Masters of Love
Science says lasting relationships come down to—you guessed it—kindness and generosity.
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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.”
The masters, by contrast, showed low
physiological arousal. They felt calm and connected together, which
translated into warm and affectionate behavior, even when they fought.
It’s not that the masters had, by default, a better physiological
make-up than the disasters; it’s that masters had created a climate of
trust and intimacy that made both of them more emotionally and thus
physically comfortable.
Gottman wanted to know more
about how the masters created that culture of love and intimacy, and how
the disasters squashed it. In a follow-up study in 1990, he designed a
lab on the University of Washington campus to look like a beautiful bed
and breakfast retreat. He invited 130 newlywed couples to spend the day
at this retreat and watched them as they did what couples normally do on
vacation: cook, clean, listen to music, eat, chat, and hang out. And
Gottman made a critical discovery in this study—one that gets at the
heart of why some relationships thrive while others languish.
Throughout the day, partners would
make requests for connection, what Gottman calls “bids.” For example,
say that the husband is a bird enthusiast and notices a goldfinch fly
across the yard. He might say to his wife, “Look at that beautiful bird
outside!” He’s not just commenting on the bird here: he’s requesting a
response from his wife—a sign of interest or support—hoping they’ll
connect, however momentarily, over the bird.
The wife now has a choice. She can respond by either “turning toward”
or “turning away” from her husband, as Gottman puts it. Though the
bird-bid might seem minor and silly, it can actually reveal a lot about
the health of the relationship. The husband thought the bird was
important enough to bring it up in conversation and the question is
whether his wife recognizes and respects that.
People who turned toward their partners in the study responded by
engaging the bidder, showing interest and support in the bid. Those who
didn’t—those who turned away—would not respond or respond minimally and
continue doing whatever they were doing, like watching TV or reading the
paper. Sometimes they would respond with overt hostility, saying
something like, “Stop interrupting me, I’m reading.”
These bidding interactions had profound effects on marital
well-being. Couples who had divorced after a six-year follow up had
“turn-toward bids” 33 percent of the time. Only three in ten of their
bids for emotional connection were met with intimacy. The couples who
were still together after six years had “turn-toward bids” 87 percent of
the time. Nine times out of ten, they were meeting their partner’s
emotional needs.
* * *
By observing these types of interactions, Gottman can predict with up
to 94 percent certainty whether couples—straight or gay, rich or poor,
childless or not—will be broken up, together and unhappy, or together
and happy several years later. Much of it comes down to the spirit
couples bring to the relationship. Do they bring kindness and
generosity; or contempt, criticism, and hostility?
“There’s a habit of mind that the
masters have,” Gottman explained in an interview, “which is this: they
are scanning social environment for things they can appreciate and say
thank you for. They are building this culture of respect and
appreciation very purposefully. Disasters are scanning the social
environment for partners’ mistakes.”
“It’s not just scanning environment,” chimed in Julie Gottman. “It’s scanning the partner for what the partner is doing right or scanning him for what he’s doing wrong and criticizing versus respecting him and expressing appreciation.”
Contempt, they have found, is the
number one factor that tears couples apart. People who are focused on
criticizing their partners miss a whopping 50 percent of positive things
their partners are doing and they see negativity when it’s not there.
People who give their partner the cold shoulder—deliberately ignoring
the partner or responding minimally—damage the relationship by making
their partner feel worthless and invisible, as if they’re not there, not
valued. And people who treat their partners with contempt and criticize
them not only kill the love in the relationship, but they also kill their partner's ability to fight off viruses and cancers. Being mean is the death knell of relationships.
Kindness, on the other hand, glues couples together. Research
independent from theirs has shown that kindness (along with emotional
stability) is the most important predictor of satisfaction and stability
in a marriage. Kindness makes each partner feel cared for, understood,
and validated—feel loved. “My bounty is as boundless as the sea,” says
Shakespeare’s Juliet. “My love as deep; the more I give to thee, / The
more I have, for both are infinite.” That’s how kindness works too:
there’s a great deal of evidence showing
the more someone receives or witnesses kindness, the more they will be
kind themselves, which leads to upward spirals of love and generosity in
a relationship.
There are two ways to think about kindness. You can think about it as
a fixed trait: either you have it or you don’t. Or you could think of
kindness as a muscle. In some people, that muscle is naturally stronger
than in others, but it can grow stronger in everyone with exercise.
Masters tend to think about kindness as a muscle. They know that they
have to exercise it to keep it in shape. They know, in other words, that
a good relationship requires sustained hard work.
“If your partner expresses a need,” explained Julie Gottman, “and you
are tired, stressed, or distracted, then the generous spirit comes in
when a partner makes a bid, and you still turn toward your partner.”
In that moment, the easy response may be to turn away from your
partner and focus on your iPad or your book or the television, to mumble
“Uh huh” and move on with your life, but neglecting small moments of
emotional connection will slowly wear away at your relationship. Neglect
creates distance between partners and breeds resentment in the one who
is being ignored.
The hardest time to practice kindness is, of course, during a
fight—but this is also the most important time to be kind. Letting
contempt and aggression spiral out of control during a conflict can
inflict irrevocable damage on a relationship.
