Intro To Couple’s Relational Counseling
Introduction video to why someone might be seeking out couples / relational counseling. In addition, provides resources for the individual to pursue on their own.
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Help! Being in Quarantine is Creating Conflict
COVID19 has changed the way we do business, how we finish out the school year, and how we engage with others. Unfortunately, changes in routines can also create conflict. The anxiety and uncertainties only compound to a sense of “new normal” many of us are figuring out as we find ourselves sharing a space, while practicing social distancing.
6 Keys to Staying in Love
In the dating world, most intimate relationships don’t turn into long-term commitments. This happens for different reasons: Some loving partners can’t get past the challenges that ultimately end their commitment to each other. Some give up early, not wanting to waste time on something that is already problematic; they just aren’t willing to put energy into a relationship that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Others, determined to make the relationship work, hold on to the bitter end, hoping that their continued efforts will eventually succeed.
Many of these frustrated relationship seekers come into therapy to try to understand what they might be doing wrong. They’ve made their best efforts and still can’t make a relationship last. And they’re aware that some couples face the same odds, yet stay together. They want to know what these people do differently that keeps their love alive. Are they just lucky people who have magically found the right person, or do they make relationships work no matter what? And if they do, what is their formula for success?
After four decades of working with couples, I have to say, yes, they are different in some ways. Although they face the same issues, couples that remain together approach their problems in unique ways that don’t damage their relationship. It is remarkable to watch these couples face situations that might unravel another relationship, and yet consistently come out caring more deeply about each other.
Stay-in-love couples each have their own style, but they also have a lot in common. These six qualities are the most notable. It is my hope that they will inspire others to find their own successful paths.
1. How they resolve their conflicts.
Every couple argues. If they are honest and authentic, they accept the fact that they will never see eye-to-eye on everything. They know that differences of opinion can add interest and intrigue to a relationship—if those disputes are worked through successfully. They also know that unresolved repeated conflicts can threaten and ultimately damage relationships, and make it much harder for them to get back what they’ve lost.
In contrast, stay-in-love couples ache when their disagreements drive them apart. After a conflict, they strive to resolve the situation and make up as soon as possible. Rather than needing to win, they want to understand why they disagreed and how they could have done it better. Judgment is not an issue—inquiry and learning are. Even when they are hurt or angry, they still want their partner to feel heard and supported.
2. They refuse to assign blame.
During a conflict, so many couples blame their partner for what’s going wrong. It’s hard for anyone to look at his or her role in conflict during the middle of strong emotions. Perhaps to avoid guilt or feeling righteous, some people try to make the other person into the bad guy, hoping they will win the argument that way. Many people will cave in when they feel badly about themselves, and counter-accusations sometimes successfully win the argument.
The sadness in assigning blame is that it doesn’t work in the long run. There are always two sides to every story, and more than one way to see the truth. Every intimate partner aches to be heard and understood, even if there are conflicting realities. When intimate partners use blame to get their way, they are likely to push their partners into defensiveness, anger, or withdrawal, and risking their capacity to keep their love alive.
Stay-in-love couples know that their partner’s views must be respected and honored, especially if they are different from their own. They strive to understand them to find a truth that allows for both. That doesn’t mean they will always agree, but they know that every connection and every disconnection must be the responsibility of both. It is a “we do this to each other,” and never, “This is your fault because you’re obviously the problem here.”
3. How they respond to requests for connection.
An important part of every quality relationship is the ability for both partners to authentically agree to honor the other’s feelings and thoughts, especially when they are trying to work through difficult emotional issues.
Many partners automatically treat each other this way when their relationship is new, but as their relationship matures, they may come to feel burdened or disrupted by continuous requests for connection, and not want to be immediately available anymore. In trying to dismiss their partner’s desires quickly, they may resort to trying to “fix” the situation without taking the time for deeper inquiry. Or perhaps a preoccupied partner will minimize the other’s feelings to try to neutralize them. An irritated partner may reply in with sarcasm or even withdraw.
Partners who remain in love do not ignore a partner who wants to connect for any reason. Even if they are distracted or preoccupied, they take the time to understand what their partner needs, and decide together how they should handle it. If that cannot happen at the time, both partners make an agreement as to when they will resolve it. And they do not mock, minimize, or disregard the other’s desire to connect.
4. How they parent each other.
In every intimate love relationship there is always an underlying “criss-cross” interaction between the symbolic parent in one partner and the symbolic child in the other. It is impossible to be open and vulnerable to another human being without those interactions happening from time to time.
