Why Marriages Succeed or Fail and How You Can Make Yours Last

[Why Marriages Succeed or Fail] by John Gottman is a self-help book published in 1994 and written for a general audience based on his decades of research on married couples. It’s his first effort to move beyond the scientific literature and reach the everyday person. He assures us this is unlike previous books written on the topic because science. It’s an easy read, and like many books of this style, filled with anecdotes, quizzes, facile metaphors to help with understanding, etc. Gottman’s group is still doing this research and still sharing lots of useful information. Their website is a very handy resource. I’d like to think the current materials have moved beyond heterosexual married couples, which are the entire focus of show more this book. It’s also unclear what kind of diverse demographics in terms of race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class his study population had by 1994. I suspect not so much as scientists do love to control as many variables as possible.

The book is divided into 8 chapters. Chapter 1, “What Makes Marriage Work” summarizes the research methods and their key findings. Chapter 2, “Marriage Styles: The Good, the Bad, and the Volatile” focuses on 3 stable communication dynamics. Chapter 3, “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Warning Signs” describes the first downward spiral that can happen. Chapter 4, “Your Private Thoughts Become Cast in Stone” proceeds with the second negative cascade that can happen. Chapter 5, “The Two Marriages: His and Hers” discusses stereotypical gender dynamics in failing marriages and the different biological responses and childhood socialization that contribute to these differences. Chapter 6, “Your Marriage: The Diagnosis” emphasizes the quizzes. Chapter 7, “The Four Keys to Improving Your Marriage” presents the communication strategies to break up the toxic dynamics. Chapter 8, “Strengthening the Foundation” recaps the information covered in the book.

The gist of Dr Gottman’s research on marriage is that there are 5 communication patterns that couples tend to fall into when addressing conflicts: validating, conflict avoidant, volatile, hostile/engaged, and hostile/detached. The first 3 are stable and lead to long-term relationships. Marital conflict is described as having 3 phases: each person stating their viewpoint (and being validated by the partner), each person attempting to persuade the other, and achieving (mutually agreed upon) resolution. The validators spend lots of time on hearing and validating each other. The volatile couples tend to skip that and move right into persuading each other. The conflict avoiders tend to go with the resolution that will make the disagreement end quickest (without necessarily resolving the underlying problem) and tend to be indirect in their approaches. Each of these 3 stable marriage patterns relies on a 5:1 ratio of positive/negative interactions and demonstrating a great deal of love and respect to maintain the relationship. Dr Gottman stresses that some conflict and negativity is essential to developing a stable communication pattern and maintaining a healthy relationship long term. The couple needs to be able to handle conflict and disappointment together.

What Dr Gottman calls the 4 Horsemen are (in this specific order) criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Criticism differs from a complaint by being more of an ad hominem attack on the person, not a “specific statement of anger, displeasure, distress, or other negativity” that is about the behavior (or event). It very much reminds me of Jay Smooth’s video on how to call out racism. The defensive tactics are described as denying responsibility, making excuses, disputing by negative mind reading (assumptions about motives/feelings), cross-complaining (counter attack), rubber person (blame the partner), yes-butting (disagreement couched in initial agreement), repeating yourself (broken record without listening), whining (‘nuff said), body language (false smile, arms folded across chest, shifting side to side). And stonewalling is just shutting down, verbally, mentally, physically, sometimes just walking away when conflict happens. These negative spirals tend to result in the hostile/engaged and hostile/detached dynamics that are not stable.

