Name: Why Marriages Succeed or Fail
Rating: 4.7 (206 reviews)
Author: John Gottman

What’s In It for me? Learn how to future-proof your relationship.

Marriage. It usually starts out so well. None of the couples beaming in wedding photos think that they’ll be the ones to get divorced. But, statistically speaking, there’s a 50 percent chance that they will. Not that anyone actually says that in wedding speeches. When it comes to love, we’re eternal optimists.

So what goes wrong? What happens between the time when the lovebirds are uttering sincere vows to always “love and cherish” each other and the moment they’re sitting in a lawyer’s office dividing up the marital property?

That’s what psychologist John Gottman has dedicated his entire career to figuring out: what is it that determines which couples stay together, and which couples don’t. When he was starting out, in the 1970s, psychologists had an enormous range of theories, but no one had done sustained empirical research. Gottman changed that. He devised a special experiment, and invited hundreds of couples to his lab to participate.

In the experiment, the couples are asked to pick something to argue about for 15 minutes. Each word, facial expression, and vocal inflection is filmed and then analyzed microsecond by microsecond by a team of researchers. The couple’s bodily reactions are also recorded. Does her breathing quicken when he mentions his affair? Does his heart start pounding when he gets defensive? Taken together, the 15 minutes are what Gottman describes as an X-ray of a marriage. Using that X-ray, Gottman and his team can predict which couples will divorce within the next three years. Astonishingly, they have a 94 percent accuracy rate!

In these blinks, you’ll learn

the key signs of a troubled marriage;
practical strategies for improving the communication in your relationship; and
how to change negative dynamics, no matter how entrenched they are.

Mastering three key communication skills can save your marriage.

How do you save a marriage that seems to be stuck in a negative deadlock? Turns out, it’s not as complicated as you may think. Improving how you communicate won’t take years of therapy or some fancy retreat in Bali. In fact, Gottman has isolated three communication skills that will turn your relationship around. Mastering these techniques, he promises, will take you 75 percent of the way to maximizing your marital happiness.

In conclusion: if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

It’s not enough to read about these skills and use them once or twice. The key to really transforming your relationship is to practice these strategies so much that they become as natural to you as the negative patterns once were. This is called overlearning. After all, you’ve had years to practice negative communication patterns. Breaking them will also take lots of practice.

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