People are never just the age they are in the current moment. They are a composite of all the ages they’ve ever been. If a partner had heartbreak in childhood and a situation causes it to re-emerge in the present, his or her partner can help ease, and even heal, that pain by acting as a nurturing symbolic parent.
Those automatic responses are notable in the early stages of a love relationship. Intimate partners often refer to each other as if they were talking to young children. They call each other “baby” or “sweetie-pie,” and every couple knows what their unique, tender words mean to both of them. It is a normal interaction.
As relationships mature, many partners begin to feel less willing to give that kind of unconditional nurturing, and might not be as automatically available when the other slips into a younger place. When no longer loved in that tender way, the needy partner may feel abandoned or rejected. They may feel they must behave more carefully, having lost the confidence that anything they say or do will be automatically supported. The symbolic parent-child safety net that was available at the beginning of the relationship is no longer always extended.
Stay-in-love couples understand how important it is to never let those special “sweet spots” die. They know that their partner will sometimes need to feel that guaranteed comfort and safety, and are more than willing to act as the good parent when asked. They know that it is natural for people to feel insecure and young at times, and they want to be there for each other when that happens.
5. How they deal with control.
Many relationships fail because one partner attempts to dominate the other, or fears being controlled by the other. Many people had childhood experiences in which they felt unimportant and were expected to submit to whatever was demanded of them. They often bring those trauma–memories into their adult relationships, fearful of being controlled again. Those fears can lead people to push for a partner’s automatic compliance, to allay that anxiety. Many partners alternately pull a partner close and then push him or her away, fearing that intimacy and commitment will lead to entrapment and being controlled.
Stay-in-love partners know that the need to feel in control at times is natural. It allows a person to be fully respected as the stronger one in the relationship at that moment. The other partner has confidence in his or her own autonomy to not react defensively or take it personally. He or she doesn’t feel the need to either counter-control or to automatically submit. Comfort with the situation allows them to seek understanding about what may be driving those behaviors. They also know that they will need to be the need-to-control partner at other times, and will receive the same understanding and respect.
These couples also know how quickly interactions can deteriorate if both want to be in control at the same time. When those situations arise, they work to stay centered and calm, agreeing to take turns listening to what each other need and feel. When they fully understand what both of their desires for control are about, they decide how to best help each other get their underlying needs met.
6. How they respond to urgency.
Newly-in-love couples are most often each other’s first priorities, so they respond immediately to their partner’s distress signals. As life’s obligations intervene and the couple resumes their normal routines, those requests must be absorbed into other priorities. Even though they may realize that being the center of someone’s life naturally somewhat diminishes over time, many partners feel neglected when that happens. They may become more demanding or feel neglected, and begin to blur the line between truly important requests and less urgent ones, fearful that neither may be met.
Stay-in-love couples are authentic, open, and self-reliant, but they also urgently need one another at times. They trust that the other will never take advantage of that immediate availability, and that when an urgent S.O.S. call goes out, their partner will rapidly respond without question or challenge. They trust that those requests are not expressed fraudulently or without concern for the other’s needs. Stay-in-love partners understand the sanctity of personal boundaries, and take pride in their own autonomy. They have learned that one of the most important qualities any person can have is the ability to love again after loss. That drives them to practice forgiveness and humility when a conflict is over. Their mutual goals are to resolve and to reconnect, leaving distress behind as soon as possible.
They know that love must include always living in each other’s hearts, whether they are together in the same place or temporarily separate. They know that the future is unwritten and that they can be taken from each other at any time. The acceptance of that truth continuously reminds them that their relationship is only as good as they are able to re-create it in each present moment.
By Randi Gunther Ph.D.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rediscovering-love/201701/6-keys-staying-in-love
‘Magic 6 hours’ could dramatically improve your relationship
When John Gottman talks, I listen.
Actually I’ve never heard him talk, but when he writes, I read.
So when a newly revised edition of his best-selling “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work” (Harmony Books) hit my desk this week, I cracked it open immediately.
Gottman is a psychology professor at the University of Washington and the founder/director of The Gottman Institute, a marital research and counseling center in Seattle.
Maybe you’ve read about his theory on “master couples” versus “disaster couples.”
Co-authored with Nan Silver, “Seven Principles,” which has sold a million-plus copies, was first released in 1999 — before Tinder, before Facebook — heck, before some of us even had cellphones.
