Making Marriage Work | Dr. John Gottman

Summary

Highlights

• Gottman's research shows that understanding and managing the Four Horsemen predicts marital outcomes with over 90% accuracy. 🔍
• Using a lab-apartment, Gottman's team observed that a rich positive climate during low-pressure situations correlates with relationship stability. 🌊
• Balancing positive interactions during conflicts at a five-to-one ratio is crucial for relationship health. Positivity literally pays! 😊
• Connection bids are foundational for intimacy. Ignoring them lowers the chance of the partner re-initiating connection. So, respond actively! 🚀
• Even simple' thank yous' and appreciation can significantly enhance relationship resilience. Never underestimate the power of gratitude! 🙏

Key Takeaways

• Friendship is the cornerstone of effective relationships. Enhancing love maps, admiration, and turning towards each other's bids for emotional connection are crucial. 💞
• Maintaining a five-to-one ratio of positive to negative interactions in conflicts helps sustain relationships. Balance is key! ⚖️
• Understanding the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling – and addressing them effectively improves relationship outcomes. 🐴
• Most marital conflicts are perpetual and unsolvable, but learning to navigate them can enhance intimacy. Communication is everything! 🔄
• Building a shared meaning system and understanding each other's dreams is essential for deep relationship connections and long-term satisfaction. 🌟

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 05:00: Introduction and Research Background The introduction opens with a presentation by Better Life Media, hailed as a leading source for life improvement. Dr. John Gottman, renowned for his work on marital relationships, is the primary speaker, suggesting this chapter will explore themes of marriage improvement and effective relationship strategies. The mention of 'making marriage work' indicates a focus on providing solutions or insights into developing successful marital practices. The opening applause signals the anticipation of valuable information to come.
• 05:00 - 15:00: Prediction of Divorce and Relationship Problems The speaker clarifies they are not a 'relationship guru,' but an expert in researching relationships. They have studied over 3,000 couples over 32 years, including gay and lesbian couples, to understand what makes relationships work.
• 15:00 - 25:00: Importance of Friendship and Positive Interactions The chapter titled 'Importance of Friendship and Positive Interactions' explores the dynamics of relationships, focusing on how they thrive or falter. The narrative is based on research conducted by the author and Bob Levinson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Their collaboration marks a 30-year journey into understanding relationships. Initially, they began their work without any preconceived notions or clear understanding of what makes relationships successful. Over the years, they've created videotapes of couples engaging in everyday interactions, aiming to decipher the intricate workings of relationships. This method provided insights into how genuine connections and positive interactions are pivotal in reinforcing the bonds of friendship within romantic partnerships.
• 25:00 - 35:00: Perpetual Problems and Conflict Management The chapter discusses ongoing conflicts and methods for managing them effectively. It introduces a research setting at the University of Washington where couples were invited to a controlled apartment environment. This setting was similar to a bed and breakfast, where couples could spend 24 hours together engaging in leisurely activities such as listening to music, watching television, and reading newspapers. The purpose was to observe and understand how they managed conflicts in a relaxed setting, just as they would in everyday life.
• 35:00 - 45:00: Shared Meaning and Building a Successful Relationship In this chapter, the focus is on understanding the dynamics of successful relationships by observing and measuring various physical and emotional responses in a simulated bed and breakfast setting. The setting appeared normal except for the scientific equipment and methodologies being used. Couples were monitored using cameras, electrocardiograms, and had their urine and blood tested for stress hormones and immune system function, while their emotional expressions were recorded. This approach aimed to gather data on how shared meaning and emotional exchanges contribute to a thriving relationship.
• 45:00 - 45:00: Conclusion and Closing Remarks The chapter discusses a long-term study on representative samples of couples, beginning with newlyweds. This longitudinal research has extended to include couples for 13 years, covering phases like pregnancy, raising children, and moving into midlife and retirement. The current study spans over two decades, providing insights into the evolving dynamics and experiences within couples and families across different life stages.

