John Gottman

I thought this book's central idea was/is life-changing, but the delivery was so-so.

Basically, the idea is that we're continuously making 'bids for connection' with others. This could be questions, words, actions, literally anything where we're, in part, saying "connect with me".

When we get such a bid, we can accept it, reject it, or ignore it. Accepting makes the relationship stronger and happier. Rejecting makes the relationship worse, but still leaves it emotionally engaged. Ignoring show more makes the relationship worse and less emotionally engaged.

Sometimes we get a bid for connection that's attached to something irrelevant (eg "Do you like the cookies I made?" yes-> you accept me, no -> you reject me). In that scenario, we can say "I accept you but reject the thing" (eg "I don't want the cookies, but you're great")

Understanding that people are basically doing this all the time and learning how to navigate it has changed the way I interact with people... but, again, the book itself is just kinda so-so, hence the low-ish rating.

Oh, and most importantly, this isn't just some author's pet theory. Everything in here is backed by inordinate amounts of science and even math and game theory. I've gone through some more of Gottman's books and the foundations are incredibly thorough. show less

The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work felt surprisingly refreshing to read, mostly because John Gottman doesn’t sugarcoat what makes relationships thrive. Instead of offering vague advice or sweeping declarations about love, he actually explains the small, almost invisible things couples do every day that either strengthen or erode their connection. What stuck with me most was how he emphasizes friendship as the backbone of a lasting relationship. It made me rethink the way I show show more appreciation and how often I overlook the simple gestures that really matter.

While I found the research and real-life observations fascinating, the book can sometimes feel a bit structured, almost like attending a workshop through the pages. Some of the exercises felt practical, but others felt a little too formal for me. Still, I appreciated how Gottman breaks big emotional issues into understandable, manageable pieces. It left me feeling less overwhelmed by the idea of “relationship work” and more encouraged that small changes can make a real difference.

By the time I finished, I felt like I’d gained a more grounded and hopeful outlook on what it means to build a healthy partnership. It’s not about being perfect; it’s about staying curious, respectful, and committed to understanding each other. I’d absolutely recommend this book to anyone who wants a down to earth, research backed guide to building a stronger, more connected relationship. show less

John Gottman is the leading relationship empiricist in the US. He, his wife, and his academic lab have spent decades researching marriage, and using their findings to bolster and examine particular empirical practices while weakening others. Most notably, he can predict with 90% accuracy which newlyweds will divorce within 6 years. The Science of Trust is not a self-help pop psychology book on improving your relationship (he has many others in that vein) so much as a layman's technical show more overview of those forty years of research.

It strikes me that most of this book is applicable to friendships, workplace relationships, politics, and other environments as well as for couples, though of course Gottman wouldn't want to make claims in those other fields. Some of the core insights he covers:
- Bids & reservoirs of trust. Partners come to each other with bids for attention all the time; healthy relationships "turn toward" these bids, rather than ignoring or actively dismissing them; without the bank of trust that turning toward bids for attention builds, the core belief that your partner is a fundamentally good person erodes and small issues become big problems
- Fundamental attribution error. In distressed relationships, people attribute troubling behaviors to their partner's negative traits and rehearse negativity (and miss 50% of the neutral and positive interactions that an observer sees); in happy relationships, people attribute troubling behaviors to their partner's situation and find opportunities to actively reflect on what they love about the partner
- Having conflict successfully. In conflict conversations, the tone set in the first few minutes matters immensely; it's very good for the relationship to maintain a positivity-negativity ratio of at least 5:1, and very bad to escalate the conflict through criticism, defensiveness, contempt or stonewalling; it's a very bad sign if these conversations become zero-sum; repairs that attend to the partner's needs are necessary throughout this conversation, and affective repairs (like empathy, self-disclosure, taking responsibility) work much better than cognitive repairs (like compromise, keeping conversation on track, questions); giving a positive prescription for action when addressing a sore point helps keep everyone on track
- Stress hormones. Once one person becomes physiologically aroused in an argument, there's no point to continuing the discussion -- it's best to take a break, self-soothe, then come back and heal the emotional wounds of the original concern and any bad interactions that followed (revisiting is necessary or the resentments can calcify); chronic alarm leads to being less able to take in information, spending lots of time summarizing yourself in hope the partner will finally "get it" (they won't), reduced creativity, less humor and listening and empathy
- Emotional attunement. Active listening doesn't matter, but it does matter to be attuned to even weak emotions and validate them, recognizing when you have no responsibility for them; being warm but emotionally dismissing is not as pro-social as being emotionally attuned
- Defining & using trust. Trust and trustworthiness are about whose interests you believe your partner will support in an interaction game; after betrayal, it's reasonable to check on current trustworthiness through smaller interactions: is the partner positive and relationship building? negative, critical, derisive, sarcastic?

So, there's a lot of useful information in this book, and it seems especially designed for engineer-style brains to grok what behaviors build and undermine persistent emotional connection. Even so, the fundamental orientation of the book doesn't lay entirely well with me. There are two dimensions to my discomfort:

- Traditionalism. This book is unabashedly monogamist, heterosexist, and generally traditionalist. Gottman argues it is better to be in a relationship that betrays you than to not be in a relationship at all; mentions the applicability of his theories to queer couples but writes with only he-she language and never develops how his findings are influenced by heterosexuality; devalues gay male, kink, and poly community social practices & ethics as sex addiction and disruptive to bonding; assumes porn use involves dishonesty and deception; and fervently ascribes to the idea of expecting the family unit to meet all your needs. These are all cultural expectations quite out of step with my milieu, and I wouldn't have minded their presence if he had actively argued for them rather than assuming their universality.
- Quantitative social science. There isn't much in this book to dispel the stereotype of professional quantitative social scientists as producing undergraduate-term-paper quality quantitative research. Though I thought the formulation of a trust metric was quite clever, the "what drives X" discussions gave me the impression of misused regression models and/or not correcting statistical significance when testing multiple hypotheses, and introducing MATLAB with a citation and a misspelling didn't do much to belie the impression of sometimes falling into being "unconsciously incompetent" within the four stages of competence. That doesn't mean the findings are wrong or even that there necessarily is a lack of competence -- Gottman is well-versed in qualitative practices as well, to be sure -- but it was a disappointment to my hopes that I'd be able to hand this book around confidently.

I'd also have liked it to touch on whether two low-emotion-super-logical people would find this book worthwhile for their relationship. That's a "future work" complaint; the book doesn't hide its position that it makes sense to start by looking for general trends in relationship data, rather than starting with corner cases, and I agree. I just want even more nuance.

Overall, I found this book to have very valuable content (4.5 stars!) but my misgivings are so fundamental and my rating system is so tied to my own affect that I can't bring myself to give it even 4 stars ("Yay, I'm a fan!" cannot quite apply). I'd still recommend The Science of Trust -- with caveats, but firmly -- to anyone quantitatively minded. show less

I'm an eye roller which can be a relationship killer. I never would have known this except through reading about John Gottman's research at his Love Lab over the years. Gottman and his team videotaped couples interacting and now have a high success rate at determining which couples will make it and which will divorce based on their verbal and non-verbal interactions. This book breaks down the research into practical advice.

I was extremely happy to read through this book and discover that show more this time around my partner and I are doing it right. Actually I feel a little smug about it. Because love at forty-something is wonderful. show less