The breakup tends to happen once the negativity expressed in the dynamics of the couple comes to dominate their headspace. Distorted thinking can reinforce itself and cast every interaction in terms of being victimized or feeling unending righteous indignation. Once this is the internal narration, it’s hard to have a fair perspective on the situation, and confirmation bias reinforces this interpretation of the situation. Dr Gottman then proceeds to describe “flooding,” a kind of emotional and physiological overload, which sounds a lot like what is called being triggered these days. The heart rate goes up, the person feels overwhelmed by the partner’s negativity and their own emotional reaction of distress, upset, hostility, etc. Muscles tense, and the person may hold their breath; thoughts may become disorganized or shut down. The negative thoughts and the body’s arousal form a feedback loop. The person over time with chronic flooding feels that negativity is the norm in the relationship. This situation leads to what Dr Gottman calls the “distance and isolation cascade.” First, the problems in the marriage are perceived as severe. Second, it seems useless to try to sort it out with the partner. Third, the couple starts leading separate and parallel lives because they’re no longer emotionally connected. Fourth, there’s nothing lonelier than feeling trapped in a loveless marriage. The personal narrative of the early days of the relationship gets rewritten to focus on the negative. Brings new meaning to “revisionist history.” In fact, this can be an early warning sign of impending doom if changes aren’t made—Dr Gottman claims a 94% success rate in predicting future divorce based on the man’s framing of the beginning of their relationship.

And the common gender dynamics: woman does the emotional labor of the relationship, which means she is usually the one who brings up problems for discussion. She is also the one who consistently seeks an emotional connection with her partner. Man cannot handle emotions, taught to suppress them, more likely to be flooded, gets defensive easily, withdraws/stonewalls. Woman gets frustrated, escalates, desperate to be heard. Rinse, repeat. Women are trained from childhood to understand, interpret, and discuss emotions; men are not and don’t have the tools. “Usually, boys care most about the game, while girls care most about the relationship between the players.” Men dominate their environment and emotions, and women support, etc. Dr Gottman then goes on to say that there are biological gender differences in the physiological stress reactions. Men get overwhelmed quickly and take much longer to calm down after emotional arousal. Men often get flooded by the first negative behavior of criticism, while women often don’t get flooded until contempt is expressed at the second negative stage. Also, stonewalling is primarily performed by men, and is unusually triggering for women. This is a particularly asymmetrical gender difference. The man tends to interpret stonewalling (either performing or receiving it) as being neutral, but the woman tends to interpret (receiving it) as disapproval and rejection.

This whole chapter on gender dynamics opens with a strong caveat that these are generalizations that don’t apply to everyone, which I appreciate, but a few reiterations of that throughout the gendered examples, especially when getting to the “But biology” part would have been helpful. It didn’t quite descend into evo psych rationalization, at least. I did appreciate the following assertion very much: “In fact, we find that, by and large, in happy marriages there are no gender differences in emotional expression! But in unhappy marriages all the gender differences we’ve been talking about emerge.” Gender imbalances masquerading as norms are more an indication of dysfunction than anything else. The specific advice to men is to embrace their wives’ anger. It is a gift to show how important an issue is. And listening to her will help her calm down. The specific advice to women is to air a complaint gently and calmly as possible; when sharing a complaint, it is important to reiterate love and specify the desire that he change a specific problematic behavior.

Also, Dr Gottman points out that disagreements about sex and housework are exceedingly common and most likely to be flashpoints for conflict. The gender differences around sex, according to Dr Gottman, mean that men seek intimacy by having sex, or consider sex as no-strings pleasure, and seek sex even when the situation is emotionally tense. Meanwhile, women use sex to confirm intimacy, which is already expressed through affection and daily interactions. Dr Gottman recommends that the man learn to pleasure his wife rather than concentrating solely on his own pleasure during sex, and that he learn and meet her specific requirements leading up to sex, which usually involve some degree of attention and care outside of the bedroom, and likely especially equity in housework. Men tend to seriously overestimate their contributions to domestic chores and childcare and almost never initiate these discussions or take charge of organizing the household and associated tasks. “The message you send your wife when you do so little around the house is a lack of respect for her.” And “If you are a husband, you are not doing your wife a favor by ‘helping’ with the housework—you are sharing necessary chores to make your lives more comfortable.” Repeated for truth! These basic inequities in daily living profoundly affect women’s satisfaction in marriage. In other words, men need to try harder to not be sexist jerks (no free pass for liberal men here), and women need to hold their hands and treat them as gently as possible when confronting said sexism. But I’m not bitter much. I am also very, very happy to be living alone right now.

