By Ryan Smith
When advising their clients on how to save a romantic relationship, lots of psychologists and psychotherapists still rely on random tidbits of conventional wisdom and generalities. But their advice is not science-based.
John M. Gottman, who is both a mathematician and a psychologist, has used data to back up his study. There are countless people out there who pretend to know how to make a romantic relationship work and how to save it. But Gottman’s recommendations have the advantage of being founded on hard, statistical data. According to Gottman, successful couples are not smarter, richer, or more psychologically aware than other people. But they have established a give and take between them that keeps their relationship strong.
Mythbusting Bad Advice
Since most psychologists and relationship counselors don’t actually give science-based advice, Gottman delights in busting a few myths:
1. Staying together is not about not having fights
While other researchers and writers who have grappled with the same topic have speculated that successful couples stay together because they do not fight, this assertion is not supported by data. Staying together is not about not having conflicts, but about handling conflicts properly. For example, most professional academic psychologists who work as marriage and relationship counselors encourage the couples that seek them out to listen like a psychologist. But while listening like a psychologist can be extremely constructive when it occurs between a psychologist and a client, this mode of listening is not what makes couples stay together.
Often, couples will seek out relationship counseling from professional psychologists where they will be instructed to handle their fights by repeating back to the loved one what he or she is saying even in the midst of a fight. They will also frequently be instructed not to attack the other in a fight, but merely assert their own needs clearly. But according to Gottman’s data, when couples try this in a fight, they usually end up becoming even more stressed out and antagonistic toward each other.
The notion that successful couples listen to each other like psychologists, instead of like romantic partners, even while in the midst of a fight, is the single biggest myth of all relationship counseling, says Gottman.
2. Staying together is not about agreeing on everything
For example, many couples seem to believe that they should be in agreement on “the big questions” like religion and politics. But according to Gottman’s data, the couples who do well together don’t necessarily agree on such overall questions at all. Instead, successful couples understand that something like 70% of all fights that recur in a relationship are really unresolvable. For example, she wants to have children, but he prefers to remain childless. He wants to have more sex than she does. She’s an incurable flirt who always has to see if she can get the attention of other men and he hates it. He wants their children to be brought up in the Lutheran faith, while she wants to raise them Catholic. Couples typically spend years fighting over such questions, each party trying to change the other. But with most couples, the things that keep recurring in their arguments year after year are exactly the things that will never change. While professional relationship counselors often advise their clients to seek compromises and ‘a new understanding’ in order to resolve these tensions, successful couples know that these things won’t change and they tend to accept each other as a package deal, knowing full well what significant downsides they thereby incur.
3. Happy relationships are not about “reaching a deeper understanding”
This is another version of the myth that in order to be successful, couples have to listen to each other with the stance of an academic psychologist. A successful relationship doesn’t need to examine every twist and turn of a conflict or emotion in minute detail in order to preserve its good health. Plenty of good couples have fights which, from a psychologist’s point of view, are never adequately resolved. But successful couples somehow get over it by slamming the door in each other’s faces and then being happy to see each other again a few hours later. How they do it is described below. But first, let’s look at some sure-fire ways to destroy a relationship.
What *not* to Do in a Relationship
1. Don’t start a fight with sarcasm or personal criticism of the other
During the course of a fight it is natural for the argument to escalate and for things to get heated. But what separates successful couples from couples who are doomed to failure is that successful couples only get personal or sarcastic somewhere down the line. Couples that stay together start out by using complaints in a fight, not personal criticism, and they only become sarcastic once they start feeling helpless or trapped in an argument that just won’t reside.
Even worse than sarcasm is belligerence, where one party seems to acknowledge the other party’s complaint, but not to care about it. “So you’re dissatisfied with what I did. What are you going to do about it?“ In our experience, this attitude is especially a pitfall for the four TJ types in handling conflicts, because the Te function naturally wants to push against outer objects to see what they’re made of. However, while this “Te approach” is often extremely effective in professional contexts, it is not always conducive to happiness in a romantic relationship.
