The 4 predictors of divorce have nothing to do with money | John & Julie Gottman

0:00 Relationships end with a whimper, not a bang. A good example is the Sloan study that was done of dual career couples and they were very surprised to find that in a typical evening the partners spent less than 10% of the evening in the same room. And in our research, we found that they kind of led parallel lives, like two railroad tracks, never crossing one another, never really coming together. I'm Julie Gottman. And I'm John Gottman.

0:33 I'm a senior scientist at Gottman Incorporated. I'm a co-founder of Affective Software. I'm the co-founder of the Gottman Institute, also the co-founder of Affective software. and John and I work together as well as have a relationship together. Thank you for watching Big Think. If you'd like to support our work, we encourage you to join our members community. As a member, you'll receive our quarterly print magazine, a beautifully designed collection of the ideas and interviews that matter most. Bigthink is for curious people who want to take deep dives into big ideas. To support the media you want to see in the world, go to bigthink.com/membership. And now back to the interview. Why relationships fall apart?

1:24 So when a couple comes to me and they say, you know, we've lost something, but we don't know what. Well, that can mean a number of things. It can mean that the way they talk about problems is terribly conflicted. They used to be able to really work on their problems. calmly and gently reach compromises. But now something has changed. So what's changed? Well, it could be that they've moved into criticism. They've moved into expressions of contempt.

1:59 They've moved into much more defensiveness or even what we call getting flooded, which means moving into fight or flight when they're addressing their partner and listening to their partner. That means they're not going to be able to hear what their partner is really saying. or the opposite that they're very very distant and they don't talk about their problems at all. They're silent. This is really what we call a devitalized relationship. It's lost its life energy. It's lost its connection. What does distress look like in a couple when they're walking into my office?

2:49 Well, it can look like several things. One, I have a long couch in my office. So, where do they sit? Do they sit together shouldertosh shoulder or are they sitting at the far ends clinging to the end of the couch? Also, people will not look at each other when they are in distress. They'll look at me and they're hoping that I'll serve as a referee for who to nail, right? Who is the person who is vastly superior and who is the other one who's making all the mistakes?

3:26 That's not how this therapy works. And so part of what I'm doing in the very beginning of therapy is looking from one partner to the other partner. And sometimes if one person is only looking at me, I'll look at them then look at the other, which I hope will guide that partner to look at the other along with me. So we're really building more of a relationship in the therapy where the two partners are talking to one another as well as including me. What drew me to the topic of studying relationships was my complete incompetence at relationships. And my best friend Bob Levenson and I shared that incompetence and we decided to set up a lab. One of the surprising things that Bob Levenson and I discovered was that 69% of all conflicts are perpetual. By bringing couples in every two years or three years or six years and finding out what they fought about, we found that 69% of the time there are these perpetual problems that never go away. You know, most of them have to do with differences in personality or lifestyle or their values and they they disagree about these issues and they keep coming back to them over and over again. The masters of relationships have these perpetual problems as well, but they approach them in a different way. They kind of are able to communicate an acceptance of their partner's personality and some humor about the differences and then they start working on them and they arrive at temporary compromises. Disaster couples deal with these perpetual problems in a different way. They really spin their wheels on the problem. They wind up becoming more alienated. They vilify one another in their minds and they see the problems as really the result of the other partner's defects and withdraw from the problem as much as they can. What turns a perpetual problem into a terrible conflict that neither person wants to talk about is typically when criticism is used to describe the problem itself. Let's take housework for example. So one partner might be saying, you know what, you are such a slob. What is the matter with you? You never clean anything. I can't believe what a mess this kitchen is. Okay, so the operative word in there was slob, right? Which is a personality flaw they're attributing to the other partner. It's very likely that the other partner is going to be defensive and say, "Oh, yeah, well, you never pay the bills on time." Or they may take the defensiveness of somebody who's whining and they may say, "I do too clean the kitchen. It's fine. What's your problem?"

6:43 Something like that. So criticism goes nowhere. What Bob Levenson and I discovered over time was that we could accurately predict whether a relationship was heading toward disaster. predict if a couple was going to divorce or stay together and if they stayed together how happily married they would be over time. We could count the number of seconds for the amount of positive emotion that they expressed divided by the number of seconds that they were angry or disappointed or hostile or belligerent or sad. We found for the couples that we wound up calling the masters of relationships, couples who really were happily married and stayed together, that the ratio of positive to negative averaged 5:1 among the masters and about8 for the disasters. And we were very curious about whether some negatives were much more corrosive than others. And we basically identified four things that really were the best predictors of relationship demise. Criticism, which is stating a problem in the relationship as a flaw of the other person's personality. Defensiveness, responding to your partner by denying responsibility for any counterattacking, acting like an innocent victim.

