusing. I’ve heard people dismiss the scientific approach to assessing marriage by pointing out that, with the divorce rate at about 50 percent, even random guessing would lead to a pretty good prediction rate. But that interpretation is based on a misunderstanding of what we are analyzing. 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.
Over the years, other laboratories using methods we pioneered have also tallied impressive successes at prediction, thus confirming that our long-term findings were stable scientific results, not anomalies. For example, the labs headed by
Rand Conger at Iowa State University and Tom Bradbury at the University of California, Los Angeles have both made highly accurate predictions of a marriage’s fate by analyzing a couple’s physiological responses while they discussed a single conflict. In another landmark study of newlyweds, psychologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, her husband
Ron Glaser, and their colleagues at The Ohio State University were able to measure the levels of the stress-related hormone adrenaline in
the blood of newlywed couples while they argued. Ten years later the researchers determined that, compared with the couples who remained happily married, those who ended up unhappy or divorced had secreted 34 percent higher levels of adrenaline while arguing as newlyweds. These researchers also found that another stress hormone, ACTH, was twice as high in the newlywed wives who ended up in troubled marriages or divorced ten years later compared with the happily married women. In other words, these researchers were able to predict the fate of newlywed couples
ten years later just by measuring hormone levels in their blood during their first year of marriage!
Although the ability to predict divorce through laboratory research has made for great advances in the study of long-term relationships, I don’t think it is this project’s most significant contribution. Instead, I think my most rewarding discovery has been the
Seven Principles, which aren’t just about predicting divorce but also about
preventing it. Unlike so many other approaches to helping couples, ours is based on knowing what makes marriages succeed rather than on what makes them fail. We no longer have to guess about why some couples stay so happily married. Thanks to years of scientific data and analysis, we really can identify what makes happily married couples different from everybody else.
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. Rather than creating a climate of disagreement and resistance, they embrace each other’s needs. When addressing a partner’s request, their motto tends to be a helpful “Yes, and …” rather than “Yes, but …” 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.
I can predict whether a couple will divorce after watching and listening to them for just fifteen minutes.
Emotional intelligence has become widely recognized as an important predictor of a child’s success later in life. The more in touch with feelings and the better able a child is to understand and get along with others, the sunnier that child’s future, whatever his or her academic IQ. The same is true for spouses. 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. Just as parents can teach their children emotional intelligence, this is also a skill that couples can learn. As simple as it sounds, developing this ability can keep husband and wife on the positive side of the divorce odds.
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. Some people may think that getting divorced or languishing in an unhappy marriage is no big deal—they may even consider it a simple fact of modern life. But there’s now plenty of evidence documenting just how harmful both divorce and an unhappy relationship can be for all involved.
Thanks to the work of researchers
Lois Verbrugge and James
House, both of the University of Michigan, we now know that an unhappy marriage can increase your chances of getting sick by roughly 35 percent and even shorten your life by an average of four to eight years. The flip side: 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.
Part of the answer may simply be that in an unhappy marriage people experience chronic, diffuse physiological arousal—in other words, they feel physically stressed and usually emotionally overwrought as well. This puts added wear and tear on the body and mind, which can present itself in any number of physical ailments, including high
blood pressure and
heart disease, and in a host of psychological troubles, including anxiety,
depression,
substance abuse,
psychosis, violence, and
suicide.
Not surprisingly, happily married couples have a far lower rate of such maladies. They also tend to be more health-conscious than others. Researchers theorize that spouses keep after each other to have regular checkups, take medicine, eat nutritiously, and so on.
People who stay married live four to eight years longer than people who don’t.
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 we assessed the immune-system responses of the fifty couples who stayed overnight in the
Love Lab, we found a striking
difference between those who were very satisfied with their marriages and those whose emotional response to each other was neutral or who were unhappy. Specifically, we used blood samples from each subject to test the response of certain of their
white blood cells—the immune system’s major defense weapons. In general, happily married men and women showed a greater proliferation of these white blood cells when exposed to foreign invaders than did the other subjects.
