Introduction — Inside the Seattle Love Lab
A romantic, sexual, long-term committed relationship with another person is still the greatest gift life can offer. The Seven Principles are meant to guard and strengthen that relationship, and to help you add purpose and meaning to the life you build together.
John Gottman learned them by watching real couples up close in his Seattle lab, which people came to call the Love Lab. What he found there is encouraging. Happily married couples aren’t smarter, richer, or more psychologically savvy than anyone else. But in their day-to-day lives, they’ve hit on a way of relating that keeps their negative thoughts and feelings about each other from overwhelming the positive ones. Every couple has those negative thoughts. The happy ones just don’t let them win. Rather than building a climate of disagreement and resistance, they embrace each other’s needs.
The stakes are bigger than most people think. Gottman likes to say that if fitness buffs spent just 10 percent of their weekly workout time, about twenty minutes a day, on their marriage instead of their bodies, they’d get three times the health benefits. And kids feel it too. Children raised in homes with a lot of marital hostility had chronically high stress hormones, and they struggled far more with depression, aggression, being rejected by other kids, and failing in school.
You might think the secret is better listening, like saying “I hear you” or “I feel your pain.” It isn’t. Happy couples know everyone has issues they’re not totally rational about, which Gottman calls “enduring vulnerabilities,” and they learn not to set those off in each other.
Happy couples also respond in kind to each other’s good moments. When one helps out with a chore, the other makes a point of returning the favor. It’s as if they live by an unwritten agreement to pay back every kind word or deed. And when that kind of care is missing at home, people look for it somewhere else. An affair is usually not about sex. It’s about looking for friendship, support, understanding, respect, attention, and care.
What Does Make Marriage Work?
At the heart of the Seven Principles is a simple truth. Happy marriages are built on a deep friendship. Friendship fuels romance because it’s the best protection against feeling like your spouse is your opponent. The key is learning to tune in to each other and make that friendship a top priority.
Couples like this tend to know each other intimately. They know each other’s likes, dislikes, personality quirks, hopes, and dreams. The flip side is just as important. Betrayal lies at the heart of every failed relationship.
Friends still fight, of course. But when a fight starts to heat up, good friends usually do something to cool it down. Gottman calls this a repair attempt. It’s any statement or action, silly or otherwise, that keeps negativity from spiraling out of control. Repair attempts are the secret weapon of emotionally intelligent couples. Whether they work or fail is one of the main things that decides if a marriage will flourish or flounder.
The strongest marriages go one step further. Husband and wife share a deep sense of meaning. They don’t just “get along.” They support each other’s hopes and goals, and they build a sense of purpose into their life together.
Once you see marriage this way, you’re ready for one of its most surprising truths. Most marital arguments can’t be resolved. Couples spend year after year trying to change each other’s minds, and it can’t be done. That’s because most of their disagreements come from basic differences in lifestyle, personality, or values. Fighting over those differences only wastes time and hurts the marriage. Instead, a couple needs to understand the bottom-line difference that’s causing the conflict, and learn to live with it by honoring and respecting each other.
How to Predict Divorce
Gottman can often tell a marriage is in danger by watching how a couple argues. The warning signs are four kinds of negativity he calls the Four Horsemen. They usually clip-clop into a marriage in this order: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.
Criticism goes past a complaint about one thing and attacks the person. Two very common forms are statements that start with “you always” or “you never.”
Contempt, the second horseman, is fed by long-simmering negative thoughts about your partner. You’re more likely to have those thoughts when your differences never get resolved. And couples who are deeply stuck in a negative view of each other often rewrite their past. Even the good memories start to look bad.
Defensiveness, in all its forms, just turns up the heat. That’s why it’s so deadly. The more defensive he gets, the more she attacks him.
Stonewalling is shutting down and tuning out. It often comes from being flooded, so overwhelmed that you can’t think or listen. Men get overwhelmed by marital conflict more easily than their wives do. So in most marriages, even happy ones, the wife brings up the touchy subject, and the husband tries to avoid it. He may get defensive and then stonewall.
That’s why it matters so much whether a couple’s repair attempts succeed. These are the little things a couple says or does to lower the tension during a hard talk, to put on the brakes before anyone gets flooded. It might be “Let’s take a break” or “Wait, I need to calm down.” One couple, Olivia and Nathaniel, stick out their tongues at each other. Other couples laugh or smile or say they’re sorry. Even an irritated “Hey, stop yelling at me” or “You’re getting off the topic” can defuse a tense moment.
When repairs keep failing, a marriage tends to go through four final stages. First, the couple sees their problems as severe. Second, talking things over seems useless, so each partner tries to solve problems alone. Third, they start living parallel lives. And fourth, loneliness sets in.