8:15 contempt, which was an escalation of criticism that involved some kind of expression of superiority over the partner on any dimension. And then stonewalling, the fourth one, which involved the listener not giving the usual signals that he or she was listening to the speaker. You know, usually listeners respond by maintaining eye contact, nodding their heads like I'm doing, uttering these brief vocalizations like oh yeah, could be. And the stonewaller just kind of shut down. No eye contact, no facial movement, no brief vocalizations, just kind of like a stonewall responding. So those were the four best predictors and contempt was the absolute best predictor of relationship demise. Contempt is the number one predictor of relationships falling apart. Contempt is similar to criticism except here's what it looks like. You wouldn't even think to clean the kitchen, would you? No, you wouldn't even think of it. You're too selfish.

9:30 So there's a difference there. The person who's speaking is acting very superior to the other, like morally superior, looking down their nose at their partner, and they're saying their words with some scorn, with some disrespect, horrible disrespect. And the other person is going to feel that. And guess what? The listener of contempt not only shrinks down in their self-esteem and feels terrible about themselves, which really ruins the relationship, but contempt. The number of times contempt is expressed in a conflict conversation predicts how many infectious illnesses that listening partner is going to have in the coming four years. In other words, contempt is not only sulfuric acid for the relationship. It's also suluric acid for the immune system, damaging the immune system. So the individual listening is going to be sick more often. So contempt is something we really want to eliminate. So those four things are what make perpetual problems so difficult. So when a couple doesn't know any alternative to criticism, defensiveness, contempt, maybe stonewalling, shutting down, becoming a big silent wall. What does it feel like to the couple? It makes them sick to their stomach a lot of times. It makes them feel terrible every time the particular topic that they're stuck on comes to the surface. A lot of times couples will just avoid it altogether. They won't talk about it. But you can feel its presence in the room.

11:34 It's like, you know, an elephant under the rug that's sitting there saying, "You going to pay attention to me?" And the couple doesn't want to. They're terrified of bringing it up because what ends up happening is they get locked into these very destructive patterns and they don't know how to get out of them. So there are several feelings they're going to have. They're going to have anger often. They're going to have fear. They're going to have often times a lot of grief at God, we're so distant. Why can't we work on this together? They may have also just hopelessness, despair, a feeling of powerlessness because nothing they do is working. And so they're really paralyzed facing that perpetual problem. What quietly destroys love is the erosion of trust.

12:41 Our understanding of betrayal and relationships really comes from the unprecedented research of a social psychologist named Carol Rusbolt. And Carol Rusbolt actually helped us understand betrayal in a new way. What Rusbolt found was that betrayal is a gradual process. It's a process where people stop cherishing what they have and start looking for what they don't have and really feeling sorry for themselves for what's missing in the relationship. Carol Rusbelt found after an argument in relationships that are headed for betrayal, people think they can do better and they actually think there's some real or imagined relationship in which they can do better. So they kind of trashed their partner. Rather than talking to their partner about the problem and giving voice to the complaints, Russol discovered that they go talk to somebody else about their partner.

13:44 And not only that, they give themselves permission to cross boundaries. So gradually as they complain about their partner, they find somebody very sympathetic and empathetic to their complaints. And when they cross boundaries, doing that, feeling sorry for themselves, giving themselves permission to cross boundaries, betrayal is a natural consequence. When trust is broken in a relationship, many things can break that trust. It can be, you know, the biggest thing which is typically an extrammarital affair or extra relationship affair because to the individual who has been hurt, their entire world has blown up. Think about it for a minute. You've built your world on a committed relationship where the values you think you share are blown up. The dreams that you thought you had together are blown up. The connection, the teamwork, the companionship, the love, the sex, the intimacy exploded into fragments everywhere. Shards of glass is what betrayal can feel like. Therefore, it's very, very difficult to work on trust even with those small betrayals. When we had cameras rolling in the love lab, the people in the control room found that when one person tried to get the partner's attention or interest, they would switch one of the three cameras over and see the response of the partner and my student Jenny Driver discovered this was really critical moment. The partner either responded and we call that turning toward or they they didn't respond kind of like it was a non-event and we call that turning away or they responded irritably. Will you be quiet? I'm trying to read. We call that turning against. We found that some of the time their partner would come back and repeat the bid, but it only happened 22% of the time. Most of the time, you know, close to 80% of the time when the bid was turned away from the original partner who made the bid would kind of crumple a little bit. When Janney looked at this over time, she found that the 17 couples who divorced after 6 years, when she looked back six years earlier, their average proportion of turning toward their partners' bids was 33%.

