Many people take time during the month of February to focus on their romantic relationships. We are more likely to write love notes, give flowers, and plan a special evening together. In that same spirit of emphasizing love, I would like to recommend a book with which you may already be familiar: The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman and Nan Silver. This book is very popular, is the number one book I would recommend if you are looking to improve your relationship, and provides the foundation for the approach I use in couples therapy.
As a marriage and family therapist, John Gottman is like a celebrity to me, so I tend to assume (almost always incorrectly) that people are as familiar with his work as I am. John Gottman is one of the most well-respected marriage experts in the country and his approach is based on decades of research. Gottman’s claim to fame is that he can predict with over 90% accuracy whether couples will stay together happily or divorce (or live together unhappily ever after) by observing whether the couples use what he calls “the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” in their conversations. These four behaviors he has identified (criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling) damage relationships.
The good news is that Gottman has also discovered antidotes to these destructive patterns of behavior, and these bad habits are totally fixable with education and effort. It would be impossible for me to share all the highlights of the book in one short blog post, but some of my favorite nuggets of information include how to make repair attempts after an argument, how to prevent emotional flooding, how to recognize and acknowledge bids for attention from your partner, and how to handle perpetually “gridlocked” problems.
My first encounter with the work of John Gottman was in a general education human development and family studies class during my first semester of college at Penn State. It had never yet crossed my eighteen-year-old mind that positive qualities in a marriage could be quantified, researched, and systematically improved. I was fascinated! I purchased one of Gottman’s earlier titles, Why Marriages Succeed or Fail: And How to Make Yours Last, read it cover to cover, and proceeded to give it to my parents for a Christmas gift that year. (Subtle, I know).
That was probably the only time during my undergraduate years that I did extra, unassigned reading purely out of captivation by the subject matter. At the time I didn’t recognize the foreshadowing of my future career. With hindsight, I can see that I have been enthusiastic about improving my own relationship and the relationships of others for a long time. If you have even a small interest in learning about what makes a marriage last, check this one out.