The updated version (out next week) offers tips for dealing with digital distractions, including Gottman’s suggestion to agree on rules of tech etiquette: How much are you comfortable with your partner sharing on social media? When is texting/posting off-limits (mealtimes, date nights)? Do you create cyber-free zones in your home?
Most compelling of all, though, is Gottman’s “magic six hours” theory, based on interviews with couples who attended marital workshops at The Gottman Institute.
“We wondered what would distinguish those couples whose marriages continued to improve from those whose marriages did not,” Gottman writes. “To our surprise, we discovered that they were devoting only an extra six hours a week to their marriage.”
If your first thought is, “Only? Where am I going to find an extra six hours in my week?” — I hear you.
If that was not your first thought, forget I said anything.
Anyway, back to the winning formula.
Couples who saw their relationships improve devoted extra time each week to six categories.
First up: Partings
“Make sure that before you say goodbye in the morning you’ve learned about one thing that is happening in your spouse’s life that day,” Gottman writes. “From lunch with the boss to a doctor’s appointment to a scheduled phone call with an old friend.”
(Two minutes per day for five days, for a grand total of 10 minutes per week.)
Second: Reunions
Gottman recommends greeting your partner each day with a hug and kiss that last at least six seconds and ending each workday with stress-reducing conversation that lasts at least 20 minutes. (About 1 hour and 40 minutes per week.)
Third: Admiration and appreciation
Spend five minutes every day finding a new way to communicate genuine appreciation for your spouse, he says. (35 minutes per week.)
Fourth: Affection
“Show each other physical affection when you’re together during the day, and make sure to always embrace before going to sleep,” he writes. (Five minutes per day, seven days a week: 35 minutes.)
Fifth: Weekly date
For two hours once a week, Gottman recommends one-on-one time, during which you ask each other open-ended questions. “Think of questions to ask your spouse, like, ‘Are you still thinking about redecorating the bedroom?’ ‘Where should we take our next vacation?’ or ‘How are you feeling about your boss these days?'” (2 hours per week.)
Sixth: State of the union meeting
Spend one hour a week talking about what went right that week, discussing what went wrong and expressing appreciation for each other. “End by each of you asking and answering, ‘What can I do to make you feel loved this coming week?'” he writes. (1 hour per week.)
All of it adds up to six hours per week.
Some of these suggestions sound a tad awkward. “What can I do to make you feel loved this coming week?” reminds me a little too much of the last time I bought a car. (“What can I do to earn your business today?”)
But I like to think of marital advice like the food pyramid: You’re not going to adhere to it every day, but it’s an instructive guide to shape your habits around.
Love In The Age Of Big Data
Once upon a time, in the Pony Expresso cafe in Seattle, a man and a woman began to experience the long-mysterious but increasingly scientifically investigated thing we call love. The first stage is called “limerence.” This is the spine-tingling, heart-twisting, can’t-stop-staring feeling, when it seems as though the world stops whirling and time itself bows down and pauses before the force of your longing. The man, a then-44-year-old University of Washington research psychologist named John Gottman, was drawn to the woman’s wild mane of black curly hair and her creativity: She was an amateur musician and painter as well as a psychologist like himself. The woman, a then-35-year-old named Julie Schwartz, who’d placed a personal ad in the Seattle Weekly that John had answered, was turned on by John’s humble little car—voted the ugliest vehicle in the University of Washington faculty parking lot—and his expansive curiosity. He read physics and math and history and kept a little spiral-bound notebook in his pocket that he used to jot down things his companions said that captivated him.
You might expect love to be the last frontier breached by data. It is the Antarctic of the human experience, richly feeding the oceans of our emotions, yet somehow remaining elusive and unknown. Philosophers have argued over it for millennia without arriving at a satisfactory definition. Poets like Erich Fried capture its strange mix of pleasure and pain, the sense of its essential ungovernability: “It is foolish, says caution / It is impossible, says experience / It is what it is, says love.”
I first encountered Gottman’s research last year in an Atlantic article called “Masters of Love.” It went viral; my own friends posted it on Facebook saying, “This is what it comes down to.” Finally, love had been harnessed in the laboratory, seen, understood and broken into building blocks we could all apply to our lives.
