NEW SECRETS ANY COUPLE CAN USE TO KEEP THE FLAME BURNING
By Anthony Schmitz
If ever the phrase had meaning, it's at a wedding. You kiss the bride, slap the groom on the shoulder, throw some rice in the air, and do your best to ignore a stupefying fact: More than half of all marriages end in divorce.
But how to tell which ones will last and which won't? The bride and groom seem to be having a high old time. They smile, they cut the cake. Look, they're dancing! Who's to know whether this is a genuine cause for celebration or another macabre ball?
Now picture instead that the wedding dance leads down a dingy corridor to the marriage lab on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. Here and at several similar labs around the country, researchers have worked for nearly two decades searching for clues to what makes a relationship work. Amazingly, some of the scientists say they now can predict with greater than 90 percent accuracy whether a particular marriage will live or die, based on little more than a short interview and a careful analysis of how a couple fight.
This morning, a young doctor and his wife are in the lab's hot seats. Facing each other in straight-backed chairs, they chat pleasantly while a lab assistant fastens monitors to their chests and fingertips to measure changes in pulse, blood flow, temperature, and sweat. Their chairs are wired to record how much they squirm. Video cameras focus on their faces, displaying their images side by side on a split-screen tv in a cramped adjoining room. On cue, they dutifully lay into each other.
The issue is of the doctor's choosing: His wife's closest friend, Catherine, recently visited them for two months, leaving him feeling abandoned.
"I become a second-class person in your life when she is around," he says.
"Do you know why?" she asks.
"Because I feel slighted."
"No," she says. "It's because you don't try to make it work."
They go round and round for five minutes, ten. Increasingly as they talk, he stares at the floor. From there his attention drifts to the ceiling, appealing to whatever gods lurk behind the acoustic tile.
"You don't appreciate the little things that she gets such a thrill out of," she says. "That's why she's so important to me, because she gives me something that you don't. She appreciates me."
Silence. He chews his lip. He stares at the floor.
"How can we work it out?" she asks. "She'll never come back because of you."
"That's fine," he says.
"You're not even trying! It's like going up against a brick wall!"
He gets out only a sound. "Ggggaaaa."
A timer on the screen ticks off the seconds. They have 15 minutes allotted to them for argument. Most of it is gone.
"I'm getting sad," she says, wiping her eyes. Hard to imagine now those same hands holding a knife above the wedding cake while her new husband beams beside her. "If she would come again, I'd have her stay in a minute."
"I wouldn't be there," he says.
She doesn't miss a beat. "Go," she says.
A lab worker knocks on the door, her timing so impeccable that this could be a tv drama instead of the couple's life. In 15 minutes they've moved from a staged argument to a line drawn in the sand. Now the public face drops back over their marriage. He laughs. "I knew that one would work," he says, congratulating himself for choosing so volatile a topic.
On the lab shelves are hundreds of such tapes, collected over the past few years. Some of the disputes are ugly and vitriolic; others seem to bore even the couples themselves. Watch a few hours of these tapes, and you might think you can feel in your bones which couples are happy and which aren't. And yet some of the couples whose disputes seem most dreary are those who have been married for decades. Others, seemingly happy, have since drifted apart. Why? If there are, as researchers claim, clear patterns that show whether a marriage will last, what are they?
Robert Levenson is a grand old man in his field, though he hardly looks the part. His name is so heavily sown throughout the marriage literature that you expect a gray-haired, tweedy figure to come loping down the dark hallway outside his Berkeley office, a floor above the marriage lab. In fact, Levenson looks as though he might be touring with a rock revival act. At the age of 45, he still has shoulder-length hair that hangs in dark curls.
Nonetheless, Levenson, a psychologist, is one of the dons of what he himself calls the marriage mafia, a small group of prominent researchers who met as teachers and students at the University of Indiana in the early seventies. Marriage research done up to that point typically described large social patterns--how divorce law affected divorce rates, for example, or what happened when more women started working outside the home. But it didn't help predict what would happen in any particular marriage.