So what to do when negativity is tending to dominate? The tools involve self-soothing to break out of the negative mix-tape in your head, and soothing your partner—these are called repair mechanisms. In general, take steps to break out of the negative spiral. Specific repair mechanisms comprise stop action (hold the conversation until calmer), editing (respond only to constructive bits from partner), gate-keeping (guiding the conversation forward), getting back on beam (stopping off-topic discussion), affection humor, conflict-avoiding techniques (appeal to shared values, relative insignificance of current conflict), feeling probes (ask and listen to partner’s emotions), metacommunication (discuss the communication process), softening persuasion attempts (avoid gridlock and hardened positions).There is advice for couples that do not have compatible conflict resolution styles, which puts them at higher risk for trouble, as well as advice specific to each of the 3 stable styles. Each of the “4 horsemen” is revisited, and specific approaches offered for backing away from and responding to criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Similarly, tools are offered for disrupting distress-maintaining thought loops, flooding, the distance and isolation cascade, rewriting the narrative of the marriage history, and gendered dynamics.

An entire chapter is focused on 4 specific strategies for stepping back from the brink and strengthening the relationship. First, calm down. Monitor your pulse, and call a time out. Work on relaxing and disrupting negative thoughts. Second, speak and listen nondefensively. Express praise, gratitude and admiration even during conflict but also during daily life. These expressions of acceptance reduce the likelihood of a defensive reaction during a disagreement or difficult conversation. When listening, offer indications of actual listening (called back channel communications), pay attention to facial expressions, and your own body language. Use “X, Y, Z statements”: when you X in Y situation, I felt Z. Focus on the message content and disregard the negative tone as much as possible. Third, validate your partner. Take responsibility, apologize, and compliment when possible. Fourth, overlearn—practice over and over until it becomes second nature and kicks in automatically during high-stress situations.

Finally, the book closes with strategies for managing conflict pro-actively in a relationship. Schedule discussions so that any problems become part of routine communication rather than blowing up into a crisis. Structure disagreements by explicitly mapping out and progressing through the 3 stages: declaring the topic and validating, persuasion and argumentation, compromise and resolution. And think about how you might frame your personal narrative in terms of overcoming challenges together. “Stable couples’ stories serve to bolster their faith in one another and their union.” The successful bottom line: love, respect, and valuing your shared history together.

I summarized the contents of the book as the Cliff Notes version of the key points. This is mostly for me to refer to later. If you think any of this might be useful to you, by all means, get the book and read up on the sample scripts and interventions to disrupt negative feedback loops and develop more positive connections. Having explicit scripts, particularly in response to specific derailing methods, is extremely useful. There were definitely some painful twinges of recognition reading through the transcripts of couples’ interactions. Whether these were verbatim transcripts of actual conversations, or composites of multiple instances among the study participants, they are illustrative. The main limitations of this book is that (1) it addresses only straight married couples without acknowledging any other possible intimate relationship; (2) it doesn’t really touch on abusive dynamics beyond clearly stating that contempt is a form of psychological abuse—frankly, all the good will and good technique in the world is not going to turn an abusive predator into a supportive and caring spouse, and some discussion, however brief, of the difference between dysfunction between well-meaning people (bad fit!) and dysfunction by intent and malice (feature, not bug!) would be good; (3) it touches on the possibility of divorce only in the last page or so, though it talks about the study participants who end up divorced in earlier chapters. show less

An excellent book on how to turn a failing marriage into a happy marriage. Unlike many other books, this one is based on research. Although most of the book describes problems, the tone is positive - he believes that most unhappy marriages can be saved. It requires work, a lot of work, but the techniques are simple enough to learn and practice them until they become second nature.