“Kindness doesn’t mean that we don’t express our anger,” Julie
Gottman explained, “but the kindness informs how we choose to express
the anger. You can throw spears at your partner. Or you can explain why
you’re hurt and angry, and that’s the kinder path.”
John Gottman elaborated on those spears: “Disasters will say things
differently in a fight. Disasters will say ‘You’re late. What’s wrong
with you? You’re just like your mom.’ Masters will say ‘I feel bad for
picking on you about your lateness, and I know it’s not your fault, but
it’s really annoying that you’re late again.’”
* * *
For the hundreds of thousands of couples getting married this
month—and for the millions of couples currently together, married or
not—the lesson from the research is clear: If you want to have a stable,
healthy relationship, exercise kindness early and often.
When
people think about practicing kindness, they often think about small
acts of generosity, like buying each other little gifts or giving one
another back rubs every now and then. While those are great examples of
generosity, kindness can also be built into the very backbone of a
relationship through the way partners interact with each other on a
day-to-day basis, whether or not there are back rubs and chocolates
involved.
One way to practice kindness is by being generous about your
partner’s intentions. From the research of the Gottmans, we know that
disasters see negativity in their relationship even when it is not
there. An angry wife may assume, for example, that when her husband left
the toilet seat up, he was deliberately trying to annoy her. But he may
have just absent-mindedly forgotten to put the seat down.
Or say a wife is running late to dinner (again), and the husband
assumes that she doesn’t value him enough to show up to their date on
time after he took the trouble to make a reservation and leave work
early so that they could spend a romantic evening together. But it turns
out that the wife was running late because she stopped by a store to
pick him up a gift for their special night out. Imagine her joining him
for dinner, excited to deliver her gift, only to realize that he’s in a
sour mood because he misinterpreted what was motivating her behavior.
The ability to interpret your partner’s actions and intentions
charitably can soften the sharp edge of conflict.
“Even in relationships where people
are frustrated, it’s almost always the case that there are positive
things going on and people trying to do the right thing,” psychologist
Ty Tashiro told me. “A lot of times, a partner is trying to do the right thing even if it’s executed poorly. So appreciate the intent.”
Another powerful kindness strategy revolves around shared joy. One of
the telltale signs of the disaster couples Gottman studied was their
inability to connect over each other’s good news. When one person in the
relationship shared the good news of, say, a promotion at work with
excitement, the other would respond with wooden disinterest by checking
his watch or shutting the conversation down with a comment like, “That’s
nice.”
We’ve all heard that partners should be there for each other when the going gets rough. But research shows that being there for each other when things go right is
actually more important for relationship quality. How someone responds
to a partner’s good news can have dramatic consequences for the
relationship.
In one study from 2006, psychological researcher Shelly Gable and her
colleagues brought young adult couples into the lab to discuss recent
positive events from their lives. They psychologists wanted to know how
partners would respond to each other’s good news. They found that, in
general, couples responded to each other’s good news in four different
ways that they called: passive destructive, active destructive, passive constructive, and active constructive.
Let’s say that one partner had recently received the excellent news
that she got into medical school. She would say something like “I got
into my top choice med school!”
If her partner responded in a passive destructive manner,
he would ignore the event. For example, he might say something like:
“You wouldn’t believe the great news I got yesterday! I won a free
t-shirt!”
If her partner responded in a passive constructive way,
he would acknowledge the good news, but in a half-hearted, understated
way. A typical passive constructive response is saying “That’s great,
babe” as he texts his buddy on his phone.
In the third kind of response, active destructive, the
partner would diminish the good news his partner just got: “Are you sure
you can handle all the studying? And what about the cost? Med school is
so expensive!”
Finally, there’s active constructive responding. If her
partner responded in this way, he stopped what he was doing and engaged
wholeheartedly with her: “That’s great! Congratulations! When did you
find out? Did they call you? What classes will you take first semester?”
Among the four response styles, active
constructive responding is the kindest. While the other response styles
are joy-killers, active constructive responding allows the partner to
savor her joy and gives the couple an opportunity to bond over the good
news. In the parlance of the Gottmans, active constructive responding is
a way of “turning toward” your partners bid (sharing the good news)
rather than “turning away” from it.
Active constructive responding is critical for healthy relationships.
In the 2006 study, Gable and her colleagues followed up with the
couples two months later to see if they were still together. The
psychologists found that the only difference between the couples who
were together and those who broke up was active constructive responding.
Those who showed genuine interest in their partner’s joys were more
likely to be together. In an earlier study,
Gable found that active constructive responding was also associated
with higher relationship quality and more intimacy between partners.
There are many reasons why relationships fail, but if you look at
what drives the deterioration of many relationships, it’s often a
breakdown of kindness. As the normal stresses of a life together pile
up—with children, career, friend, in-laws, and other distractions
crowding out the time for romance and intimacy—couples may put less
effort into their relationship and let the petty grievances they hold
against one another tear them apart. In most marriages, levels of
satisfaction drop dramatically within the first few years together. But
among couples who not only endure, but live happily together for years
and years, the spirit of kindness and generosity guides them forward.
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