The article proposes a recipe for becoming a love “master” instead of a love “disaster” by responding the right way to what Gottman calls your partner’s “bids for connection.” A “bid” is when your lover points out your kitchen window and marvels, “Look at that beautiful bird outside!” You could go “Wow!” and get binoculars (an active “turn-towards”); mumble “Huh,” and keep reading your newspaper (a passive reaction, less good); or say, “I’m sick of your fucking birds. What about the broken garage door?” Gottman found that masters turn towards their partners’ bids 87 percent of the time. Love, he concluded, comes down to “a habit of mind.”
And habits of mind take work to instill. Everyone at the workshop was given a kit in a box with a handle. Inside were decks of cards proposing questions to help us learn about our partners (“how are you feeling now about being a mother?”) or offering ways to connect erotically (“when you return home tonight, greet each other with a kiss that lasts at least six seconds”). A manual provided us with a vocabulary to demystify and contain some of the scary things that go on in love: fights are “regrettable incidents,” the things that make us feel good together are our “rituals of connection,” the dark inner chasms that regrettable incidents seem to reveal are our “enduring vulnerabilities.”
One of the Gottmans’ employees, Kendra Han, estimated that a quarter of the couples in attendance were the kind of ickily self-aware duos who try this kind of thing for “fun and enrichment” while the majority were in some state of “relational distress.” The prevailing mood was a mix of hope and fragility. “This is already not going well,” I overheard one woman say, laughing a little. “My husband’s late.”
As I watched the Gottmans from my own seat two rows from the stage, I felt anxious, too. I had come with my own love problem to solve.
Some traditional Arab cultures believed that when you fall in love, your lover steals your liver. The ancient Chinese told their children that love could take out your heart. Romantic love, in older human cultures, was often something dark. It involved physical dissolution, the sense of falling apart. It made us act irrationally and tore a hole into the neatly woven fabric of our lives, beckoning us to step through it into a land of terrors. “You get lots of stories of getting tricked,” William Jankowiak, an anthropologist who has extensively studied love in folktales, told me.
JOHN BEGAN TO FEEL AS IF HE COULD EAVESDROP ON A COUPLE SITTING ACROSS FROM HIM IN A RESTAURANT AND GET A PRETTY GOOD SENSE OF THEIR CHANCES OF DIVORCE.
Simon May, a British philosopher who has studied the development of beliefs about love over two millennia of Western culture, suggests that we’ve placed vastly more importance on finding love since the retreat of Christianity and the rise of relativism. “Human love,” he writes in his magisterial Love: A History, “is widely tasked with achieving what once only divine love was thought capable of: to be our ultimate source of meaning and happiness, and of power over suffering and disappointment.” The grounding we used to find in devotion to ideals like nationalism or communism, or in our faith in an ever-caring Shepherd, we now seek from individual, fickle human beings.
After I read May’s theory that love “is now the West’s undeclared religion,” I began to see evidence of it everywhere. “When you get down to it … [love is] the only purpose grand enough for a human life,” writes Sue Monk Kidd in The Secret Life of Bees. At funerals, we praise the way the deceased person loved as the ultimate sign that his life had meaning. Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his Supreme Court opinion legalizing gay marriage nationally, identified marriage as the ultimate wellspring of all the other essential human joys, from “expression” to “spirituality,” while Sheryl Sandberg counsels young women that their choice of a mate is the most important decision of their lives. According to May, we no longer view love as “the rarest of exceptions,” as older cultures did, “but as a possibility open to practically all who have faith in it.”
These expectations are crazy-making, and it’s no wonder scientists have jumped in to try to save us. In the 1930s, sociologists began to generate charts to try to predict what kinds of love marriages would last a lifetime. You could take your own personality traits—loves sewing circles?—and plot them against your beau’s to forecast the happiness and stability of your match.
Starting the ’70s, with divorce on the rise, social psychologists got into the mix. Recognizing the apparently opaque character of marital happiness but optimistic about science’s capacity to investigate it, they pioneered a huge array of inventive techniques to study what things seemed to make marriages succeed or fail. They had partners write down everything they hated or loved about each other and then studied how close the pair subsequently sat together on a couch. They even generated fights, instructing couples to argue over how to pack the car for a vacation while each partner twiddled dials under the laboratory table assessing their mate’s helpfulness. One study showed that couples who did novel things together fared better; another revealed that intense emotions, once believed to be a sign of immaturity in love, could be worked with to create very deep intimacy. Given how central our love partner had become to our well-being—research had begun to show a good marriage was more predictive of long-term health than eating right or not smoking—Sue Johnson of the Ottawa Couple and Family Institute told me she felt like she was “in the most exciting revolution that’s happened in the 20th century for human beings.”