Making Marriage Work | Dr. John Gottman Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 better life media america's leading source for life improvement presents dr john gottman making marriage work [Music] [Applause] thank you thank you very much now why should you listen to me
• 00:30 - 01:00 uh first of all let me just uh tell you that i'm not a relationship guru i'm not like those people on afternoon television and the only thing i have to offer is that i'm an expert in how to do research on relationships and i've studied uh over 3 000 couples over the last 32 years you know couples very much like yourselves and uh and what i've tried to do is find out what it is they do to make their relationships work and we've also studied gay and lesbian couples as well
• 01:00 - 01:30 as heterosexual couples for a very long time and i've done this work with my friend bob levinson who's a professor at the university of california berkeley and it's our 30th anniversary actually this year of working together and what we really brought to this whole area was profound ignorance because we really didn't have a clue about what made relationships work when we started doing this research 30 years ago and so we did is we made videotapes of couples doing ordinary things like talking about how
• 01:30 - 02:00 their day went and talking about an area of conflict continuing disagreement and at the university of washington i built an apartment laboratory that was kind of like a bed and breakfast getaway in which uh we had couples just hang out for 24 hours and it was a beautiful picture window there and boats going by and uh and you know people just sort of listen to the music they want to listen to watch television brought newspapers to read and did whatever they wanted to do and the only difference between that
• 02:00 - 02:30 setting and an ordinary bed and breakfast was that we had four cameras bolted to the wall and they wore halter monitors that measured two channels of electrocardiogram and when they urinated we took a urine sample to measure stress hormones in their urine and we took blood from them to measure how their immune system was functioning and there were people in the other room recording their facial expressions of emotion but aside from that it was like an ordinary bed and breakfast getaway and
• 02:30 - 03:00 we found you know what we basically did was study you know representative samples of couples and we started with newlyweds in one study for example we're now in the 13th year of studying those couples as they had kids we studied them in pregnancy and as their their babies developed and then we studied kids who we studied families who were in midlife who had young kids couples in their 40s couples in their 60s all the way through retirement our current study is about 20 years we follow couples so
• 03:00 - 03:30 we didn't know if there were good relationships or bad relationships when we started and we found out that over time some of them some of the relationships broke up and some of them fell apart some of them stayed together and were really unhappy with one another and others you know kind of more or less liked each other over time and the relationships got better and better and they were pretty happy and we called that last group the masters of relationships and the other group the disasters the ones whose
• 03:30 - 04:00 relationships fell apart or stayed together and weren't happy and what we tried to find out was was there anything different about the masters and the disasters is there anything we could figure out about it and we were very surprised to find out that we could predict which couples would stay together and which ones would get a divorce with over 90 accuracy and you know you don't find that kind of prediction in psychology very often usually we can't predict people's
• 04:00 - 04:30 behavior at all but here in relationships we're able to predict with enormous accuracy what would happen to a relationship in fact in just 15 minutes of a couple talking about an area of continuing disagreement we could predict with 85 percent accuracy whether they get divorced and not only that after following couples for 14 years we could not only predict if they would get divorced but when they would get divorced as well so i want to tell you about that research and what we discovered from
• 04:30 - 05:00 this and how we put it all together in kind of a theory about what makes relationships work and what the principles are for making them uh making them get better and better and also turning around ones that are really unhappy now this ability to predict divorce with very high accuracy or happiness with very high accuracy hasn't done a lot for my personal life i don't get invited out to dinner very much for example you know very few couples want to know if their relationship is going to work or not
• 05:00 - 05:30 and in the middle of a fight my wife is very likely to say to me if they could see you now no so but we try to use the principles my wife and i we try to figure out you know what how we can make our relationship better and in fact uh we do a workshop in seattle where the second day uh every time we do the workshop my wife and i talk about a fight we just had and we're never at a loss we always have a fight to talk about and we do this in front of 150 couples uh and so you know
• 05:30 - 06:00 part of what i want to tell you is that what we've learned in studying good relationships as well as the disasters is that we're all really in the same soup so let me start by talking about what it is we learned that allows us to predict divorce or stability with very high accuracy the first thing we found was that if you take a look at the ratio of positive stuff during conflict things like interest asking questions being nice to one
• 06:00 - 06:30 another being kind being affectionate being empathetic and you look at all the negative stuff like criticism hostility anger uh hurt feelings and you take the ratio of positive to negative in relationships that stay together that ratio turns out to be five to one there's five times as many positive things going on in relationships that work as negative so that's an interesting equation and it sort of suggests that if you do
• 06:30 - 07:00 something negative to hurt your partner's feelings you know that you have to make up for it with five positive things so the equation is not balanced in terms of positive and negative negative has a lot more ability to inflict pain and damage than positive things have to heal and bring you closer now the couples who wound up divorced that ratio was point eight to one so there was a little more negativity than positivity in couples who were heading for divorce