Levenson, along with John Gottman, a psychologist now at the University of Washington, was instrumental in changing that. His area of expertise was emotion and the changes it sets off in blood pressure, heart rate, and other body processes not typically under conscious control. Gottman had just started using what was then a recent invention, the video camera, to closely examine how couples interact. Together the two set out to open a window into the forces that build or erode marriages.
First they developed an elaborate coding system to label moment by moment each display of emotion, such as affection, anger, joy, or contempt. They searched for words and body language that showed, for example, criticism, withdrawal, or whining. All of this was synchronized with physiological data--sweating, squirming, blood flow, and heart rate--and then followed up with interviews to discover what couples were thinking and feeling at specific moments during the tapings.
The result: For the first time, researchers were able to tease out the differences between what couples said about their relationship and how they actually behaved in the heat of battle.
"The videos, with the physiological monitoring, made it possible to see that you could get a different story than the couple might want you to see," Levenson says. "Couples may try to appear calm for the cameras, but it's hard to make your heart react the way you'd like it to."
Many of the couples were studied over a period of years, leading Gottman and Levenson to some startling conclusions. You might guess, for instance, that how much a couple fight or whether they fundamentally disagree over the usual trouble spots--money, sex, child rearing--would reliably predict divorce.
It doesn't. At least, according to Gottman and Levenson, not in the way most people think. It's not a lack of compatibility by itself that dooms a marriage but how a couple handle the inevitable differences that crop up in any relationship, they say.
"Everyone has more or less the same problems, and they have to hack away at solutions," Levenson says. "It's just that some couples deal with these problems in a way that puts the matter behind them. For others, the problem continues to plague them. It erodes whatever reserves of love and commitment they have."
The question is, why can some couples smooth over major differences, such as race or religion, while others get stuck on trivia, such as whether the cap ought to go back on the toothpaste? Levenson and Gottman have found a common thread: In successful marriages, the spouses have the same fighting style and maintain a remarkably consistent balance of positive and negative moments in their relationship. Indeed, satisfied couples share about five loving or kind moments for every instance of anger, contempt, complaint, or disgust.
Healthy marriages come in three distinct types, Gottman says. First, there are therapists' dream couples, whom he dubs validators. Rather than having a shouting match over who ought to clean the kitchen, they calmly air their views, try to understand the other's position, and reach a compromise.
Compared to these ideal couples, volatile spouses seem to be from a different planet. Deeply romantic and frequently dramatic, they jump at the chance to launch a rip-roaring argument. Faced with a spat over housecleaning, for instance, they don't waste time trying to understand their partner's point of view. They both just try to steamroller their way to victory.
Finally, there are couples Gottman calls conflict avoidant. In many ways, the least likely of the successful couples, they may disagree once every few years about which movie to see but carefully sidestep issues that might appear looming to other couples, such as major differences on how often to have sex. Even when they do argue, they don't feel obliged to persuade the other of their views or to find a middle ground. They simply agree to disagree and drop the subject.
Faced with a sitcom representation of this idea, we instantly see its appeal. Lucy should be married to Ricky Ricardo. Their notions of how to meet the world's challenges--Shout at it! Smack your forehead! Slam a door!--are perfectly matched. God forbid that Ricky should be married to his practical next-door neighbor, Ethel Mertz, or that Lucy be paired with the stolid Fred.
But is it true? Can the way we resolve differences really be more important than the kind of differences we have to begin with? Aren't rancorous marriages fated for the rocks? Aren't conflict-avoidant couples ignoring trouble that will ultimately blow up in their faces?
It may be a startling idea, Gottman says, but his research points to a central conclusion. Each type of couple has a great chance of being happy as long as they maintain a careful ratio of loving to snarling exchanges. Couples who snap at each other hourly have to fill the rest of the day with loving moments. Couples who bristle at each other once a year can profess their love on a bimonthly schedule. Only when the loving-to-snarling moments fall below that five-to-one ratio are couples headed for trouble.