But here’s the hopeful part. After tracking happy couples for as long as twenty years, Gottman found that the key to saving or divorce-proofing a marriage isn’t only how you handle your fights. It’s how you treat each other when you’re not fighting. That’s where the seven principles begin.
Principle 1 — Enhance Your Love Maps
A love map is the part of your mind where you keep everything you know about your spouse. Happy couples have a fairly detailed map of each other’s everyday life, hopes, fears, and dreams. They remember the big events in each other’s history. And they keep updating the map as the facts and feelings of their spouse’s world change.
This matters most when life turns upside down. Take one of the biggest causes of marital unhappiness and divorce, the birth of the first baby. The couples whose marriages thrived after the baby came had detailed love maps from the start. Because they already had the habit of keeping up with each other, and knew what the other was thinking and feeling, the upheaval didn’t throw them off course. Couples who don’t start with that deep knowledge can easily lose their way when life shifts so fast. Having a child is so profound that your whole sense of who you are and what you value gets reshuffled.
Ken and Maggie are a good example. When their baby arrived, the woman Ken thought he knew was changing before his eyes. But because they were in the habit of staying close, he kept up with what Maggie was thinking and feeling. Too often, when a new baby comes, the husband gets left behind.
There are few greater gifts a couple can give each other than the joy of feeling known and understood. So ask open-ended questions, and then remember the answers.
Principle 2 — Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration
Singing each other’s praises can only help your marriage. Fondness and admiration are two of the most important parts of a lasting romance. If they’re completely gone, the relationship can’t be revived.
The best test of whether a couple still has them is usually how they talk about their past. Bitterness can spread like a cancer. It can actually reach backward in time and destroy a couple’s good memories, so that even the early years get retold as a story of disappointment.
The good news is that you can guard against this. Just reminding yourself of your spouse’s good qualities, even while you wrestle with each other’s flaws, can keep a happy marriage from sliding downhill. Get in the habit of looking for things you can appreciate in what your spouse is and does. Then tell your partner what you’ve noticed and what you’re grateful for.
Principle 3 — Turn Toward Each Other Instead of Away
Romance isn’t kept alive by candlelit dinners. It’s kept alive in small, ordinary moments. Will a couple read or listen to the news together, or silently alone? Each time partners turn toward each other, they’re funding what Gottman calls their emotional bank account. They’re building up savings that, like money in the bank, can cushion them when times get rough, when they face a major stress or conflict. Because they’ve stored up so much goodwill, these couples are less likely to slide into distrust and constant negativity during hard times.
One of the best ways to turn toward each other is a daily talk the book calls the Stress-Reducing Conversation. It’s a time to talk about whatever is stressing you outside the marriage, not about the marriage itself. Here’s how it works.
First, take turns. Each partner gets to be the complainer for fifteen minutes. Second, show real interest. Don’t let your mind or your eyes wander. Stay focused on your partner. Ask questions, make eye contact, nod, and say “uh-huh.” Third, don’t give advice nobody asked for. It isn’t that solving problems is always wrong when your partner is upset. But as psychologist Haim Ginott put it, the cardinal rule is “Understanding must precede advice.”
Fourth, show that you understand. Say things like “I can see why you feel that way,” “I’m on your side,” or “No wonder you’re upset.”
Finally, take your partner’s side. That means offering support even if you think their view is unreasonable. Show a “we against others” attitude. If your spouse feels alone in facing some trouble, let them know you’re in it together.
Principle 4 — Let Your Partner Influence You
In the long run, the happiest and most stable marriages were the ones where the husband didn’t resist sharing power and decisions with his wife. When they disagreed, these husbands looked for common ground instead of insisting on their own way.
Emotionally intelligent husbands have figured out the one big thing, which is how to show honor and respect. And it pays off. The wives of men who accept their influence are far less likely to be harsh when they bring up a hard topic. That raises the odds the marriage will thrive.
The Two Kinds of Marital Conflict
Accepting influence matters most when you disagree. And couples disagree about two kinds of problems. Some problems are solvable. But most are perpetual. They come back again and again because they grow out of who each person is. Here are a few examples. Meg wants to have a baby, but Donald says he isn’t ready yet and doesn’t know if he ever will be. Walter wants sex far more often than Dana does. Chris is lax about housework and rarely does his share until Susan nags him, which makes him angry. Tony wants to raise their children Catholic, but Jessica is Jewish and wants them to follow her faith.
As psychologist Dan Wile put it, “When choosing a long-term partner… you will inevitably be choosing a particular set of unsolvable problems that you’ll be grappling with for the next ten, twenty, or fifty years.” A marriage succeeds to the degree that the problems you choose are ones you can live with.