• 07:00 - 07:30 so first of all uh for a relationship to feel right it has to be a very rich climate of affection and humor and fun and intimacy and empathy now in the apartment lab that i mentioned that ratio is more like 20 to 1 rather than 5 to 1 right so when you're just hanging out it really needs to be an enormously rich climate of positive stuff interestingly enough you might think that from that finding what you want to do is if you're a therapist you want to
• 07:30 - 08:00 declare war on negativity and eliminate all anger sadness hurt feelings from relationships and that's not true turns out negativity is actually very productive in relationships because hurt feelings and negativity wind up for one thing calling out stuff that doesn't work in relationships right you hurt your partner's feelings you learn something right and you talk about how to make it better next time so you don't want a relationship where there's nothing negative going on the other thing is it wouldn't be very real if there wasn't
• 08:00 - 08:30 sadness disappointment you know and there's kind of a cycle of getting closer and drawing apart that happens in relationships after a fight people are distant for a while and then they get closer together so that in fact in relationships as a result of negativity there's a need to continually renew courtship in relationships and so that's the importance of that finding about negativity and not declaring war and negativity you don't want to get rid of anger you don't want to get rid of
• 08:30 - 09:00 sadness you know that's kind of our inheritance when we have a close relationship we get all the emotions now the next thing that bob and i wanted to know is are all negative things equally corrosive are there some things that really are a lot more negative than others and in fact there are and i wound up calling those things the four horsemen of the apocalypse and because there were four things that really were very predictive of divorce and they were characteristic of the disasters
• 09:00 - 09:30 and very different from the masters the masters are dealing with conflict in this way it's kind of like if i was holding imagine i was holding an invisible soccer ball right here okay and this soccer ball represents our problem and my wife and i are kicking this ball around and that's the way the masters deal with things now the disasters from the beginning try to put that ball in their partner's body and they're really saying you're the problem right so the first horseman of the apocalypse is what we
• 09:30 - 10:00 call criticism and criticism is a way of complaining that suggests that your partner's personality is defective okay and now what are the masters doing the masters are still complaining right but they're talking about themselves talking about their feelings and what they need so let's say for example i complain and i want to complain the way you know a really great relationship would complain i might say to my wife something like you know you talked about
• 10:00 - 10:30 yourself all through dinner you never asked me anything about my day and that hurt my feelings i really need you to ask me about my day okay so there i'm talking about myself what i feel and what i need right now the disasters would try to make that just a symptom of my wife's defect and i would say to my wife something like you know you talked about yourself during dinner you never asked me anything about my day what is wrong with you
• 10:30 - 11:00 this is a great question right what is wrong with you does anybody ever answer that question hey i'm glad you asked that let me take a look and see what's wrong you know it's not really a question right now the second horseman of the apocalypse kind of follows from the first because if you feel criticized you're going to be feeling attacked and you're going to be warding off this attack right and that's defensiveness the second horseman of the apocalypse and we found there are two ways of becoming defensive that are most common in couples the first is righteous indignation and in righteous indignation
• 11:00 - 11:30 what you're doing is meeting a complaint with a counter complaint the second way of being defensive is i can act like an innocent victim and the most common way people act like an innocent victim is they whine i cared about your day i really did i was really interested in your day now what's the what's the opposite what's the constructive alternative what do the masters do instead of get defensive it's very simple they accept responsibility even for a
• 11:30 - 12:00 small part of the problem so she says to me all through dinner you talked about yourself you never asked me about my day i can say god good point you know i really was stressed out you know during dinner and the drive home was awful i had a rotten day i don't think i was listening to anybody you know whole day and you're right i probably wasn't listening to you so how was your day now the third horseman is our best predictor of divorce and it is
• 12:00 - 12:30 disrespect and contempt now contempt is a little bit different than criticism because in contempt you feel superior to your partner you're speaking from a higher plane kind of like i'm on this podium and i'm talking down well if you do that to your partner you feel let's say you feel cleaner than your partner or more punctual or tidier or smarter than your partner then you're going to kind of talk down to your partner and the comment that will come out will be this kind of snobby contemptuous comment right now how do
• 12:30 - 13:00 people get contemptuous the most common way they do that is by calling their partner names or directly insulting them and you know so you can say you know what a jerk you only talk about yourself now we would like our partners to respond to us by saying something like john that's brilliant you're such an observant person you know thank you for pointing out all the ways in which i'm failing as a human being can we have lunch next week so you can tell me more
• 13:00 - 13:30 you know but unfortunately people don't respond that way right they really wind up getting hurt in fact contempt is our single best predictor of divorce now what is it that the masters are doing that's the alternative for contempt what is the opposite of disrespect it is not doing nothing it is really respect and being proud of the people we love and what the masters are doing is creating in the relationship a culture of appreciation they're saying thank you