I would rate this book higher if it weren't for my knowledge that Gottman's later books are generally better than this one.

This book has a lot of solid advice about relationships, much of which applies to relationships in general, and not just marital relationships. The advice is concrete, actionable, and easy to understand. There's just enough repetition to reinforce the ideas without making the book tedious.

So why the low rating? The tone is very oriented toward those who feel that they are in a failing marriage, which means Gottman fails to convey how important these communication techniques are for all couples. In general, the right time to improve your communication skills is before things start falling apart.

This book was required reading in my clinical psychology, masters level course. I was surprised to see a "popular psych" book in a graduate course but it turned out to be a great text. This book combines an academic and research perspective with accessible and easily generalized examples that can benefit anyone. Since reading it, I have significantly improved my relationship skills and use them frequently in my marriage. The self-tests, the simple practices, and the engaging writing style place this book at the top of the stack for relationship advice. This book is not just for couples in trouble--new couples or anyone looking to improve their relationship skills can benefit

How did I arrive at this Book?

I came to read this book, after reading works from attachment theory.

Attachment in Psychotherapy by David J. Wallin. It was the best read of 2020. Please Check out, Attachment Theory

My friend was engaging on improving communication skills. We both wanted to improve our skills in relationship.

Instead of pridefully saying, I know enough about relationship or I am good in it. We both, with humility and courage admitted, have areas to define, grow, improve.

I reached out to a Professor. He teaches Clinical Psychology, and approves of this work.

Practice, Practice, Practice this.

Gottman says, practice, as this becomes second-nature.

Perhaps, this work can be extended to all relationships?

Why do I need show more to read this book?

Maybe if you are looking to grow in relationships, want to recognize areas of your self, this might be good read.

How much time would this take? About 6-7 hours

What does this book offer me?

-Concrete ways to be aware, improve, manage relationships
-This one specifically on marriage.
-This could be extended to other relationships

Okay, So, What is inside this book?

Outline:

1) What makes Marriage Work,
2) Marriage Style
3) Four Horseman of Apocalypse
4) Your Private thoughts become Cast in Stone
5) Two Marriage: His and Her
6) Your Marriage: Diagnosis
7) Four Keys to Improve Your Marriage
8) Strengthen the Foundation


What are the Key Ideas of this Book?

For this, I give you question and answers from the book

1) What makes marriage work?

Marriage is extreme complex relationship.

He says,

-ability to resolve conflict (There styles of healthy ways to do it)
-5:1 positive to negative in the relationship

He says, there is no single test, that can predict outcome.

He does give a rough number of 90% based on positive to negativity in the relationship.

2) Marriage Style: The Good, Bad and Volatile

Gottman gives examples of couples with different styles. I liked his example of volatile couple.

He says, exploding would come under volatile style. It’s not the end of the world. I changed my mind on it. I was of persuasion that less conflict, it's more likely to be better, but I was wrong.

Validating, Volatile, Avoidant Relationship relationship styles.

Gottman suggests to negotiate a style of stable relationship. He says, avoidant are more likely to be in troubled and create loneliness.

3) Four Horseman of Apocalypse:

a) Contempt: Looking down on someone, or seeing them as beneath you. Erosion of Love, Insults arise out of this.

Remedy: Praise and Admiration for Positive Qualities

b) Defensiveness: This happens, when we are criticized or when someone starts blaming us.

Remedy: Calm down, be non-defensive, listen when barrage of emotional explosion occurs. Embrace the Anger. Do not flee unless physical fight occurs.

c) Criticism:

This is Personal Attack. Sometimes, we might not be aware of it.
Statements like,
"You are Always late",
"You NEVER care about me.",
Last but the best one,
"You idiot, why don’t you remember to take the garbage out?"

Really? Never which means, 100% of the time? Probably not. It’s psychological abuse.

