How to Make Marriage Work

By Dick Goldberg

The best predictor of life expectancy is not how much you eat or how much you run. Surprisingly it is your marriage. Children of divorce are likely to live four years less than children from intact families. Kids of divorce who in turn are divorced themselves are likely to live eight years less.

Successful marriages are strongly correlated with better health and with greater life satisfaction. Those going through divorce have a much higher rate of heart disease, high blood pressure and emotional hostility than the rest of us. They even have a higher rate of these maladies than someone who is recently widowed.

Divorce rates keep rising, and rising geometrically. A University of Michigan study in 1989 found that if you got married in 1989 the odds of divorce were 67% and that number is rising. Yet despite all this evidence of how important marriage is to one’s well being and how likely a divorce is, little effort is put into enhancing marriages or increasing the likelihood of success. It is easier to get a marriage license than it is to get a driver’s license, you just plunk down a few dollars, fill out a form and off you go.

Hopefully, after reading this information you will have some basic facts and ideas about marriage that will increase your chances for success . Perhaps this information should be shared with and made available to everyone who gets a marriage license. Most of what I will share with you is based on Dr. John Gottman’s research. Dr. Gottman is a professor at the University of Washington- Seattle and for the past 20 years has been studying thousands of couples, videotaping their interactions for hundreds of hours. What he has discovered is that he can predict with 96% accuracy who will divorce and who won’t. In addition, some of what I will share with you is based on my own life experience and experience as a couples counselor.

In Gottman’s books he discusses the four most destructive behaviors to a marriage. They are criticism, contempt, stonewalling and defensiveness. They are all toxic but contempt is poison.

Criticism is disparaging your spouse, not just their behavior. To say, “You are a terrible listener,” or “You are such a slob,” is criticism. The remedy is to substitute complaint. To say, “I would feel better and appreciate it if you listened more attentively to me at dinner…” Or, “It would sure please me if you picked up your clothes off the floor and not leave your dirty dishes in front of the t.v.”

Contempt is criticism “plus.” It is one of the most accurate predictors of divorce. Some examples might include, “You are disgusting,” or “You are stupid,” or “You are worthless.” There is even an universal facial expression to express contempt. It is raising the left side of your mouth and raising your eyebrows, showing disgust.

Stonewalling is refusing to deal with conflicts or problems. It is okay to take a timeout when you are upset and come back to talking about the problem later. However it is very destructive to refuse to talk about problems or conflicts at all.

Defensiveness creates an atmosphere where one spouse is not safe in bringing up problems or issues. For example, if the husband says, “It hurts me when you put me down in front of others like you did last night,” and gets a response like, “I did not and if I did , I am sure you deserved it because you are such an insensitive person. You can be such a jerk.” The spouse who was offended learns to not bring up problems but bury them and let them fester.

If you recognize yourself in any of these behaviors, your relationship is not doomed unless you see a lot of contempt. Most healthy couples do exhibit these behaviors from time to time. What is more important is whether or not you successfully repair and recover from these toxic events. Repair is not complicated. It could be as simple as saying you are sorry or admitting you are wrong. What makes the repairs successful is how rich the relationship is, how much you have in the bank.

So how do you foster a high quality relationship that has a big bank account? First and foremost, be great friends. Know each other’s lives, dreams and hearts. Know what motivates the other person. Listen to each other well. Understand the small and big details of your dear friend’s life.

“Turning to” is a strange sounding but important concept. It means to pay attention. Gottman viewed couples over a long period of time and found many where a spouse would say something they felt was fairly important and their mate would pay no attention. It could be something as simple as the wife saying, “Isn’t our dog cute right now?” and the husband doing nothing but staring out the window continuing his meal as if she had said nothing. Unfortunately, this behavior is not uncommon and a very good predictor of a relationship that is going to die. Turning to could be a simple as just saying, “Yeah.”

Next is fondness and admiration. It is important to see and say the things you admire, respect and love about the other person. It is good to know them, but it is of little value unless you let your partner know that you notice. Also it is helpful to see the glass as half full. For example, one could say, “I just love your energy, it brings so much to our relationship,” versus, “You are really wired a lot of the time, sometimes it is really annoying.”

Every relationship has ongoing conflicts. The ones you started with are often the same ones you have twenty years later. The reality is that about 2/3 of all conflicts are never resolved but are perpetual issues. A successful marriage adapts successfully to these issues so they are not disruptive. The troubled marriage keeps struggling over these more destructively. These issues can be as simple as he is a sports junkie and she hates sports, one is a Democrat and the other a Republican, she spends too much time with her mother and that drives him crazy or one is a workaholic and the other doesn’t care much about work. Learning how to come to terms with or accept these differences is essential. To do that spouses sometimes see the value in the core beliefs that are behind disagreeable viewpoints and learn to live with them even though they may not like them.

Finally, every marriage is a cross-cultural experience. Even if you are both 40, white and Catholic and graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, you both still come from different families, in other words different cultures. It is important to establish shared rituals and meanings to create your own culture. These could be as simple as a mutual love for your dog or you go to the same church or vacation rituals or the way you celebrate birthdays… These things bring you closer.

How couples fight is also an extremely important factor in marital success. Surprisingly there is one simple predictor for how successful or destructive a fight will be. It is important to avoid harsh start-ups or conflicts. For example, “I have had it with your damn yakking on the phone, don’t you ever shut up?” That is likely to not go well. “I miss you company at night. Is there any way you could cut back on your phone calls so we could spend more time together?” That is likely to go a lot more smoothly.

The next negative is something most men are guilty of and women innocent. It is important for your spouse to know that they can have some influence on you, that you let them affect you. For example she says, “We lost our best couple friends. I wish there was some way to cultivate new friends,” and if he totally ignores it, that is not a good indicator. Or if he is walking out the door and she tells him that he has on one brown and one green sock, if he totally ignores it and keeps walking out the door, it is again not a good predictor.

Interestingly, when children play together at the age of four or five, girls are easily influenced by boys’ requests and boys are seldom influenced by girls’ requests for change. The pattern continues unfortunately. This allows men to have a great influence on the successful outcome of their marriage by dropping some of those resistant behaviors.
My own experience in life and as a marriage counselor tells me the following:

Marry someone you would pick as a good friend, even if you were not sexually or romantically attracted to them because sooner or later the honeymoon will end. The infatuation will be over as you have your first fights and realize that your partner is not on a pedestal but just a human being. At this point your relationship will boil down to a friendship, perhaps one with love, companionate love, but not of the same nature as the infatuation it first started with. If you pick someone you are wildly attracted to, but weren’t crazy about as a friend, you will likely soon be in trouble.

Get out your beefs. It certainly can cause pain and conflict at first but if you don’t put out issues to resolve them or deal with them they go under the carpet. As you put more and more of them under the carpet, it will keep rising until it is a wall between the two of you and love will die.

Give compliments and do loving things. Human beings are more fragile in ways than we would like to think. People remember the negatives far longer and with greater emotion than the positives, so when you tell your partner something you don’t like you have to surround it with positives. A suggested ratio is five positives to every one negative. Just make sure your compliments are real.

Don’t expect men to be women or women to be men. The sexes grew up in different cultures. I.e. men might not want to talk about their feelings and women might not be as fast to sex and quicker to romance. The less we can blame our spouse for these shortcomings and understand that it is societal, the less tension there can be in the marriage. Over time some androgyny takes place as you learn from each other.