2. Don’t stonewall the other party’s legitimate complaints
Stonewalling is basically ignoring the other party’s legitimate points of complaint. In any argument there is bound to be fair points in favor of both parties. Only in the rarest of circumstances will one party be 100% right while the other is 0% right. When stonewalling, one party is essentially ignoring the other party’s points of criticism in order to keep pushing his interpretation of the situation when he needs to be participating in a respectful give and take of complaints.
According to Gottman, when stonewalling occurs, it is almost always (85% of the time) the man who does it. However, to Gottman’s observation we would add that in our experience, people with a narcissistic or sadistic personality style of either gender will also be especially prone to use stonewalling as a technique in a fight.
3. Don’t react to sore questions with defensiveness
When you are being defensive, you are making it seem as if the other person is the source of the trouble for even raising the complaint. For example, the man may ask: “Honey, did you remember to drop off my books at the library today as we agreed?” The woman might deflect the question out of embarrassment that she hadn’t done so. Rather than owning her negligence, she may be inclined to try and get out of the situation by pinpointing marginal elements of his remark that she finds disagreeable, such as his (perceived) tone of voice, or him adding “as we agreed” to the end of his statement.
In such a situation, the woman is not only deflecting attention from the man’s legitimate question, she is making it seem as if the man is the problem for even bringing up the question. By allowing herself to express an indignant attitude towards her partner for stressing her out, even though the question was in fact entirely legitimate, the woman is essentially communicating that it is not the legitimacy of what is said that governs their relation, but whether or not she likes it. This is an extremely detrimental stance when it comes to nurturing a respect for the other in a romantic relationship.
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As you can see, the common theme between sarcasm, stonewalling, and being defensive, is that one partner stops taking a faithful and respectful notice of the other and starts indulging entirely in her own needs as a way of coping with conflict. According to Gottman, these are all sure-fire ways of destroying a romantic relationship because they are exactly the inverse of the things that make a romantic relationship work. So what does make a romantic relationship work?
What Makes a Romantic Relationship Work?
According to Gottman, you can essentially distil the working of a successful relationship into three basic points:
1. Respect, friendship, and enjoyment of the other’s company
Because most of us are not especially rational in choosing a partner, many couples end up in a constellation where they find it hard to respect the other or to enjoy the company of the other person. Mismatches in intelligence and ambition are two such parameters, which will often lead to conflict down the road.
But respect and enjoyment of the other’s company are exactly the elements that lead to friendship between the couple, and according to Gottman, it is the quality of the friendship between the couple that determines its long-term success. You read that right. The biggest predictor for a romantic relationship is not erotic attraction or the intensity of the feeling of love for the other. It is how the two of you will do as friends in a relationship.
Erotic attraction or good looks are primarily primitive biological factors that say next to nothing about whether two people will do well as a couple. You may think Scarlett Johansson looks good up on that billboard, but that says nothing about how the two of you would do in a relationship.
Conversely, because successful couples are such good friends, it is hard for them to become truly adversarial with each other. Because of their deep-rooted friendship and respect for one another, they are able to avoid sarcasm, criticism, stonewalling, and defensiveness in their arguments – exactly the things that undermine a relationship.
2. Shared meanings, ambitions, and dreams
In a successful relationship, each person supports the other person’s hopes and dreams. Note that both parts of the couple don’t need to have the same wishes and dreams for the relationship to prosper, but they do need to share in and sympathize with the other party’s basic enthusiasm for his hopes and dreams. Say, for example, that one part of the couple has been dreaming of a promotion for years. If all that she is met with each time she voices excitement at the thought of possibly getting the promotion one day is a blank face and passionless murmurs from the other party, she is likely to feel despondent – not just about her relationship, but about life itself.
When such a situation has played itself out a number of times, and her partner has repeatedly failed to take an interest in her dreams, can we really blame her for seeking consolation and understanding elsewhere? We would certainly need to ask ourselves what kind of commitment her partner is putting into the relationship if he can’t even get excited at the prospect of his significant other achieving her dream. Just like with sarcasm, stonewalling, and being defensive, failing to take an interest in the other party’s hopes and dreams is a type of behavior that signals to the other that he or she is fundamentally not worthy of respect and attention. And such an attitude is poisonous to a romantic relationship.