Wile gives an example. Paul married Alice, and Alice gets loud at parties, which shy Paul hates. But if Paul had married Susan, they’d have fought before they even got to the party, because Paul is always late and Susan hates to be kept waiting. And if he’d married Gail, they’d still be upset about a fight over housework. Whoever you marry, you get a set of problems. And so it goes.
A perpetual problem isn’t a disaster. The danger is when it hardens into gridlock. You keep talking about it but get nowhere. Each talk leaves you more frustrated and hurt, with no humor or affection left. You start to see each other as the villain, dig in deeper, and eventually pull away from each other emotionally.
Solvable problems call for a different approach. Make sure you start the conversation softly rather than harshly. Learn to use repair attempts well. Watch your body during tense talks for signs that you’re getting flooded. Learn how to compromise. And become more tolerant of each other’s flaws. Do these things, and solvable problems will stop getting in the way of your happiness. The next principle walks through each one.
Through all of it, remember that negative emotions carry important information about how to love each other better. And before you ask your spouse to change how they drive, eat, vacuum, or make love, make sure your partner feels known and respected, not criticized or put down.
Principle 5 — Solve Your Solvable Problems
In some ways, this principle comes down to good manners. It means treating your spouse with the same respect you’d show a guest. If a guest leaves an umbrella behind, you say, “Here, you forgot your umbrella.” You’d never say, “What’s wrong with you? You’re always forgetting things. What am I, your servant?” With a guest, you’re careful of their feelings, even when things go wrong. Your spouse deserves at least that much.
Soften Your Start-Up
How a hard conversation begins shapes how it ends. The best soft start-up has four parts. First, “I share some responsibility for this.” Second, “Here’s how I feel.” Third, about this specific situation. And fourth, “Here’s what I need,” said as a positive need, not as what you don’t want.
In short, complain but don’t blame. Talk about one situation, not your partner’s character. Describe it without judging, and be clear about what you need. A soft start-up might sound like this. “I’m feeling very deprived lately, and I would love it if we surprised each other with a present out of the blue this week. What do you think?”
Make and Receive Repair Attempts
Putting on the brakes is an important skill in a marriage. You can prevent plenty of disasters by stopping talks that get off on the wrong foot, and by ending those endless rounds of blame. Your future together can still be bright even if your arguments tend to get very negative. The secret is learning the right kind of damage control.
Many repair phrases, like “I’m feeling defensive,” “Please say that more gently,” or “Let’s take a break,” will probably sound phony at first. That’s because they’re a very different way of talking to your spouse when you’re upset. But feeling phony isn’t a reason to skip them. If you learned a better way to hold a tennis racket, it would feel wrong at first, simply because you weren’t used to it. Repair attempts work the same way.
Soothe Yourself and Each Other
When a fight floods you, your body takes over. If your heart rate goes over 100 beats a minute, or 80 if you’re an athlete, you won’t be able to hear what your spouse is telling you, no matter how hard you try. So take a twenty-minute break before you keep going.
Use that break to calm your body. Sit or lie down, close your eyes, and take deep, even breaths. Squeeze each tense muscle for two seconds, then let it go heavy and warm. Many people also picture a peaceful place, like a forest, lake, or beach, and hold it for about thirty seconds.
Calming your partner helps just as much. It works like reverse conditioning. If your spouse often calms you down, you come to link them with feeling relaxed instead of stressed. That naturally adds more good feeling to your relationship.
Compromise
Once you’re both calm, you can look for middle ground. Take a piece of paper and draw two circles, a small one inside a large one. In the inner circle, list the parts of the problem you can’t give in on. In the outer circle, list everything you can bend on. Remember the aikido principle of yielding to win. The more you’re willing to give, the better you’ll be able to persuade your spouse. So try to keep your outer circle as big as you can and your inner circle as small as you can.
Coping with Typical Solvable Problems
The most common areas of marital conflict are work stress, in-laws, money, sex, housework, the distractions of phones and the internet, and a new baby. There’s a good chance at least some of these are hot buttons for you. If the conflict is perpetual, no amount of problem-solving will fix it. The tension will ease only when you both feel comfortable living with the difference. But when the problem is solvable, the challenge is finding the right strategy.
Work stress. After a long, hard day, you may each need time alone to unwind before you talk. If your spouse comes home under a cloud and snaps at you, try not to take it personally. They probably just had a bad day. Let it go, and build a daily ritual for unwinding, whether that’s silly videos, a run, or meditating.