“Imagine proving all those poets and philosophers from way back wrong!” she said. “Finally, we can make sense of love and actually shape it with deliberation.”
♦ ♦ ♦
When John got his start researching couples in the mid-1970s, he was the one who needed help. He’d grown up in Brooklyn and New Jersey a diminutive nerd with few friends. As an adult, his love life felt perpetually unstable and unhappy. He found it hard to be satisfied with the woman he was with. In one two-year relationship, he and a girlfriend argued so much he ended up with stress-induced pneumonia.
Psychology, which he studied at the University of Wisconsin, gave him a way to use his problem-solving mind to attack the question of his own loneliness. Like a science-fiction android who pins electrodes on his human subjects to try to figure out where their emotions come from, John set about creating experiments that were as broad as possible: What does a good relationship look like? What does it feel like to be in it?
His career took off when he met a psychologist named Robert Levenson. Each man turned out to be exactly what the other had needed. Levenson was investigating the remarkable variance in how different people react to stress by testing their heart rates and sweat-gland activity after receiving a jolt. By teaming up with John, he says he finally felt as if he was working on something more “personally relevant and emotionally rich” than administering electric shocks. Meanwhile, by joining with Levenson, John thought he might uncover a way to measure marital happiness that was more “real” than people’s self-reporting on surveys.
Their collaboration led John to create an actual mock apartment where couples could do “ordinary” things like cook and watch TV together. “It was just like being at a bed and breakfast,” he said, “except you were hooked up to electrodes … and there were surveillance cameras hanging from the ceiling.” Then, he harnessed the emerging power of computers to analyze a vast amount of data from the interactions. Professionals trained in interpreting facial expressions evaluated hours of video, rating the couples for emotions like delight, disgust and fear; assistants coded questionnaires the partners filled out about their relationship history for positive and negative feelings; and machines took constant measures of the couples’ heart rates and vascular tone while they flirted and fought.
Years afterwards, the psychologists followed up to see which couples were happy and which had split up. They plugged that information into a computer, along with all the data they’d previously gathered, and asked the machine to create equations that associated certain behaviors and physiology with long-term happiness. What emerged were fascinating and often surprising observations on lasting love. They found that couples that stay happy used a lot of “we,” whereas couples that turned out unhappy used “I,” “me” and “mine.” They also discovered that when partners with a good long-term outlook argued, they somehow managed to maintain a ratio of five positive comments to one negative one. “At the time, everybody was enamored with this idea that romantic relationships were full of fireworks,” Levenson remembered. “Well, that was not the finding. It is the capacity of couples to calm down, to soothe, to sort of reduce the level of arousal for each other, that is the most important factor in predicting whether the marriage will last.”
In the beginning, the two men’s techniques were viewed as dangerously iconoclastic. “When Bob and I were assistant professors getting evaluated for tenure our committee said, ‘Look, you guys are crazy. We can’t predict one person’s behavior. How are we going to predict two people’s behavior? You’ll never find anything. You’ll never get a grant,’” John recalled. But as the astoundingly robust predictions started rolling in, all that changed. John got elected to chair the family psychology research unit of the American Psychological Association. The New York Times profiled his findings. Where John had once felt hopelessly bewildered by love, he began to feel as if he could eavesdrop on a couple sitting across from him in a restaurant and get a pretty good sense of their chances of divorce.
“John had these brilliant insights,” Julie told me, “but nothing was being done with them.”
They imagined that a happy relationship was built consecutively in seven layers. The foundation was a strong friendship, based on John’s laboratory findings that couples who spoke more fluidly and in more detail about each other and their pasts were more likely to stay together. Then came sharing admiration, “turning towards” each others’ bids and developing positive feelings about the coupling. Once that had all clicked into place, a pair could proceed through learning to manage their fights with, among other techniques, a process they dubbed “dreams within conflict,” whereby people try to see the positive dream inside what looks like a partner’s negative position. At the top–the pinnacle of a great relationship–came helping each others’ dreams come true and building a shared sense of purpose, like volunteering or traveling the world.
The “dreams with conflict” technique was inspired by the Gottmans’ own marital strife. One fight involved Julie’s wish, for her 50th birthday, to climb above Mount Everest’s base camp with 10 female friends. “John gets altitude sick on a ladder,” Julie said. He didn’t want her to go. In bed at night, he’d pepper her with questions: “What if you get caught in a blizzard? What if you fall in a glacier? What if you get altitude sick?”