According to Gottman, successful couples tend to have familiarity with, and a shared interest in, the other party’s interests. There is nothing to suggest that the members of the couple need to be experts in the other party’s field of expertise. But taking a basic interest in the other party’s wishes and interests and making your presence felt as a familiar beacon of encouragement and support is a crucial component in maintaining the success of your romantic relationship.
3. Sharing the power and influence in the relationship
Throughout most of history, couples have had to align themselves with a cultural order where the man called all the shots in the relationship and where the woman was his subordinate. Though women are not formally subjected to their husbands anymore, the vestiges of this thousand-year history still persist and many men are bound to feel that in order to be “real men” they must abstain from letting themselves be influenced by the woman.
For example, even in this day and age there are men who feel reluctant to acknowledge it when his partner voices a superior point of view in a discussion or if she offers a particularly insightful analysis of a problem. According to Gottman, there are men who feel that they must deny the woman’s contribution as she is setting it forth. If they want to accept it, they feel, then they must paraphrase and amend it before they can accept it as their own. But according to Gottman, men should not be so afraid of giving credit where credit is due, because doing so only serves to show that the man is confident in his own ability to reason and evaluate new perspectives.
In other words, the man should not be afraid of letting the woman call some of the shots and letting himself be influenced by her when she has a valuable contribution to make. However, he should be mindful of her calling all of the shots in the relationship, as that would merely be the reverse of the historical situation, which would again mean not sharing the power and influence in the relationship as Gottman recommends doing.
Remember, Gottman is not saying that couples should share the power in a relationship because he is pandering to political correctness. His recommendation comes from analyzing thousands of couples in order to isolate what makes them successful.
What Helps a Romantic Relationship Get By?
Finally, the above points may be a tall order for some and may not be attainable for all couples. So here are three basic things that anyone can do to strengthen the health of their romantic relationship.
1. “Repair timeouts”
Couples that get into heated fights may benefit from taking “repair timeouts,” that is, stopping the fight in its tracks in order to calm down and avoid sarcasm, defensiveness, and belligerence. However, be careful not to confuse genuine timeouts with stonewalling or defensiveness, as described above. It is no use attacking or accusing the other party, for example, and then asking for a timeout once the tide starts turning and it becomes increasingly evident that you were probably wrong to attack your partner.
Likewise, when asking for timeouts, you must be sure to own your need for them totally. Pleading for a timeout just after signalling to your partner that you think he is a total jerk, or because you think “it would be a good idea for both of you,” is not likely to be met with a favorable response. It isn’t psychologically genuine.
2. Jokes
Couples who do well together tend to joke a lot and they use self-deprecating expressions even while in the midst of a fight. Making a joke in a pointed situation can serve to puncture the tension between you and your partner and to recall and reinforce modes of communication between the two of you that you both enjoy. Making jokes also serves to call attention to the fact that your romantic relationship is bigger than the fight that you are having here and now.
Conversely, people who consistently fail to respond positively to a joke in a heated situation signal that their distress is too important for anything else to receive attention until they are brought back to normal. Like sarcasm, stonewalling, defensiveness, and not sharing in the other party’s hopes and dreams, failure to appreciate the other person’s efforts to lighten the mood with a joke signals to the other that this relationship isn’t about us, but about me and my needs.
Of course, when using a joke in a heated situation, it is very important to be neutral or self-deprecating in your humor. It’s no use deprecating the other with humor in the midst of a fight. The reader’s own judgment is required here.
3. Daily attention
Finally, if you ask people what makes their relationship special, most people will talk about the big things like romantic dinners, holidays and special occasions in their life as the things that really make a relationship. But in fact, what really matters in maintaining a good relationship is not the “big things” like holidays and date nights but the wealth of little things that go on through daily interaction.
Attention to the daily humdrum of conversation that leaves the other party feeling valued and understood is far more conducive to a romantic relationship than a string of fancy dinners and holidays. In the same way, finding a balance in your mundane being together that makes both of you feel valued and understood (e.g. you make my tea just as I like it; I buy your favorite pastries fresh from that baker you love on my way home from work) typically does more to make both of you value your relationship than a weekend in Paris at a fancy hotel.
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How to Make Your Relationship Last © 2014 Ryan Smith and CelebrityTypes International.
With research by John M. Gottman and Tom Butler Bowdon.