16:39 when she looked at the people who were still married and looked back six years earlier, their average was 86% turning toward. So, you know, over six years, you could fill a Russian novel with all the moments of turning toward that these master couples had done. And we realized that bids were really important. So, a bid for connection is so important in a relationship because it's saying to the other person, I trust you to respond. I believe in you as a trustworthy person. Let's take for example, you're expressing a bid for connection by expressing a need. You can say to the other person, you know, I'm really exhausted. I'm really tired. Would you mind doing the dishes tonight? Well, by asking that, you are trusting the other person to be caring of you, to be loving. And what that means is you perceive that partner as being a caring, loving person, right? Who doesn't want to think that about themselves, right? So, making a bid for connection is a way of saying you're a good person, you're a worthy person, you're a trustworthy person even, and you're a caring person. So, I trust you and I'm going to make a bid for connection with you and only you in this moment. When one person starts really checking out of the relationship and withdrawing from all of the conflict, withdrawing from their partner, they start getting lonely. And that loneliness is very punishing physiologically. In fact, we discovered that couples who are lonely and and when the withdrawal takes place from the relationship, their heart is actually pumping harder at every beat and the time it takes for the bolus of blood to go from the heart to the ear is chronically reduced. Their blood is flowing faster at every heartbeat. The heart is working harder. Even when they're just reading a newspaper or taking a walk, if they have that loneliness inside them, their heart is actually laboring harder. And those people tend to die younger as a result of that loneliness. That's kind of what we discovered in Bob's longitudinal 20-year study of couples that we tried to recont these people and we thought they had dropped out of the study, but what had happened is one of the partners had died and that faster blood flow was predictive of that death, that early death. Is there a point of no return when you can't really heal a relationship? And frankly, we don't know. Helen Fischer taught us that you can stay in love forever. There's no shelf life for love. Before her research, we thought being in love lasts about two years and then it goes away. Nobody can sustain being in love. Not true. There may not be any point of no return. We've even seen couples divorce and then hate the divorce and get back together and rebuild the relationship. But we kind of believe that when the relationship becomes a source of abuse and and it's really no longer really on the side of both people. When people become enemies, when love is no longer just a dying ember that we can fan into a roaring fire. When that's gone, when the fondness and admiration system dies, the relationship is better off dead and se people are better off separated. You know, a lot of couples may believe that they've reached the end of the road. There is no turning back and it's time to leave the relationship. They've reached the end of that relationship. The problem with thinking that too early when perhaps you know the conflict you're exhausted by the conflict or you feel so distant from your partner that you know the spark is missing that was there in the beginning. When people believe that they've reached the end of the rope often times they can be wrong. The reason they're wrong is that they haven't learned alternative ways of speaking with one another, reconnecting with one another, and perhaps rebuilding trust with one another. You know, I would say probably every couple that comes into my office, the most distressed ones, often one of them will believe that that's it. They're at the end of the road. I hold the hope for them because I know the fact that they've even come into my office suggests there's a little tiny ember there that still remains of the love of hope that the relationship can grow again into something that's much healthier and much more rewarding for them. However, there are couples where they truly have reached the end of the road. And I like to think, you know, that results from too little too late.

22:52 In other words, I may have a couple who comes in and 25 years have passed since they became really, really unhappy. so that they've lived on parallel tracks, kind of like railroad tracks with no connection for years and years and years. Well, by the time they finally come in, all those embers have turned into ash and there's no love left. No matter how things change in the relationship, in that case, okay, it may be over, but so many times it actually isn't. Buried under the ash can be just a little spark of hope. And that's what I will work on with the couple to kind of blow on that little ember. Give the partners different ways of connecting with one another. Brand new ways of connecting that they hadn't been aware of before. And then things begin to build very very slowly. Kind of like blades of grass, right? Fragile, delicate, but rebuilding nonetheless.

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