What Makes a Marriage Work?

Common interests keep you together. That all depends on how you interact while pursuing those interests. If your time together is just another opportunity to inflict disrespect, hurt, and pain, then I can’t see how having common interest is going to keep you together.

The 50/50 approach. It’s really the unhappy marriage where this quid pro quo operates, where each feels the need to keep a running tally of who had done what for whom. Happy spouses do not keep tabs on whether their mate is washing the dishes as payback because they cooked dinner. They just do it because they generally feel positive about their spouse and their relationship.

Avoiding conflict will ruin your marriage. Couples simply have different styles of conflict. Some avoid fights at all costs, some fight a lot, and some are able to “talk out” their differences and find a compromise without ever raising their voices. No one style is necessarily better than the other—as long as the style works for both people.

Affairs are the root cause of divorce. In most cases it’s the other way around. Problems in the marriage that send the couple on a trajectory to divorce also send one (or both) of them looking for intimate connection outside the marriage.

Men are not biologically “built” for marriage. Similar to the notion that affairs cause divorce, this theory holds that men are philanderers by nature and are therefore ill suited for monogamy (staying with one woman). However, research has shown that extramarital affairs do not depend so much on gender as opportunity. Now that so many women work outside the home, the rate of extramarital affairs by women now slightly exceeds those of men.

Men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Gender differences may contribute to marital problems, but they don’t cause them. The determining factor in whether wives feel satisfied with the sex, romance, and passion in their marriage is, by 70 percent, the quality of the couple’s friendship. For men, the determining is, by 70 percent, the quality of the couple’s friendship. So men a women come from the same planet after all.

Emotionally Intelligent Marriages

What cam make a marriage work is surprisingly simple. Happily married couples aren’t smarter, richer, or more psychologically astute than others. But in their day-to-day lives, they have hit upon a dynamic that keeps their negative thoughts and feelings about each other (which all couples have) from overwhelming their positive ones. They have what Gottman calls an emotionally intelligent marriage. The more emotionally intelligent a couple—the better able they are to understand, honor, and respect each other, and their marriage—the more likely that they will indeed live happily ever after. As simple as it sounds, it can keep husband and wife on the positive side of the divorce odds.

What Does Make Marriage Work?

The advice Gottman used to give couples earlier in his career was pretty much what you’d hear from virtually any marital therapist—the same old pointers about conflict resolution and communication skills. But after looking squarely at his own data, he had to face the harsh facts: Getting couples to disagree more “nicely” might reduce their stress levels while they argued, but frequently it wasn’t enough to pump life back into their marriages. It took studying hundreds of couples until I finally uncovered the secrets of these emotionally intelligent marriages. No two marriages are the same, but the more closely Gottman looked at happy marriages the clearer it became that they were alike in seven telltale ways. By mastering his Seven Principles, you ensure that your own marriage will thrive. You can learn about Gottman’s Seven Principles in-depth by reading his book, but here are a few sneak previews.

Friendship Versus Fighting
At the heart of this program is the simple truth that happy marriages are based on a deep friendship. By this I mean a mutual respect for and enjoyment of each other’s company. These couples tend to know each other intimately—they are well versed in each other’s likes, dislikes, personality quirks, hopes, and dreams. They have an abiding regard for each other and express this fondness not just in the big ways but in little ways day in and day out. Friendship also fuels the flames of romance because it offers the best protection against feeling adversarial toward your spouse.

Positive Sentiment Override
What the heck is that? When you experience Positive Sentiment Override, this means your positive thoughts about each other and your marriage are so pervasive that they tend to supersede your negative feelings. When your spouse yells “where are my keys?” you overlook their annoyed tone thinking they are probably stressed and in a hurry. You want to find the keys right away to help them out if you can. However, if you have not been attentive to your relationship and have let anger, irritation, and resentment seep in, your response may have been more like, “How should I know! Am I your slave?” Over time your relationship slips into “Negative Sentiment Override” where everything gets interpreted more and more negatively. Even positive statements from our spouse get reinterpreted as attacks. Once you reach this point, getting back to the fundamental bond that united you in the first place can seem as difficult as backpedaling while whitewater rafting.

A Happy Couple’s Secret Weapon—Repair Attempts
A “repair attempt” refers to any statement or action—silly or otherwise—that prevents negativity from escalating out of control. Repair attempts are the secret weapon of emotionally intelligent couples—even though many of these couples aren’t aware that they are doing something so powerful. When a couple have a strong friendship, they naturally become experts at sending each other repair attempts and at correctly reading those sent their way. But when couples are in negative override, even a repair attempt statement as blunt as “Hey, I’m sorry” will have a low success rate. The success or failure of a couple’s repair attempts is one of the primary factors in whether their marriage will flourish or flounder.

Shared Meaning
In the strongest marriages, husband and wife share a deep sense of meaning. They don’t just “get along”—they also support each other’s hopes and aspirations and build a sense of purpose into their lives together. Very often a marriage’s failure to do this is what causes husband and wife to find themselves in endless, useless rounds of argument or to feel isolated and lonely in their marriage. Once you understand this, you will be ready to accept one of the most surprising truths about marriage: Most marital arguments cannot be resolved. This is because most disagreements are rooted in fundamental differences of lifestyle, personality, or values. This doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do if your relationship has been overrun by conflict. But it does mean that the typical conflict-resolution advice won’t help. Instead, you need to understand the bottom-line difference that is causing the conflict between you—and to learn how to live with it by honoring and respecting each other. Only then will you be able to build shared meaning and a sense of purpose into your marriage.