• 13:30 - 14:00 for very small things that their partners are doing thanks for picking up the laundry i enjoyed the conversation at dinner i watched you playing with the baby last night and it was really beautiful we had that teacher conference and you know that teacher really intimidates me you've got a lot of guts so it's communicating not only affection but respect right that's the culture of appreciation now how do you build that and what the way you build it is you start really creating a different habit
• 14:00 - 14:30 of mind a habit of mind where instead of scanning the environment for things to criticize and put down and make yourself superior through putting down other people you scan the environment for things you can praise and appreciate and this is as important in uh in love relationships as it is in parent-child relationships looking for stuff you can appreciate catch your partner doing something right now the fourth horseman of the apocalypse we call stonewalling and here's what stonewalling is it's
• 14:30 - 15:00 really emotional withdrawal from conflict and here's the way we actually measure it in our laboratory usually when a when a listener is listening to somebody talk they actually give the speaker a lot of signals that they are tracking that they're that they're there not necessarily agreeing they maintain they're sort of an open body they maintain eye contact nod their heads they utter these brief vocalization oh yeah huh they move their faces oh yeah
• 15:00 - 15:30 could be oh yeah sure and so all of these signals are coming out the stonewaller doesn't do that maybe foal's arms are kimbo like that looks down and away there's no facial movement there's no vocalization there may be an occasional glance at the speaker just to see if the ogre has magically disappeared that's stonewalling now what does stonewalling do you know what it does is that the speaker doesn't think he or she is getting through right so instead of
• 15:30 - 16:00 getting out the 40-pound cannon when they're stonewalling the speaker gets out the 60-pound cannon boom you know let's really have an impact right so those are the four horsemen of the apocalypse and they allow us to predict with high accuracy what's going to happen to a relationship but you know that's kind of like the recipe for failure right and the recipe the alternative recipe for constructive conflict resolution is interesting and useful in some way but
• 16:00 - 16:30 it doesn't give you enough information about what it is that the in good relationships is really happening to maintain that intimacy in the relationship and here's what we discovered about that from looking at the apartment lab we actually came out with a number of principles that really could be useful in building a relationship so let me tell you about these principles the first thing that we found was that in good relationships friendship is extremely important it's not just about
• 16:30 - 17:00 conflict and how you deal with conflict it's about intimacy and maintaining intimacy now the cool thing about being a researcher is you cannot just talk about things in vague terms you have to really measure stuff and so you have to be really precise about the advice you give and what we found was there were three ingredients to friendship and that's all you needed to do was work on those three things and you could you could have an intimate friendship in your relationship and here's what the three things are
• 17:00 - 17:30 first first thing was to enhance what we call your love maps now what's a love map it's an internal road map that you make up that you have in your mind about your partner's inner world inner psychological world so this is the whole dimension of being known a feeling like your partner is really interested in knowing you and of feeling like you know you want to know your partner so it's about interest in one another right and it's about knowing like you know who are the main
• 17:30 - 18:00 people in your in your partner's world uh what's stressing your partner out what's exciting what are some of your partner's dreams and hopes and aspirations and values right now how do you find that information out asking questions so the fundamental process is really asking questions now not questions like did the plumber come right but open-ended questions like how are you feeling about being a mother right now how do you like this house do you want
• 18:00 - 18:30 to change it how are you thinking about your job right now have you changed how would you like our life to be in the next five years those kinds of questions they help build the love map now the cool thing about this is some people make these love maps naturally and some people just don't do it so when you talk to people who don't make love maps and you tell them about how important it is they go okay so how do i do that and if you show them how to do it then they go
• 18:30 - 19:00 okay i'll do it now if you want to really try changing your life in the area of relationships in the next two weeks try making 50 of the things you say to people a question an open-ended question instead of making statements to people ask them questions and you'll find that people really change because people rarely ask questions it's a very very fundamental thing to do and yet it's a very rare thing people mostly make statements and broadcast rather than saying what do you think about this
• 19:00 - 19:30 asking those kinds of questions so love maps is the first ingredient of friendship the second one is what we call fondness and admiration and i mentioned that in the culture of appreciation it's really about communicating affection and respect in very small ways and that's what the masters are doing they're creating this culture of appreciation in very tiny ways they're saying thank you i'm proud of you i really admire you i respect you and they're doing it often now
• 19:30 - 20:00 let me tell you about a couple that we saw and this guy you know was very successful in his career and he ran an intensive care unit for for babies in a major hospital in los angeles and he and his wife had been married for 17 years and i talked to him about the very first date he had with his wife and he said god you know i was thinking that first date that of all the women i'd ever met she was the most vivacious most exciting the most beautiful the