Researchers Janice Kiecolt-Glaser and
Ron Glaser tested the effectiveness of other immune-system warriors: the natural
killer cells, which, true to their name, destroy body cells that have been damaged or altered (such as infected or cancerous ones) and are also known to limit the growth of tumor cells. Again, subjects who were satisfied with their marriage had more effective
natural killer cells than did the others.
It will take more study before scientists can confirm that this boost in the immune system is one of the mechanisms by which a good marriage benefits your health and longevity. But what’s most important is that we know for certain that a good marriage does offer these advantages. I often think that if fitness buffs spent just 10 percent of their weekly workout time—say, twenty minutes a day—working on their marriage instead of their bodies, they would get three times the health benefits they derive from exercise class or the treadmill.
When a marriage goes sour, husband and wife are not the only ones to suffer—the children do, too. In a study I conducted of sixty-three preschoolers, those being raised in homes where there was great marital
hostility had chronically elevated levels of stress hormones compared with the other children studied. We don’t know what the long-term repercussions of this stress will be for their health. But we do know that this biological indication of extreme stress was echoed in their behavior. We followed them through age fifteen and found that, compared with other children their age, these kids suffered far more from truancy,
depression,
peer rejection, behavioral problems (especially aggression), low achievement at school, and even school failure.
One important message of these findings is that it is not wise
to stay in a bad marriage for the sake of your children. It is clearly harmful to raise kids in a home that is consumed by
hostility. A
peaceful divorce is preferable to endless marital warfare. Unfortunately, many divorces are not peaceful. Too often there is mutual enmity between the parents that continues after the breakup. For that reason, children of divorce often fare just as poorly as those caught in the crossfire of a miserable marriage.
When it comes to saving a marriage, the stakes are high for everybody in the family. And yet despite the documented importance of marital satisfaction, the amount of scientifically sound research into keeping marriages stable and happy is shockingly small. When I first began researching marriage more than forty years ago, you could probably have held all of the good
scientific data on marriage in one hand. By “good” I mean findings that were collected using scientific methods as rigorous as those used by medical science. For example, many studies of marital happiness were conducted solely by having husbands and wives fill out questionnaires. This approach is called the self-report method, and although it has its uses, it is also quite limited. How do you know a wife is happy just because she checks the “happy” box on some form? Women in physically abusive relationships, for example, score very high on questionnaires about marital satisfaction. Only if the woman being abused feels safe and is interviewed alone does she reveal the truth.
To address this paucity of quality research, my colleagues and I supplemented traditional approaches to studying marriage with more extensive and innovative methods. We tracked the fates of seven hundred couples in seven different studies. We didn’t just look at newlyweds but also at long-term couples who were first assessed while in their forties or sixties. In addition, we analyzed couples who had just had their first baby and couples parenting preschoolers and teenagers. We have examined the relationships of couples from diverse socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic groups and sexual orientations.
Most of my long-term studies have entailed extensive interviews in which the spouses detailed for me the history of their marriage, their philosophy about relationships, and how they viewed the marriages of others, including their parents. I videotaped them talking to each other about how their day went, discussing areas of continuing disagreement in their marriage, and also conversing about joyful topics. And to get a physiological read of how stressed or relaxed they were feeling, I measured their heart rate, blood velocity, sweat output, respiration, and endocrine and immune function throughout these taped interactions. In all of these studies, I played back the tapes to the couples and asked them for an insiders’ perspective of what they were thinking and feeling when, say, their heart rate or blood pressure suddenly surged during a marital discussion. Then I kept track of the couples, checking in with them at least once a year till the study’s end to see how their relationship was faring.
Couples who attend my workshop have a relapse rate that’s about half that from standard marital therapy.
My colleagues and I were the first researchers to conduct such an exhaustive observation and analysis of married couples. Our data offered the first real glimpse of the inner workings—the
anatomy—of marriage. These results, not my own opinions, form the basis of my
Seven Principles for making marriage work. These principles, in turn, are the cornerstones of the remarkably effective short-term therapy for couples that I developed along with my wife, clinical psychologist Dr.
Julie Gottman.
Thousands of couples have now attended our programs. Almost all of them came to us because their marriage was in deep distress—some were on the verge of divorce. Many were skeptical that a simple workshop based on the Seven Principles could turn their relationship around. Fortunately, their skepticism was unfounded. Our findings indicate that these workshops have made a profound and powerful difference in these couples’ lives.
