Every marriage’s disintegration is marked by the same four warning signs that researchers John and Julie Gottman can spot before a couple even finishes their first sentence.
The founders of the Gottman Institute break down decades of lab research on why relationships collapse, and what to look for in a partner so they can make it 50 years by your side.
About the speakers: Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman and Dr. John Gottman co-founded of The Gottman Institute and Affective Software. John is the author or co-author of over 250 published academic articles and more than 50 books. He is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Washington, where he founded “The Love Lab” at which much of his research on couples’ interactions was conducted. Julie is a highly respected licensed clinical psychologist and educator. She co-created of Loving Couples Loving Children, co-created the popular Art & Science of Love weekend workshops for couples, and co-designed the national clinical training program in Gottman Couples Therapy.
Timestamps
00:00:38 Chapter 1: Why relationships fall apart
00:07:06 The four relationship killers
00:12:52 Betrayal, trust, and bids for connection
00:20:09 Is it ever too late?
00:24:35 Chapter 2: How couples successfully repair a relationship
00:27:30 The four stages of healing betrayal
00:36:21 The one thing great couples do
00:42:57 Chapter 3: Defining love
00:48:53 The secret to a great sex life
00:54:24 Love myths, busted
00:58:06 Reasons to not give up on love
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Transcript
Below is a transcript of the first five minutes of this video interview. This is a true verbatim transcript that captures the conversation exactly as it happened. If you’d like to read the full transcript while following along with the video, click here.
[Julie] I’m Julie Gottman.
[John] And I’m John Gottman. I am a senior scientist at Gottman Incorporated. I’m a co-founder of Affective Software.
[Julie] I’m the co-founder of the Gottman Institute, also the co-founder of Affective Software. John and I work together as well as have a relationship together.
Today on Big Think, we’re going to be talking about how relationships fall apart, how relationships repair themselves, and how to sustain a long-lasting and loving relationship.
Chapter 1: Why relationships fall apart
[John] Over time, really, relationships end with a whimper, not a bang for the most part. People kind of start ignoring the relationship. A good example is the Sloan study that was done of dual career couples where they followed couples over time. These couples had young children and they were very surprised to find that in a typical evening, the partners spent less than 10% of the evening in the same room. And so over time, these couples, for that erosion, they really wound up ignoring the relationship. Their relationships devolved into a long to-do list rather than them really continuing play and fun and adventure and romance in the relationship. The relationship kind of got ignored over time. People became more distant. And in our research, we found that they kind of led parallel lives, like two railroad tracks.
[Julie] So when a couple comes to me and they say, you know, we’ve lost something, but we don’t know what. Well, that can mean a number of things. It can mean that the way they talk about problems is terribly conflicted. They used to be able to really work on their problems calmly and gently, reach compromises, but now something has changed.
So what’s changed? Well, it could be that they’ve moved into criticism, they’ve moved into expressions of contempt, they’ve moved into much more defensiveness or even what we call getting flooded, which means moving into fight or flight when they’re addressing their partner and listening to their partner. That means they’re not gonna be able to hear what their partner is really saying. Or, the opposite that they’re very, very distant, and they don’t talk about their problems at all. They’re silent. This is really what we call a devitalized relationship. It’s lost its life energy. It’s lost its connection.
What does distress look like in a couple when they’re walking into my office? Well, it can look like several things. One, I have a long couch in my office, so where do they sit? Do they sit together, shoulder to shoulder, or are they sitting at the far ends, clinging to the end of the couch? Also, People will not look at each other when they’re in distress. They’ll look at me and they’re hoping that I’ll serve as a referee for who to nail, right? Who is the person who is vastly superior and who is the other one who’s making all the mistakes?
That’s not how this therapy works. And so part of what I’m doing in the very beginning of therapy is Is looking from one partner to the other partner. And sometimes if one person is only looking at me, I’ll look at them, then look at the other, which I hope will guide that partner to look at the other along with me. So we’re really building more of a relationship in the therapy where the two partners are talking to one another, as well as including me.
[John] What drew me to the topic of studying relationships was my complete incompetence at relationships. And my best friend Bob Levenson and I shared that incompetence and we decided to set up a lab. One of the surprising things that Bob Levenson and I discovered was that 69% of all conflicts are perpetual. By bringing couples in every two years or three years or six years and finding out what they fought about, we found that 69% of the time there are these perpetual problems that never go away. You know, most of them have to do with differences in personality or lifestyle or their values, and they disagree about these issues and keep coming back to them over and over again. The masters of relationships have these perpetual problems as well, but they approach them in a different way. They kind of are able to communicate an acceptance of their partner's personality and some humor about the differences and then they start working on them and they arrive at temporary compromises.
Disaster couples deal with these perpetual problems in a different way. They really spin their wheels on the problem. They wind up becoming more alienated. They vilify one another in their minds and they see the problems as really the result of the other partner's defects and withdraw from the problem as much as they can.
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