• 20:00 - 20:30 most intelligent woman i'd ever met i went wow now there's a fondness and admiration system right now the next thing i wanted to know is did his wife know this that he was thinking this on the first date in fact in 17 years had he ever told her that he thought this about her and so i i asked her i said did you know this she said i never had a clue so what's the fundamental thing in fondness and admiration it can't stay in the brain it's got to come out the mouth right so that's really what the masters
• 20:30 - 21:00 are doing in very small ways they're saying thank you i mean even for trivial things thanks for doing the dishes you know even if it's that person's turn to do the dishes right a lot of couples say well why should i say thank you i just do stuff he does stuff why should we say thank you to each other i don't get much appreciation and i always say do you like that do you like feeling unappreciated no well do you both feel unappreciated yes okay so that's to express appreciation
• 21:00 - 21:30 it's not very complicated it's very simple and it helps this habit of mine right where you're scanning the environment for things to appreciate so that's love maps fondness and admiration right respect and affection the third is something we learned from the apartment lab is that when people are just hanging out the way they build intimacy is in very tiny moments they make little bids bids for emotional connection
• 21:30 - 22:00 now it's at the lowest level they're making bids for their partner's attention you know like for example you know i can look out the window of the apartment lab where boats were going by and i can say well there's a pretty boat okay now let's say that my wife says that and i'm cleaning my glasses right and she says there's a pretty boat no response we call that turning away right sometimes somebody be cleaning their glasses
• 22:00 - 22:30 here's a pretty boat huh now that's a pretty minimal response right but it's turning toward it's some response sometimes people would turn toward a bid in a very enthusiastic way like there's a pretty boat wow that is a pretty boat you know say did you ever think why don't we quit our jobs like and get a boat like that and just kind of sail off together so we call that an enthusiastic turning toward right rather than just you know a
• 22:30 - 23:00 turning tord without enthusiasm and what we found was very interesting that what happens if i make a bid for just her attention and she turns away she doesn't respond at all you know what are the chances i say hey there's a pretty boat no response i'm gonna say hey julie i said there's a pretty boat you know the probability of rebidding is almost zero in all relationships it actually is zero in the couples the
• 23:00 - 23:30 newlyweds that wound up divorcing six years later and .22 22 probability in couples that stayed together still very low right and in fact on the videotape what you see is if people partners turn away they kind of crumple a little bit you know and they do some face saving things like straightening up or petting the cat you know or something like that but they don't re-bid that lack of connection is really painful and we started realizing that in these very tiny moments of emotional connection people
• 23:30 - 24:00 are building kind of an emotional bank account in the relationship they're building up points in their relationship that builds emotional connection okay those are the three components of intimacy making a love map right and updating it periodically by asking questions fondness and admiration and turning toward okay now when those three things are working then it turns out people are in a state of mind that we call positive
• 24:00 - 24:30 sentiment override now that's a fancy term but it means that my positive sentiment for my wife and the relationship overrides momentary times when she's irritable or we're feeling a little distant but if those three parts of a friendship are not working very well love maps fondness and admiration and turning toward then i'll be a negative sentiment override and that means i've got a chip on my shoulder right i mean if i'm in negative sentiment override
• 24:30 - 25:00 she can come down one morning to the kitchen and say in a very sweet way you know honey you're not supposed to run the microwave when there's no food in it and if i got that chip on my shoulder i'm gonna say don't you tell me how to run the microwave i'm the one who reads the manuals around here you're not going to control and manipulate me see i've got a chip on my shoulder i'm hyper vigilant for put downs i'm in a negative state and you know you can't tell me to not be so sensitive about the
• 25:00 - 25:30 relationship you know to lighten up not take it so personally just you can't tell me well she said it in a sweet way i can't get out of negative sentiment override right so research studies that have tried to change people's cognitive style about the relationship fail and they fail for good reason because love maps aren't working fondness and admiration and turning toward aren't working that's why i got why i got that chip on my shoulder right but if they're working i'm in positive sentiment override she can say
• 25:30 - 26:00 in a very irritable way hey you're not supposed to run the microwave but there's no food and if i'm in positive sentiment override i'll say okay i'm not taking that personally right you know i'm seeing that as maybe she's stressed out i'm thinking this lady's very involved in the microwave today i don't know why you know but uh not gonna ask her now you know uh but you know basically you know it's a buffer positive sentiment override is a buffer against
• 26:00 - 26:30 irritability and emotional distance and that brings me to conflict because what the masters are doing during conflict is they're really able to repair the the conflict when it's not going well it's hard to change people's behavior when they're fighting you know it's very easy to get defensive you know if you feel attacked it's very easy to become critical if you're upset particularly if you put off your complaints for a long time so everybody does that but the masters can repair
• 26:30 - 27:00 they can have a recovery conversation and in fact this dimension of repair is one of the most central dimensions about making relationships work well over time everybody messes up everybody gets defensive everybody gets critical at times insulting you know these things happen but the ability to really step back when you're calmed down and say i'm sorry you know that didn't go very well um can we talk about it and have that