“What if you get hit by a bus?” she’d reply.
Julie invited a sherpa to their house to give a presentation on the trip. The sherpa stood in the living room, 6 feet tall, dark and sexy, and showed slides of fabulous rope bridges snaking over river chasms as her friends ooh-ed and aah-ed. Afterwards, Julie asked John what he thought of the evening. “I don’t trust that sherpa. I think he just wants to have sex with you 10 women,” John recalled saying. “I was right about that, by the way.” But he came to realize what seemed like Julie’s peculiar urge to “sleep on rocks where there’s no air” stemmed from her yearning for far-flung adventure born from her difficult childhood.
They also fought over whether to buy a second home. It was a priority for Julie to return to living in the forest, her childhood safe space. John initially refused. Over many “dreams within conflict” discussions, they discovered that John’s intransigence came from his own upbringing. His father, a rabbi, fled Vienna shortly before World War Two with “only some sugar and a lemon.” He counseled his son about the power of feeling free of possessions, including real estate, saying, “The only possessions you can count on are the ones inside your mind.”
Finally, after a year of bickering and breakthroughs, the Gottmans felt as if they’d perfected their method, and they took on a partner to help them turn it into a business. At first, they recruited participants to their workshops by posting fliers and placing pamphlets in therapists’ waiting rooms. But within a few years, such aggressive flogging wasn’t needed anymore. Crowds flocked to the workshops and, later, to the Gottmans’ online store, which offers products like a board game that takes you and your partner, represented by little plastic pieces, on a journey across painted cardboard through the steps to building a fulfilling relationship.
“There’s so much more of a burden placed on marriage now to be your social support system,” Julie reflected. “People turned out to be starving for this knowledge.”
Likewise, surfing the web for the solution that would bring my more recent relationship to heel, I feared we couldn’t make it conform to an ideal template. A recent Quartz article insists that when choosing a life partner, we have to search for the right “eating companion for about 20,000 meals,” “travel companion for about 100 vacations,” “parenting partner” and “career therapist”–all while admitting that contemplating such a project “is like thinking about how huge the universe really is or how terrifying death really is.” The author assures you, though, that using a spreadsheet will help you feel as if it’s “fully in your control.” I guess this is supposed to be empowering; I suspect it actually puts relationships under a kind of pressure beneath which many would crumble. My boyfriend and I came from very different countries, from different kinds of families. That we managed to love each other at all was already a miracle.
When we imagine that every human life and every complex love can be molded to fit a scientifically derived ideal, we cover our eyes to the realities of circumstance–and shame people who can’t manage to twist their circumstances to that ideal. Simon May, the philosopher who writes on love, told me that he’s known people who were accused of basic psychological failings when they couldn’t make their relationships work out. “But we have to take into account all the literature on unhappy love,” he said. “I don’t think it’s just people getting it wrong or not trying hard enough.” He called love an “earthy emotion” that often provokes restless feelings like tension and guilt, and suggested the assumption that every love affair can be managed denies the full humanity of our partners, their own “inscrutable and uncontrollable” natures. They aren’t things we can program for maximum impact like a FitBit.
As I dug a little deeper into the work behind the love articles, I found that some of the people responsible for the science felt it held fewer definitive answers than we want to believe. One of them was Arthur Aron, the Stony Brook research psychologist whose work the Times glossed in “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This.” He was working at his second home in California when I called him. He laughed when I mentioned the Times story. He’d designed the 36 questions, he said, to artificially “create closeness” in a laboratory setting between same-sex heterosexual strangers, not lovers. One of his grad students had also tried the method on some heterosexual opposite-sex pairs, and one pair had, funny enough, fallen in love, but the lab hadn’t followed up with the others.
Aron has studied love in many other experiments, and he’s been struck by how contextual factors influence relationships. “Unfortunately the single biggest [factor], if you look across the world, is stress,” he said. “If you’re very poor, if you’re in a crime-ridden neighborhood, it’s hard for any relationship to work out very well. That’s not one we can do much about as individuals.”
