EMILY
ESFAHANI SMITH, THE ATLANTIC
Science
says lasting relationships come down to—you guessed it—kindness and generosity.
Every day
in June, the most popular wedding month of the year, about 13,000 American
couples will say “I do,” committing to a lifelong relationship that will be
full of friendship, joy, and love that will carry them forward to their final
days on this earth.
Except,
of course, it doesn’t work out that way for most people.
The
majority of marriages fail, either ending in divorce and separation or
devolving into bitterness and dysfunction.
Of all
the people who get married, only three in ten remain in healthy, happy
marriages, as psychologist Ty Tashiro points out in his book "The Science
of Happily Ever After," which was published earlier this year.
Social
scientists first started studying marriages by observing them in action in the
1970s in response to a crisis: Married couples were divorcing at unprecedented
rates. Worried about the impact these divorces would have on the children of
the broken marriages, psychologists decided to cast their scientific net on
couples, bringing them into the lab to observe them and determine what the
ingredients of a healthy, lasting relationship were.
Was each
unhappy family unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy claimed, or did the miserable
marriages all share something toxic in common?
Psychologist
John Gottman was one of those researchers. For the past four decades, he has
studied thousands of couples in a quest to figure out what makes relationships
work. I recently had the chance to interview Gottman and his wife Julie, also a
psychologist, in New York City. Together, the renowned experts on marital
stability run The Gottman Institute, which is devoted to helping couples build
and maintain loving, healthy relationships based on scientific studies.
John
Gottman began gathering his most critical findings in 1986, when he set up “The
Love Lab” with his colleague Robert Levenson at the University of Washington.
Gottman and Levenson brought newlyweds into the lab and watched them interact
with each other.
With a
team of researchers, they hooked the couples up to electrodes and asked the
couples to speak about their relationship, like how they met, a major conflict
they were facing together, and a positive memory they had. As they spoke, the
electrodes measured the subjects' blood flow, heart rates, and how much they
sweat they produced. Then the researchers sent the couples home and followed up
with them six years later to see if they were still together.
From the
data they gathered, Gottman separated the couples into two major groups:
the masters and the disasters. The masters were still
happily together after six years. The disasters had either broken up or were
chronically unhappy in their marriages.
When the
researchers analyzed the data they gathered on the couples, they saw clear
differences between the masters and disasters. The disasters looked calm during
the interviews, but their physiology, measured by the electrodes, told a
different story. Their heart rates were quick, their sweat glands were active,
and their blood flow was fast. Following thousands of couples longitudinally,
Gottman found that the more physiologically active the couples were in the lab,
the quicker their relationships deteriorated over time.
But what
does physiology have to do with anything? The problem was that the disasters
showed all the signs of arousal — of being in fight-or-flight mode — in their
relationships. Having a conversation sitting next to their spouse was, to their
bodies, like facing off with a saber-toothed tiger.
Even when
they were talking about pleasant or mundane facets of their relationships, they
were prepared to attack and be attacked. This sent their heart rates soaring
and made them more aggressive toward each other. For example, each member of a
couple could be talking about how their days had gone, and a highly aroused
husband might say to his wife, “Why don’t you start talking about your day. It
won’t take you very long.”
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