• 27:00 - 27:30 recovery conversation that's something that the masters can do not only that but the one thing we found about the masters that was so interesting was that they had a sense of humor during conflict so how do you get people have a sense of humor turns out that if you build love maps and fondness and admiration and turning toward and we've done this experiment then people's sense of humor increases even during conflict and they can repair and they can be affectionate during conflict so friendship is the basis of
• 27:30 - 28:00 regulating conflict that's pretty interesting because you can change people's behavior in these very neutral moments these tiny moments like in the apartment lab when they're just hanging out it's not very emotional it's not a big deal and all you have to do is build awareness of these bids and the importance of turning toward what we didn't expect and this was a big surprise is that not only are these three ingredients of friendship the basis for dealing with conflict in a constructive manner having a sense of humor and
• 28:00 - 28:30 affection during times when you disagree but they're also the basis of good sex romance and passion in the relationship now let me try to convince you of that that that makes sense i have a book that is called 1001 ways to be romantic it's kind of an interesting book has a lot of really great suggestions like you know some are addressed to husbands some are dressed to wives you know and like one says don't send your wife a dozen roses send
• 28:30 - 29:00 her a rose a day for 12 days kind of cool idea you know write a note with each rose kind of nice well let's look at number 24 which turns out to be again addressed the guys and it says what could be more romantic than sending your wife a golden locket giving your wife a golden locket with your picture in it okay let's think about that love maps fondness and admiration and turning toward let's say love maps i
• 29:00 - 29:30 haven't asked my wife a question in 17 years fondness and admiration we were out to dinner a couple of nights ago and she started telling a story and i said you're not going to tell that story nobody wants to hear that that is so stupid just shut up i said that in public okay fondness and admiration i'm i'm down two now right bids and turning uh you know i don't even notice when she makes a bid and then i give her a golden locket with my picture in it right
• 29:30 - 30:00 and i ask you is that going to be a romantic event in a relationship i don't think so right she's going to drive the suv over it a couple of times really flatten out that golden locket what makes that event romantic you know if i write a poem and we go to our favorite restaurant and i toast to how beautiful her eyes are and i read my you know stupid poem that i wrote i choke up when i read it her eyes filled with tears because love maps fondness and admiration and turning toward are working in the relationship
• 30:00 - 30:30 and so you really build sex and passion and romance in these very very small moments of emotional connection now we learned some surprising things about conflict as well let me tell you what we learned first of all we found that most conflicts in a marriage fact 69 of them are never solved when we study couples four years later we find mostly they're talking about the
• 30:30 - 31:00 same stuff in the same way so that's kind of interesting you know if you know if it's not that changeable then you know what do you do to make a difference in relationships well by building these parts of the relationship you know that fondness and admiration and turning toward and love maps you're actually working on that relationship itself on the way conflict is dealt with in that relationship but 69 percent of the time we found that the same conflicts are
• 31:00 - 31:30 perpetuated and we wound up realizing that when you pick somebody to marry you have automatically inherited your set of unresolvable relationship problems that you'll have for the next 10 20 30 40 years like in my marriage for example you know my wife has to have the house incredibly neat you know and it has to look like a museum whereas i am charmingly sloppy right it's not going to change until she gets therapy and she feels the same way about me she
• 31:30 - 32:00 says i'm organizationally impaired so we have this perpetual issue well most conflicts are perpetual issues now by the way if you married somebody else you wouldn't have those conflicts you'd have a different set but every relationship has these perpetual problems due to these personality differences and the fact that we are much more forgiving toward ourselves than we are toward others so we found two kinds of couples around these perpetual problems one kind really had kind of a dialogue
• 32:00 - 32:30 with perpetual problems you know it's not that the perpetual problems went away it's that they had a relationship with the problems they talked about them and they figured out ways to cope and to some extent you could really say that marriage is last to the extent that you've selected somebody who's irritating qualities you can stand and where the perpetual problems are ones you can deal with whereas if they're perpetual problems that really make you nuts then that relationship is not going to
• 32:30 - 33:00 work out very well and in fact in the couples that really wound up getting divorced their perpetual problems resulted in gridlock this is my visual image of gridlock two fists in opposition right no compromise every time they talk about the issue there's the four horsemen or they get emotionally disengaged they hurt each other's feelings they feel basically not accepted by their partner that's gridlock marital conflict it's like a highway where all the cars are bumper to bumper never goes anywhere it never
• 33:00 - 33:30 moves anywhere it's just frustrating it's just steamy it's awful and so the major problem in making relationships work around conflict is not resolving the conflict because most conflicts don't get resolved it's moving a couple from gridlock to dialogue to where they're coping with the problem now what's the secret of that that's a really interesting question right how do you move somebody from gridlock to dialogue and what a lot of people will say if you went to the library and you know read about marital