Aron also pointed out that a lot of the science on happy love was based on averages, creating a norm away from which couples can stray very, very far and still be happy. Take a recent study claiming the ideal age to marry is between 25 and 34. The study reflects the center hump of a scattered group of dots representing pairs older and younger that all work in their own way. And the reporting on it outrageously inverts causation. The study’s authors mused that people who married younger might have been less settled, and those who waited until later might have been be more “congenitally cantankerous,” upping their divorce rates. That doesn’t mean arbitrarily marrying in your late twenties would do anything whatsoever to improve your chances. And yet, I still read a story on Vox headlined, “Want to Avoid Divorce? Here’s the Best Age to Get Married.”
John Gottman designed his experiments to allow numerous variables to emerge, creating a much richer formula. But his findings were limited by the pool from which he drew his test subjects, communities in Illinois, Washington, Indiana and the San Francisco Bay Area with their own local habits. “There’s this sort of big mystery at the heart of things,” another psychologist told me.
That psychologist was Robert Levenson–the same man with whom John had pioneered his work. I reached him on the phone at Berkeley, where he now teaches. He and John are still close, and Levenson praised John’s “fierce interest” in what makes marriages last. “It’s not surprising that at the end of the day, after our research, he spent a significant part of his life working on interventions,” Levenson reflected.
But he wasn’t so sure the actions he and John had observed happy couples performing could be turned into a do-it-at-home blueprint. “We actually don’t know what got the happy couples to that point,” he said. What makes two human beings want to turn towards each others’ bids 87 percent of the time, give a shit about the fragile dreams hiding behind each others’ most intransigent and frustrating opinions and have that magical effect on each other like a powerful chemical tranquilizer in the first place? This, he said, still “requires scientific study.”
Kendra Han, the workshop employee, admitted she doesn’t follow up after couples leave the conference to see whether the method made them happier. Two studies conducted by the Gottmans show that the method really can move people along a happiness spectrum: A 2000 intervention given to already-healthy couples expecting a child revealed that it helped them weather the difficulties of becoming parents, and a 2013 Journal of Family Therapy study of 80 couples showed that most maintained gains in marital satisfaction a year after “The Art and Science of Love” workshop.
This is less definitive than the promise to transform disasters into masters, though, and the method wasn’t directly compared to other therapies. Robert Levenson told me couples-therapy purveyors can be reluctant to do comparative studies, and gave a hypothetical example of why based on the finding that happy couples use “we” a lot.
“What if I have the Levenson ‘We’ Therapy, where people come to my ‘We’ training and learn how to use ‘We’?” he asked me. “Then I do a study and compare it with the Gottman approach and it turns out the Gottman approach does much better. But what about my ‘We’ building and my ‘We’ weekends and my ‘We Retreat’ at Club Med?”
But encountering the Gottmans’ lingo—the “enduring vulnerabilities,” the “rituals of connection,” the “turning towards”—suddenly put meaning to the language-less, mysterious eddy of emotions that had been the relationship. It gave them things to do. Donald started sending Donna text messages every afternoon: “How was your day?” When he had a difficult encounter with a testy colleague, Donna shared her admiration for him, telling him how proud she was of him for handling it well. When Donna had a cold and snored, the “old Don,” she said, would have roused her by “huffing and puffing with annoyance.” Instead, he employed the Gottmans’ patented “softened start-up,” waking her gently, expressing concern for her sore throat, and later sending her a note from work thanking her for rolling over to the other side of the bed.
Talking to them by video Skype, I never would have known the two had struggled. They cuddled up to one another in the frame and giggled like smitten high-schoolers as they retold the story of how they met.
“We spotted each other,” Donna grinned, sticking her tongue out at Don.
“She was on a balcony,” Donald said, smiling back. “It was like Romeo and Juliet.”
I also got to watch Julie counsel a couple, Shantel and Paul, using the Gottman Method. The pair comes from a poorer neighborhood in Seattle, and they got free therapy in 2007 in exchange for agreeing to be filmed to help train other Gottman Method counselors. I’d intended to dip in just for a few minutes to get a sense of how Julie worked. But I ended up viewing six hours of the counseling in one afternoon, transfixed. Though Paul and Shantel could hardly have seemed less like me and my partner in their particulars–they had children; a low ebb in their relationship occurred after Paul got shot–so much of the by-turns-playful-and-reproachful dance that they did with each other on Julie’s couch reminded me of my own relationships: the flirty exchanges, the deep concern for each other, the subtle digs at each others’ flaws, the sudden flares of anger as they touched each other on open wounds. Shantel wept as she recounted how Paul criticized her; Paul cried himself as he recalled being abandoned by his godmother and how he fears Shantel’s rejection.