In-laws. When a wife and her mother-in-law clash, the only way out is for the husband to side with his wife. One of the basic tasks of a marriage is to build a sense of “we-ness.” So he has to let his mother know that his wife comes first. He is a husband first, then a son. His mother’s feelings may be hurt, but it’s critical that he stay firm.
Money. Money fights are often perpetual, because money stands for deep needs like safety and power. But for simpler money problems, it helps to know what a marriage has to balance. Money buys pleasure, and it also buys security.
Housework. When the husband does his share around the house, both spouses report a better sex life. The wives also stay calmer in arguments, so they’re less likely to start harshly and set off the Four Horsemen. The key isn’t how much he does. It’s whether his wife feels it’s enough. That might be an even split, or him taking over the chores she hates. Writing down who does what gives you a fair place to start.
Becoming Parents
As one writer put it, “A child is a grenade. When you have a baby, you set off an explosion in your marriage, and when the dust settles, your marriage is different from what it was. Not better, necessarily; not worse, necessarily; but different.”
In the year after the first baby arrives, 67 percent of wives see their happiness in the marriage drop sharply, from lack of sleep, feeling overwhelmed and unappreciated, and juggling a baby with a job. For husbands, it usually drops later, as a reaction to their wife’s unhappiness.
What sets the happy mothers apart has nothing to do with whether the baby is colicky or sleeps well, whether they nurse or bottle-feed, or whether they work or stay home. It has everything to do with whether the husband goes through the change to parenthood with his wife or gets left behind.
A baby almost always transforms a new mother. She’s never felt a love so deep and selfless. If her husband doesn’t go through that change with her, distance grows. While she’s embracing a new “we” that includes their child, he may still miss “just the two of us.” He loves his child, but he wants his wife back.
So what’s a husband to do? He can’t get his wife back. He has to follow her into the new world she’s entered. When he does, he doesn’t resent his child. He feels like a father, too, with pride and tenderness toward his child.
A few things help. Focus on your friendship. Before the baby comes, make sure you really know each other’s worlds. The more of a team you are now, the easier the change will be.
Don’t shut Dad out of baby care. Sometimes a new mother slips into a supervisor role. “Don’t hold her like that.” “You didn’t burp him enough.” Faced with that, some husbands back off, do less and less, and feel more and more left out. The fix is for the new mother to back off. There’s more than one way to burp a baby, and the baby is his child, too. A few lukewarm baths are a small price to pay for a father who stays involved.
And let Dad be the baby’s playmate. Some men don’t feel connected to their child until the baby can walk and talk, and by then their distance has cracked the marriage. But even newborns can be great playmates. Babies start smiling at three weeks. A father who bathes, changes, and feeds his baby will find the baby loves to play with him.
Sex
Desire rarely matches perfectly. In one study of couples with a toddler at home, the husbands wanted sex six times as often as their wives, on average.
Couples whose sex lives were good to great made sex a priority, instead of the last chore on a long to-do list. They talked about it, made time for each other, and put the relationship first, despite the pull of work and kids. In short, they trusted each other and were in tune in and out of the bedroom.
Talking is where many couples get stuck. The problem is that the less clear you are about what you want, the less likely you are to get it. The answer is learning to talk about sex in a way that lets each of you feel safe.
When sex becomes about technique instead of connection, the result is anxiety. Men worry about their erections, women about reaching orgasm, and it all gets harder to talk about. Letting go of orgasm as the goal helps couples see that sex is really about connection.
How you ask matters, too. Nothing will make your spouse want to touch you less than saying, “You never touch me.” It’s better to say, “I loved when we kissed last weekend on the big couch. I’d love more of that.” And instead of “Don’t touch me there,” try “It feels extra good when you touch me here.”
Take Mike and Lynne. Mike wanted sex several times a week, and Lynne thought once every other week was enough. The more Mike pushed, the more pressured Lynne felt, and the more her desire faded. So they shifted their focus from sex to sensuality and put Lynne, the partner with less interest, in charge. Since she loved massages, she used them to guide their evenings, with no sex, just plenty of holding and touching.
And when you’re not in the mood, say no gently. Put it in your own words, something like “I usually would love to, but I need a rain check. I’m just too wiped out tonight. But I still find you very attractive, and I want something to look forward to.”
Principle 6 — Overcome Gridlock
Solvable problems are one thing. Gridlock is a perpetual problem that’s become stuck. And gridlock is a sign that you each have dreams for your life that the other doesn’t know about, hasn’t acknowledged, or doesn’t respect. By dreams, Gottman means the hopes, goals, and wishes that are part of who you are and give your life purpose and meaning.
