From the issue dated February 26, 1999
THE PROBLEMS OF PARTNERSHIPS
U. of Washington Professor Takes Lessons From the 'Marriage Lab'
By PETER MONAGHAN
Seattle
To find out how your marriage is faring, John M. Gottman will sit you and your spouse in a "marriage lab" on the University of Washington campus here, and hook both of you up, via electrodes, to a bank of sensors.
He'll set you to talking about your marriage, and he will observe.
Mr. Gottman, a professor of psychology, will listen to what you say and how you say it. He and his associates will watch your facial and bodily expressions. They'll measure your perspiration, respiration, heart rate, and blood flow.
As the two-day process continues, you and your spouse will, if you're typical, stop noticing that your every reaction is being analyzed from behind one-way mirrors and through three video cameras.
You'll almost certainly start to exhibit patterns that Mr. Gottman has -- in the course of analyzing the relationships of hundreds of couples -- seen many times before.
"With a couple of minutes of videotape," he says flatly, "we can predict with over 90-per-cent accuracy what's going to happen to a marriage." That's even before he talks to you, at length, about your marriage.
For 25 years, Mr. Gottman has studied the patterns and rhythms of marriage. His peers consider him one of the most productive and innovative marriage researchers. Reviewers rate his books, both scholarly and popular, as "must reads."
The marriage lab is one way he gets at how marriages work -- or don't work. With a view of boat traffic on a nearby canal, couples, who are paid as research subjects, live for two days in an apartment that is part of the lab and do what they might do at home: They eat, work, chat, ... squabble.
Mr. Gottman has concluded that most marriages and similar relationships fall into one of three categories: validating partnerships, which are dominated by affection and compromise; volatile partnerships, in which conflict is intense, but so is passion; and others, in which a pair of conflict-avoiders agree to disagree.
His research indicates that all of those arrangements can work -- and that all of them, in fact, require conflict, both as fuel and as a venting mechanism.
Yet, he cautions, all require far more acts of positive reinforcement than of negative interaction (a ratio of about five to one seems to fare best, his research suggests).
Despite high rates of divorce, Mr. Gottman is optimistic about fixing problems in partnerships. He puts it plainly: "You have to change the way the couple deals with conflict. You have to achieve less negativity. And you have to have more positive affect -- more interest and humor and affection."
He has described his findings in scholarly tomes as well as popular texts like Why Marriages Succeed or Fail: And How You Can Make Yours Last (Simon & Schuster). Two more are due next month: Marriage Clinic: A Scientifically Based Marital Therapy (W.W. Norton) is for professionals, and Seven Principles for Making Marriages Work (Crown) is for general readers.
Mr. Gottman has little doubt that couples can improve their relationship with some simple practices. Among them: In moments of conflict, breathe deeply, calm down, speak and listen non-defensively. Try a morning leave-taking, a chat to end the day, time together without the kids.
Marriage, he suggests, has its own Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: complaint/criticism; contempt; defensiveness/denial of responsibility; and stonewalling withdrawal. Those behaviors, in turn, usher in anger, fear, sadness, and cascading dissatisfaction.
Mr. Gottman is interested in all kinds of marriages -- those that work as well as those that don't. "We're looking at the masters of marriage, not just at the disasters," he says. His goal is to fashion the interactions of successful marriages into remedies for failing ones. For example, he has found that lasting couples aren't saints who never fight; instead, they excel at recognizing when there is a problem and trying to "fix it."
"What we do is formalize the process of repair," he says.
At his Seattle Marital and Family Institute, which is not affiliated with the university, therapists learn methods based on his research. He directs the institute with his wife, a fellow psychologist, Julie Schwartz Gottman.
Some of his findings are surprising. A study last year challenged common practices in marital therapy, suggesting that "active listening" ("What I hear you saying is ..."), a mainstay of counseling, doesn't work -- couples at loggerheads just can't manage it.
He has found that 86 per cent of couples who visit his marriage lab report that they are better able to handle their conflicts. "The big empirical question," he says, is whether such progress can stave off relapses.
Mr. Gottman often gets requests for news interviews and appearances on network television shows. In his field, he has a lot of competition for popular attention. Last November, Psychology Today ran an amusing comparison of Mr. Gottman and the current king of pop relationship advice, John Gray. The magazine rated Mr. Gottman vastly superior as a psychologist, but book sales were another story. Why Marriages Succeed or Fail had sold 55,000 copies -- not shabby -- but Mr. Gray's Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus had topped six million.
In academic terms, Mr. Gottman is thriving. He has a research team that grows, depending on finances, to 20 collaborators and as many as 50 student assistants. He has projects under way or completed on marriage -- including one on mathematical models of marital interactions -- and in such other areas as spousal abuse, child rearing, and same-sex relationships.
In lectures, readings, and interviews, Mr. Gottman does not pretend that his own marriage escapes the patterns he sees in so many others: "I violate all the rules."
Nor does he hide the fact that his marriage is not his first -- he jokes that his experience of romance has amounted to a kind of practicum. "I've been through the worst relationships you can imagine," he says, "and now I have got a wonderful one."
One gets the sense, talking with Mr. Gottman, that he finds all marriages "wonderful ones," in their own way.
"I have never seen a marriage, interviewed a couple, where I haven't come away with the feeling, 'Well, this is another way to be married.'"
Copyright © 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