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. So we put our workshops to the test by doing an extensive twelve-month follow-up of 640 couples. I’m happy to report a success rate of about 75 percent. I’m even happier to report a very low relapse rate of 20 percent. (The nationwide relapse rate for standard behavioral marital therapy is 30 to 50 percent.) More specifically, we found that at the beginning of our workshops, 27 percent of the couples were at very high risk for divorce, but at our twelve-month follow-up, after nine sessions, that proportion had dropped to 7 percent. The rate plummeted to 4 percent for struggling couples who also underwent nine additional sessions of our couples’ therapy. 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.
In recent years other laboratories have obtained similar findings to ours and have also developed techniques both for improving couples’ therapy and preventing relationship problems. But despite the gradual increase in useful and hopeful approaches, the majority of marriage therapists are still offering treatment that does not get to the heart of what makes a long-term relationship last. In order to achieve the next level of understanding about how to keep our relationships thriving, we need to throw out some long-hallowed beliefs about marriage and divorce.
If you’ve had or are having trouble in your relationship, you’ve probably gotten lots of advice. Sometimes it seems like everybody who has ever been married or knows anyone who has ever been married thinks he or she holds the secret to guaranteeing endless
love. But most of these notions, whether intoned by a psychologist on TV or by a wise manicurist at the local mall, are wrong. Many such ideas, even those initially espoused by talented theorists, have been long discredited—or deserve to be. But they have become so firmly entrenched in the popular culture that you’d never know it.
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. Whatever a marriage therapist’s theoretical orientation, whether you opt for short-term therapy or long-term therapy, or regularly read relationship advice blogs, the message you’ll get is pretty uniform: learn to communicate better. The sweeping popularity of this approach is easy to understand. When most couples find themselves in a conflict (whether it gets played out as a short spat, an all-out screaming match, or stony silence), they each gird themselves to win the fight. They become so focused on how hurt they feel, on proving that they’re right and their spouse is wrong, or on keeping up a cold shoulder, that the lines of communication may be overcome by static or shut down altogether. So it seems to make sense that calmly and lovingly listening to each other’s perspective would lead couples to find solutions and regain their marital composure. 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 most common method recommended for resolving conflict—used in one guise or another by most marital therapists—is called
active listening. For example, a therapist might urge you to try some form of the listener-speaker exchange. Let’s say Rick is upset that Judy works late most nights. The therapist asks Rick to state his complaints as
“I” statements that focus on what he’s feeling rather than hurling accusations at Judy. Rick will say, “I feel lonely and overwhelmed when I’m home alone with the
kids at night while you’re working late,” rather than, “It’s so selfish of you to always work late and expect me to take care of the kids by myself.”
Next, Judy is asked to paraphrase both the content and the feelings of Rick’s message, and to check with him if she’s got it right. (This shows she is actively listening to him.) She is also asked to validate his feelings—to let him know she considers them legitimate, that she respects and empathizes with him even if she doesn’t share his perspective. She might say, “It must be hard for you to watch the kids by yourself when I’m working late.” Judy is being asked to suspend judgment, not argue for her point of view, and to respond nondefensively. “I hear you” is a common active-listening buzzword. “I feel your pain” may be the most memorable.
By forcing couples to see their differences from each other’s perspective,
problem solving is supposed to take place without
anger. This approach is often recommended whatever the specific issue—whether your conflict concerns the size of your grocery bill or major differences in your life goals. Conflict resolution is touted not only as a cure-all for troubled marriages but as a tonic that can prevent good marriages from faltering.
Where did this approach come from? The pioneers of marital therapy adapted it from techniques used by the renowned psychotherapist
Carl Rogers for
individual psychotherapy.
Rogerian psychotherapy had its heyday in the 1960s and is still practiced in varying degrees today. His approach entails responding in a nonjudgmental and accepting manner to all feelings and thoughts the patient expresses. For example, if the patient says, “I just hate my wife, she’s such a nagging bitch,” the therapist nods and says something like, “I hear you saying your wife nags you and you hate that.” The goal is to create an empathetic environment so the patient feels safe exploring inner thoughts and emotions and confiding in the therapist.