• 33:30 - 34:00 therapy or relationships between couples you know they would say well the reason these people aren't compromising about this perpetual problem they're not getting anywhere with it you know they're they're in opposition they're entrenched in their position they're polarized in their positions is because they have personality defects he's a narcissist she is borderline she's hysterical he's self-centered and unempathetic you know in all these ways of describing inadequate personalities
• 34:00 - 34:30 but what we say is the opposite we say if you look at the subtext of what they're arguing about in other words look underneath what they're fighting about maybe they're arguing ostensibly about money they really disagree about spending and saving and their their philosophies about money are really very different but you actually look at what they're what they're talking about underneath that and you find that they're actually arguing about very different things than money they're arguing about basic philosophical
• 34:30 - 35:00 concepts that are very close to their sense of self they're talking about freedom they're talking about power they're talking about caring and love they're talking about what a home is what it means to be a family and so what does that mean it means that within these fists if you could make the relationship safe enough and open these fists there would be a dream a life dream within each position that would fly out like a dove
• 35:00 - 35:30 and the reason they're not compromising is really understandable so instead of us saying to people the reason you're not compromising is that you're arrested in an earlier stage of development you're immature you have a personality defect we say no wonder you couldn't compromise you could no more compromise on this issue then you could respond to somebody who came up to you and said excuse me can i borrow your bones you can't give people your bones right or you die and in the same way you can't
• 35:30 - 36:00 give up the bones of who you are so we tell people the reason you're gridlocked is because you haven't looked at the dream within the conflict the life dream and what you need to do is become a dream catcher and release those dreams make the relationship safe enough ask questions find out what the dreams are within this each person's position and what the history of those dreams are what the life story is the narrative behind each dream and then find a way to honor both dreams
• 36:00 - 36:30 and once both dreams are honored then the the greatest sources of conflict and alienation in a relationship become the greatest sources of intimacy because what are you doing you're building love maps at a deeper level right you're finding out something about meaning and purpose in people's lives now for problems that could be solved what we found was that 31 of the problems that could be solved we found
• 36:30 - 37:00 actually that the masters were doing something really interesting and to summarize what they were doing in one word it was really gentleness they were presenting issues in a very gentle way and they were doing what we call softened startup instead of presenting it in a harsh way they were presenting their issue in a very gentle way and i learned a lot from this in my relationship and i found that you know a lot of times i would get really upset with my wife julie and i say to her julie you are so emotionally unavailable
• 37:00 - 37:30 to me what is wrong with you and i found when i said that she did not want to spend more time with me i don't know why i was expressing my feelings very clearly but then i i watched the masters do it and you know so one day i said to her you know honey i'm getting that old feeling again of being lonely i really miss you i just need more of you in my day not only that but they expressed appreciation so i said you know a couple of weeks ago when we cuddled on the couch
• 37:30 - 38:00 that was really so nice how can we do that again and she said how about now so it was the same complaint right but i softened the startup in fact rather than criticizing her i was still expressing what i needed which was more of her i was really flattering her i was really telling her how much i missed her how much i needed her how much i admired her how important she was to me and saying it very directly which was what the masters were doing the other thing we found is not only are the masters
• 38:00 - 38:30 starting with general startup but they're really accepting influence from one another and in particular guys are accepting influence from women now that was very that was a very interesting thing and it emerged from studying violent relationships a study i did with neil jacobson and uh what we found was that these physically violent guys never said anything to their wives like good point i never thought of that everything they said was no you're not going to control and
• 38:30 - 39:00 influence me they rejected everything they were like baseball players at batting practice you know whatever got tossed to them they hit back so we're very interested in that rejection of influence and we went looked at our newlyweds who were not violent to try to see what predicted whether they'd stay together or get divorced and we looked at women accepting influence for men men accepting influence from women and it didn't predict with women but for guys who came up to close to where the women were because the women were accepting
• 39:00 - 39:30 influence in all relationships at a pretty high level the guys who were accepting influence their relationships stayed together and we're living through a period in history where women are being emancipated on an international scale in most nations and they're being empowered economically psychologically politically and after millennia of oppression and the guys who realize that this is a time to really honor women and it makes a difference to honor your wife's dreams it makes a
• 39:30 - 40:00 difference to to convey that honor just for example like putting down the toilet seat after you go to the bathroom you know now it takes as much work for a woman to put it down is for a man to put it down putting it down it really conveys that you're thoughtful and that you're honoring your partner it's a small thing but the men who accept influence from their partner and say well it's a good point i never thought of that tell me more about your opinion you know let me consider that let me find out why you see things the way you