I called Shantel in late July. Like the other couples I spoke to, she reckoned the Gottman Method “kept us married.” Since they’d met as young teens, she and Paul had basically been each other’s only ports in an incredibly stormy world. In his teens, Paul got involved in the drug trade; later, the pair got caught up in the predatory lending crisis and briefly became homeless. Add to that the fact that they had not selected each other to ride out this turmoil on the basis of a problem-solving-compatibility survey but on love, which often, like a trickster determined to upend our tidy plans, draws opposites together and, by reminding us of our emotionally fraught childhood bonds with our parents, brutally reveals just how vulnerable and childlike we really still are. Add to that the fact that our culture teaches us to expect love to “feel right,” to feel like a peaceful resolution rather than an adventure, to feel as calm as faith.
“Every time we got into a huge argument, we thought it must not be ‘meant to be,’” Shantel said. Julie’s techniques gave them a way to navigate the astounding complexity that is a marriage based on love. “One of the biggest things is being able to notice when we are ‘flooded’ and when we are at a place we can’t even engage and giving each other that space,” she told me. “We love telling each other when we’re ‘turning towards’ each other. ‘Hey, I’m making an attempt here to turn towards you. What I did was wrong. It was unfair.’ And the other person is receptive to that because we both have an understanding of what it means.”
In private, the Gottmans are much more nuanced on the impossibility of healing some relationships than they are in public. “Sometimes, really, people’s dreams don’t mesh,” John reflected. “There are all kinds of reasons why therapy can fail.” I got the sense they deeply care about couples in pain—they asked me several times about my own relationship. Their promise that mastering love is possible is, in part, an effort to comfort couples enmeshed in terrifying complexity. “Even if you can give somebody one little nugget of something they can take in, it’s helpful,” Julie said.
I still don’t quite know what’s going to happen with my relationship. But I left the workshop wanting to try the Gottmans’ techniques. They brought to mind a line from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: “The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. … Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way.” The new love science may be just a string in the increasingly huge and windy maze that is contemporary love, no more absolute than all the other ways of thinking about love we’ve invented over 50,000 years—but we need that string.
“I have a different answer,” John said. “I don’t think it’s necessary. When you haven’t been able to build trust, there’s the constant sense that this person isn’t there for you. They’re there for themselves but not for you. But we now know that there are really systematic processes through which people build trust and commitment.” Recently, he’d been working on the mathematics of building trust in relationships based on John Nash’s concept of the cooperative equilibrium, where two players in a game seek the best possible outcome for both of them.
But he also acknowledged that his painful younger relationships were steps on the path to Julie, showing him what he really wanted and how he needed to change. Julie said the same of her first marriage.
If everybody involved had known then what you know now about how to build a good relationship, I asked, could you have made your earlier marriages work?
“No,” Julie said.
“I don’t think so,” John said.
There’s another way to tell the story of how John and Julie fell in love, one that brings to the fore not the scientifically based steps by which they built their coupledom but rather the awesome workings of destiny. I got the sense this story was more important to them than the other one. Revealing it, they curled closer together on the couch, Julie nestling her head into the crook of John’s neck, John massaging her leg.
Two years before she met John, Julie said, she’d had a vision of the man she would spend her life with. Her vision had shown the man from behind. When John got up from the table to pay the bill on their first date at the Pony Expresso, and turned around, she felt a shock so sudden it left her trembling: It was him, the man from her vision. Later, she came to believe fate had brought them together for the higher purpose of helping couples: “I see our predestiny, the sacred holiness, as to do this little tiny bit of healing as tikkun olam”–Jews’ duty to repair the world.
Julie’s scientist brain knows that feelings of intense attraction come down to hormones and pheromones, but, she said, “I don’t know how to put that together with the fact that I had this vision of him.”
Perhaps, someday, a scientifically observable process will allow us to understand exactly what it is, that sense of mysterious destiny we can find in other people, not created but seemingly sent from on high. But is that a world in which we’d actually want to live?
John smiled as he recounted the puzzling sensation he experienced that evening in the Pony Expresso, similar to Julie’s. He’d been unhappy for decades. In the months before that encounter, he said he’d gone on 60 dates, trying to establish a “database” of women to choose from. And then he met Julie and felt unaccountably whole. “I’ve never felt alone since,” he said.
“Oh, sweetie,” Julie murmured. “You’re going to make me cry.”