Since marriage is also, ideally, a relationship in which people feel safe being themselves, it makes sense to train couples in this sort of unconditional understanding. Conflict resolution is certainly easier if each party expresses
empathy for the other’s perspective.
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.
When we began our research, the wide range of marital therapies based on conflict resolution shared a very high level of relapse. In fact, the best of this type of marital therapy, conducted by
Neil Jacobson, had only a 35 to 50 percent success rate. In other words, his own studies showed that only 35 to 50 percent of couples saw a meaningful improvement in their marriages as a result of the therapy. A year later, less than half of that group—or just 18 to 25 percent of all couples who entered therapy—retained these benefits. A while ago,
Consumer Reports surveyed a large sample of its members on their experience with all kinds of psychotherapists. Most therapists got very high customer-satisfaction marks—except for the marital ones, who received very poor ratings. Though this survey did not qualify as rigorous scientific research, it confirmed what most professionals in the field already knew: in the long run, marital therapy did not benefit the majority of couples.
When you really think about it, it’s not difficult to see why counseling that relies solely on active listening to rescue relationships so often fails. Judy might do her best to listen thoughtfully to Rick’s complaints. But she is not a therapist listening to a patient whine about a third party. The person her husband is trashing behind all of those
“I” statements is her! There are some people who can be magnanimous in the face of such criticism—the Dalai Lama comes to mind. But it’s unlikely that you or your spouse is married to one of them. (Even in Rogerian therapy, when the client starts complaining about the therapist, the therapist switches from empathy to other therapeutic approaches.) Active listening asks couples to perform Olympic-level emotional gymnastics even if their relationship can barely walk.
I’m not suggesting that validation, active listening, and “I statements” are useless. They can be enormously helpful when
attempting to resolve conflicts. In fact, I often recommend them to couples in a modified format with specific guidelines, as you’ll see later in the book. But here’s the catch: even if they do make your fights “better” or less frequent, these strategies are not enough to save your marriage. You need all Seven Principles.
Even happily married couples can have screaming matches—loud arguments don’t necessarily harm a marriage.
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.
Consider one couple we studied, Belle and Charlie. After more than forty-five years of marriage, Belle informed Charlie that she wished they had never had children. This clearly rankled him. What followed was a conversation that broke all the active-listening rules. This discussion doesn’t include a lot of validation or empathy—they both jump right in, arguing their point.
CHARLIE: You think you would have been better off if I had backed you in not having children?
BELLE: Having children was such an insult to me, Charlie.
CHARLIE: No. Hold on a minute.
BELLE: To reduce me to such a level!
CHARLIE: I’m not redu—
BELLE: I wanted so much to share a life with you. Instead, I ended up a drudge.
C
HARLIE: Now wait a minute, hold on. I don’t think not having children is that simple. I think that there’s a lot biologically that you’re ignoring.
BELLE: Look at all the wonderful marriages that have been childless.
CHARLIE: Who?
BELLE: The Duke and Duchess of Windsor!
CHARLIE (deep sigh): Please!
BELLE: He was the king! He married a valuable woman. They had a very happy marriage.
CHARLIE: I don’t think that’s a fair example. First of all, she was forty. That makes a difference.
BELLE: She never had children. And he fell in love with her not because she was going to reproduce.
CHARLIE: But the fact is, Belle, that there is a real strong biological urge to have children.
BELLE: That’s an insult to think that I’m regulated by biology.
CHARLIE: I can’t help it!
BELLE: Well, anyway, I think we would have had a ball without children.
CHARLIE: Well, I think we had a ball with the kids, too.
BELLE: I didn’t have that much of a ball.
Charlie and Belle may not sound like the Couple of the Year, but they have been happily married for over four decades. They both say they are extremely satisfied with their marriage and devoted to each other.
No doubt they have been having similar in-your-face discussions for years. But they don’t end angrily. In this conversation they go on to discuss why Belle feels this way about motherhood. Her major regret is that she wasn’t more available to spend time with Charlie. She wishes she hadn’t always been so cranky and tired. There’s a lot of affection and laughter as they hash this out. The bottom line of what Belle is saying is that she loves Charlie so much, she wishes she had had more time with him. Clearly, there’s something very positive going on between them that overrides
their argumentative style. Whatever that “something” is, marriage counseling that only focuses on “good” fighting doesn’t begin to help other couples tap into it.