• 40:00 - 40:30 see things those guys are way ahead of the game okay now not only did the masters have gentle startup and the guys accept influence but also they moved toward compromise and they were able to compromise and one of the things they did was very interesting and because we collected data on heart rate and blood flow velocity on physiology while people were interacting we found that calming down was a very very important part of this whole equation when your
• 40:30 - 41:00 heart rate gets above 100 beats a minute your body starts secreting adrenaline and your arteries start constricting and blood flow shuts down to the gut in the kidney and you start sweating more blood pressure increases the kidney starts producing a substance called renin which leads to angiotensin which also increases blood volume and blood pressure all this stuff is going on well it has adaptive value when you're trying to escape from a predator you know or
• 41:00 - 41:30 there's a car coming in your lane and you have to get out of the way right that's adaptive but when you're in the middle of a marital discussion this kind of physiological arousal is very maladaptive because you cannot process information very well you can't be very creative you know you're not a very good problem solver when your heart rate gets above 100 beats a minute so what really has to happen is people have to calm down and take breaks and really calm themselves and self-soothe so in one study we did we actually did
• 41:30 - 42:00 this trick with people we waited for their heart rate to get above 100 beats a minute and we went out and said to the couple we're having some trouble with our equipment would you stop talking about this problem until we repair it and we gave them magazines to read right now it wasn't true we actually the equipment was working we waited actually for their heart rate to go down down down down down and when it went back to baseline we came in and said okay the equipment's working now you can talk about the issue again why did we do that we wanted to see if it would be
• 42:00 - 42:30 different with their discussion of the problem would be different when their heart rates were low than when they were high i can tell you for for the most part it was like a different relationship when the heart rate was low all of a sudden people had a sense of humor you know they listened well they were more creative problem solvers so we learned from this that you know reducing flooding and physiologically reducing your your arousal is a very important part and one of the most important thing you can do to really
• 42:30 - 43:00 make that happen is to take a break call a timeout and what we found is studying violent couples was that they never did that whenever they had a violent fight there was one person who wanted to get away from the other and have a time out and the other one say no way you're not abandoning me you're not having a timeout and so the conflict would escalate so monitoring your physiological arousal is very important now this is nobody's fault right i mean when your heart rate gets up you get defensive you know you're really in a
• 43:00 - 43:30 state of fight or flight and there's no way you can be a good problem solver and you can listen well and that gets us to the final part of this theory and these principles for making relationship work is the idea of shared meaning and a shared meaning system and this is really one of the most important things about relationships is that what people do in relationships that really work well is there feel like they're building something something beyond just the two of them
• 43:30 - 44:00 they feel like being together has some meaning and purpose and there are many ways in which people create meaning and purpose most people do it really unintentionally without talking about it without thinking about why they're doing what they're doing and what they're doing one important way of people build meaning is by the way they move through time together now what i want to suggest to you is that every relationship even if people come from the same race the same religion the same part of the country the same ethnic group every
• 44:00 - 44:30 relationship is a cross-cultural experience so people create meaning thinking about their cultural legacy their heritage they think about their mission in life what they want to leave the world with and that relationship either supports that mission and legacy or not they create meaning in the way they move through time together right they create meaning and how they think about themselves as a son as a daughter as a friend as a brother or sister as a
• 44:30 - 45:00 mother and a father as a husband or wife and all of these ways you know in all of these roles and all of these ways people create meaning now you can do it intentionally or you can do it unintentionally but if you do it intentionally then you create the shared meaning system and what are we doing there we're really again building love maps right so it really comes back to the beginning to friendship so let me summarize there are really three parts to making a relationship uh a successful relationship the one that works out over
• 45:00 - 45:30 time and gets better over time one thing is really the quality of friendship and all you have to do for that is build love maps build fondness and admiration which is affection respect and notice bids for connection and turn toward your partner rather than away and against and when that happens you're in a state of positive sentiment override rather than negative and that helps you really repair it helps you have a recovery conversation after a fight helps you regulate the conflict and repair when it
• 45:30 - 46:00 happens and i also told you that during conflict most problems don't get solved in a relationship people just adapt to them and when they don't adapt to them it's because they're really gridlocked on a conflict and those horrible conflicts the worst ones really can be the greatest sources of intimacy if you wind up opening those fists and releasing the dreams within the conflict and honoring one another's dreams and that's actually the tip of the iceberg because it's part of creating a shared meaning system
• 46:00 - 46:30 together and that's what makes relationships work well thank you very much for listening [Applause] [Music] we hope you've enjoyed this special presentation of dr john gutman's making marriage work if you'd like to own a copy of this program or any of better life media's programs please visit our website at betterlifemedia.com where you'll find all types of valuable life improvement information
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