Remedy: Gottman suggests to make it into complaint. Instead of, “You NEVER.”, “You are …” make it into, Complaint into specific behavior, start with, “I” statements.

A Complaint is specific and limited to one situation.

d) Withdrawal (Stone-walling): We withdraw if there’s too much negativity or have a stone-wall in our communication. Sometimes, when a person does that, the other person comes with more force wanting attention, and it might come off as rejection of the other person. Men are more likely to be stone-wallers.

Remedy: Instead of having poker face. Use back-channel, use words like, “uhm..”, “yes”, “oh I see.” Be attuned to facial-expression of the other person and mirror the other person’s facial expression.

Why back-channel helps? It helps the other person to know that you haven’t tuned out of the conversation.


4) Your private thoughts become cast in stone:

Gottman specifically gives example of one scenario, same interpreted in self-soothing and distress maintaining ways. The one with self-soothing is more likely to take positive qualities, but the one with distress maintaining more likely to create more anger and more upset.

Innocent Victim: If we are hit by third horseman, defensiveness, we are more likely to take innocent victim role. The major emotion we feel would be fear.

Righteous Indignation: We have hostility and contempt for the other person. When we are hit hard by contempt. We are hit hard by hurt, and anger. Stonewallers might more likely to take righteous indignation role.

5) Two Marriage: His and Her

This Chapter goes into basic differences between Men and Women. This is an outline, not specific to everyone.

6) Your Marriage: Diagnosis:
I suggest you to refer the book for questionnaires.

7) Four Keys to Improve Your Marriage:

1) Calm Down
1.a)Rewrite inner script
1.b)Speak Non Defensively
2) Praise and Admiration
3) Validation
4) Over learning

8) Strengthen the Foundation:

Negotiating Marriage Style:
-How to Argue
-How to Express and Handle Emotions
-How to Feel Loved and Show Love: What does truly involved means?
-Strongly valuing, “We-ness.”

When communication becomes difficult, reason is because more negativity in the relationship.

What are some suggestions, that I could do?

a) Important for men to take tasks at home, and outside.
b) Have suggestion Box.
c) Create Schedules or Times to talk.
d) Share Glory — create a family story, tell your story.
e) Create Love, Respect and Shared Sense of Values.

What this book does not offer?
Theoretical foundation for the body of work, knowledge base, accurate definition, schools of thought in this area, religious vs secular work on this.

Where do I disagree with Gottman?

The area, where I disagree with the author, “Leaving the relationship.”

If a person adheres to Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism or Christianity. Their view on deserting, absconding, leaving the relationship comes specifically with their belief system. Gottman does not consider that and brings that to the table. People from religious tradition have an element of supernatural assumption in their body of knowledge, ergo, not sure how that can play out.

Excerpts that you might like:


And fighting—when it airs grievances and complaints—can be one of the healthiest things a couple can do for their relationship (indeed, how you fight is one of the most telling ways to diagnose the health of your marriage).

After a couple fight, Gottman says, What I detected hidden beneath their seemingly trivial skirmishes was a rich and painful history of unresolved issues concerning his need for autonomy and her need to feel valued by him.

The issue is how well you handle the inevitable differences that arise whenever two people form a partnership.

Do I need to get rid of all negativity in the relationship?

Some negativity is required in relationships. Beware of negative internal script that plays in your inner-world. I suggest reading attachment theory and my review of it.

What is one idea that I need to remember?

“The Ability to resolve conflicts.” play a crucial factor in all relationships.

Overall, I recommend this book to everyone, who wants to grow in relationship, communication skills.

Deus Vult,
Gottfried show less

Relationship expert John Gottman does not just talk about experiences with couples clients but has his theory founded in years and years of research.
This book is highly recommended for anyone interested in deepening their relationship, learning to understand each other and how to manage conflicts in relationship.
I use Gottman's work daily in relationship counselling with my couples clients.

classic research

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