The notion that you can save your relationship just by learning to communicate more sensitively is probably the most widely held misconception about happy marriages—but it’s hardly the only one. Over the years, I’ve found many other myths that are not only false but potentially destructive. They are dangerous because they can lead couples down the wrong path or, worse, convince them that their marriage is a hopeless case. Among these common myths:
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. For example, Sam has a problem dealing with authority—he hates having a boss. If he were married to a controlling partner, the result would be disastrous. But instead he is happily married to Megan, who treats him like an equal and doesn’t try to dominate him.
Contrast them with another couple who do run into marital problems. Jill has a deep-seated fear of abandonment. Her husband, Wayne, flirts shamelessly at parties despite being fully devoted to her. When she complains, he insists she lighten up and let him enjoy this harmless pleasure. But the threat Jill perceives from his flirtations—and his unwillingness to stop—drives them to separate and eventually divorce. 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.
Of course, a severe mental illness is another matter. 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.
That all depends on how you interact while pursuing those interests. If a husband and wife who love kayaking are able to glide smoothly down the water together, their mutual hobby enriches and deepens their fondness and interest in each other. But if their travels are punctuated with “That’s not the way to do a J-stroke, you idiot!” then pursuing this common interest is hardly benefiting their marriage.
Some researchers believe that what distinguishes good marriages from failing ones is that in good marriages spouses respond in kind to each other’s positive overtures. When one helps out with a chore, the other intentionally reciprocates, and so on. In essence, the couple function with an unwritten agreement to offer recompense for each kind word or deed. In bad marriages, this contract has broken down so that
anger and resentment fill the air. By making the floundering couple aware of the need for some such “contract,” the theory goes, their interactions could be repaired.
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.
Plenty of lifelong relationships happily survive even though they sidestep confrontation. Never in forty years of marriage have Allan and Betty sat down to have a “dialogue” about their relationship. Neither could tell you what a “validating” statement is. When Allan gets annoyed at Betty, he turns on ESPN. When Betty is upset with him, she heads for the mall. Then they go on as if nothing happened. Yet they declare that they are very satisfied with their marriage and love each other deeply, hold the same values, love to fish and travel together, and wish for their children as happy a married life as they have shared.
Couples simply have
different styles of conflict. Some avoid fights at all costs, some argue a lot, and some are able to talk out their differences and find a
compromise without ever raising their voices. No one style is necessarily better than another—as long as the style works for both people.
In most cases, it’s the other way around. Problems in the marriage that send the couple on a trajectory to divorce also send one (or both) of them looking for intimate connection outside the marriage. Trysts are usually not about sex but about seeking friendship, support, understanding, respect, attention, caring, and concern. In one of the most reliable surveys ever done on divorce, by
Lynn Gigy and
Joan Kelly from the
Divorce Mediation Project in Corte Madera, California, 80 percent of divorced men and women said their marriage broke up because they gradually grew apart and lost a sense of closeness, or because they did not feel loved and appreciated. Only 20 to 27 percent of couples said an extramarital affair was even partially to blame.
A corollary to the notion that affairs cause divorce, this theory holds that men are philanderers by nature and are therefore ill suited for monogamy. But whatever natural laws other species follow, among humans the frequency of
extramarital affairs does not depend on gender so much as on opportunity. Now that many women work outside the home, their rate of extramarital affairs has skyrocketed. According to research by British sociologist
Annette Lawson, formerly
of the University of California, Berkeley, since women have entered the workplace in massive numbers, the number of extramarital affairs of young women now slightly exceeds those of men.
According to a rash of bestselling books, men and women can’t get along because males are “from Mars” and females “from Venus.” However,
happily married heterosexual couples are also “aliens” to each other.
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 could go on and on. The point is not just that there are plenty of myths out there about marriage but that the false information they offer can be disheartening to couples who are desperately trying to make their marriage work. If these myths imply one thing, it’s that marriage is an extremely complex, imposing institution that most of us just aren’t good enough for. 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.