These dreams run deep. Couples have named things like freedom, peace, adventure, a spiritual journey, healing, or asking God for forgiveness. A fight about money or chores can be carrying one of these underneath it.
So if you’ve reached gridlock on any issue, big or small, become a dream detective. Figure out which dream or dreams are fueling the conflict. Once you both understand them, talk about them. Each of you gets fifteen minutes to speak and fifteen minutes to listen. Don’t try to solve the problem. Just be clear and honest about what you want and why it matters so much.
The listener can help by asking questions like “Tell me the story of your dream. Does it relate to your history or childhood in some way? I’d like to understand what it means to you.” Or “What do you want? What do you need? If I could wave a magic wand and you had exactly what you needed, what would that look like?” Recognizing and respecting each other’s deepest hopes is key to saving and enriching your marriage.
Principle 7 — Create Shared Meaning
Marriage isn’t only about raising kids, paying bills, and getting along. It’s also about building a life together that means something. So a crucial goal of any marriage is to create an atmosphere where each of you feels free to talk honestly about your beliefs. That shared meaning rests on four pillars. When couples build them together, they enrich their marriage and their family life.
Pillar One: Rituals of Connection
Busy lives naturally pull couples apart. Rituals, in your marriage and with your children, are a strong antidote. A ritual is a planned event or routine that you both enjoy and count on, and that shows and strengthens your sense of togetherness. It might be date night, dinner at home, sharing daily thanks, reuniting at the end of the day, or falling asleep together.
Pillar Two: Support for Each Other’s Roles
How you see your own roles, and your spouse’s, can either add meaning and harmony or create tension. Your marriage will feel deeper the more your expectations of each other match. For example, Ian and Hilary both believed a husband should be a protector and provider, and a wife more of a nurturer. Chloe and Evan believed in an equal marriage where each supported the other both emotionally and financially. What mattered was that each couple agreed.
Pillar Three: Shared Goals
What are you working toward, together and on your own? Sometimes you haven’t even asked yourself that. But once you start, it opens a door to something that can deeply shape both you and your marriage.
Pillar Four: Shared Values and Symbols
Religious objects like a crucifix or a mezuzah are clear symbols of faith a couple might keep in their home. But symbols can be much more personal. For Jenna and Spencer, their dining room table held special meaning. Family stories also tend to be rich in meaning, and they reflect deeply held values.
Afterword — What Now?
No book or therapist can solve all of your marriage problems. But learning the Seven Principles really can change the course of your relationship. Even a small, gentle shift in the direction of your marriage can make a dramatic difference over time. Here’s a simple way to spend those twenty minutes a day.
Partings. Before you say goodbye in the morning, learn one thing that’s happening in your spouse’s day, from lunch with the boss to a doctor’s visit to a phone call with an old friend.
Reunions. Greet each other with a hug and a kiss that lasts at least six seconds. The six-second kiss is worth coming home to. Then have a stress-reducing conversation at the end of each workday for at least twenty minutes.
Admiration and appreciation. Find some way every day to show real affection and appreciation. And sincerely say, “I love you.”
A weekly date. Use this time for just the two of you to ask open-ended questions that update your love maps. “Where should we go on our next vacation?” “How are you feeling about your boss these days?”
A state of the union meeting. Pick one hour a week to talk about how your relationship went that week, and keep that time sacred. Start with what went right. Then give each other five specific appreciations you haven’t said yet. Next, talk about any issues that came up, using a soft start-up and listening without getting defensive. Move to problem solving with the two-circle method. And end with each of you asking and answering, “What can I do to make you feel loved this coming week?”
Remember, working briefly on your marriage every day will do more for your health and long life than working out at the gym.
It also helps to aim high. Research has found that people with the highest expectations for their marriage usually end up with the best marriages. So holding your relationship to high standards makes you far more likely to get the marriage you want than looking the other way and letting things slide. Many couples avoid hard topics because they’re afraid of a fight. The best way to beat that fear is to talk about problems while they’re still small, before they build up steam and explode.
Some spouses are critical all the time. Sometimes it’s because their partner doesn’t respond emotionally. But often it comes from inside, from self-doubt that started in childhood. It begins as criticism of yourself.
Expressions of thanksgiving and praise are the antidote to the poison of criticism and contempt. The problem in most marriages is not that partners stop loving each other but that they stop noticing the fine qualities that are present, taking them for granted while focusing on what is missing. One of the most meaningful gifts a parent can give a child is to acknowledge their own mistake plainly — to say “I was wrong” or “I’m sorry.” This builds in the child the forgiveness of self. In the end, that’s what the whole book comes back to. A good marriage isn’t two perfect people. It’s two good friends who keep noticing the best in each other and keep forgiving the rest.