Marriages that fail go through a similar downward spiral, says Gottman. The bad moments not only occur more often but become more pointed. "You never entered that check" becomes "I know you're no rocket scientist, but I'd think you could balance the damned checkbook." Such personal attacks typically bring on defensiveness and contempt, which in turn bring one spouse or the other to a last, deadly stage: withdrawl. A classic male device, it's the moment in an argument when a death mask falls over a husband's face and he wants nothing more than to get away. Like the young doctor, he stares at the floor or chews his lip.
What's behind this timeless reaction? Based on their studies, both Levenson and Gottman believe that marital battles affect husbands more acutely than they affect wives. Men get more upset physiologically and stay upset longer. Husbands squirm more when a discussion turns ugly. Less blood gets pumped to their extremities. Their heart rate and blood pressure go up. In comparison, women show smaller changes. The way Levenson and Gottman see it, men's greater arousal is probably a holdover from the days when fight-or-flight decisions involved rampaging saber-toothed tigers. These days, quick arousal is more of a burden than a benefit.
To escape the awful feelings caused by an attack from their wives, men turn themselves off. But women, socialized to see themselves as marital problem solvers and less beset by physiological reactions than men, keep trying to work things out. The result is a cliche: the stony husband and his nagging wife.
Taken together, certain trouble signs allow researchers to predict which matches will fail. In marriages headed for divorce, husbands stonewall more often. Partners trade barbs and pleasantries on a one-to-one ratio. When they talk about their marriage, they're less likely to say that they've overcome hurdles together. They're not "we," glorying in their triumphs over adversity, but two disappointed individuals.
The bad news, according to Gottman, is that men and women who marry someone with a different fighting style may be doomed to an unhappy marriage. A volatile spouse, who thrives in the heat of passionate battle, will ultimately be driven to distraction by a validator's reasonableness. Because your style of fighting is deeply linked to your view of the world and of yourself, an effort to change it can be difficult if not impossible.
Does that mean there's no hope for unhappy marriages? Not at all, says Levenson. "Some couples just get stuck in bad routines. It's like they need to be reprogrammed so they don't go down that same road."
And so imagine that you are in Denver. A white horse pulls a white carriage down a winding street. From the rear axle hangs a sign, just married, painted in elegant script. On the seat, smiling with the benign detachment of royalty, is a fresh young bride. Her gown is white, ankle length. Her hair is dark and flowing. On her lap rests a bouquet of red roses. Beside her, in his tuxedo, is the young groom, grinning like a madman. Because this is the Saturday before Halloween, the sidewalks are full of costumed imps. If this couple weren't now blinded by love, they might look around and understand. A thousand devils await them.
The horse saunters down the mall, past a hotel where another member of the marriage mafia, Howard Markman, has set up shop for the weekend. Markman, a one-time student of Gottman's at Indiana and now a University of Denver professor, has created a niche for himself. He's taken the critical findings from the marriage research done to date--that female pursuit, male withdrawal, and an out-of-whack positive-to-negative exchange ratio predict dissatisfaction--and built a divorce-prevention program around them.
This morning, 15 couples gather in one of the hotel's conference rooms for Markman's two-day seminar, having paid $300 for the privilege. The seminar title is "Fighting for Your Marriage," the idea being that learning to fight in the right way can help prevent divorce.
This is a crowd that could use some help. One couple with three kids has just reconciled after a separation triggered by a mid-life crisis involving, among other things, a large red motorcycle. Another couple, recently engaged, is hoping to learn how to keep little arguments from blowing up into major conflagrations. And these are the couples who are talking. Others stare grimly at their knuckles, contemplating God knows what.
Markman and his partner, Scott Stanley, work the crowd with a well-honed line of patter. "We haven't just sat around in armchairs developing theories," Markman says. "We're going to show you what we've found over almost 20 years of research." Markman is dark and intense, with a smile that's something of a piratical leer. Stanley is lanky and fair, a hands-in-the-pockets sort. Their professional standing is based on the relative success of their research program. In one of their studies, they took 114 young couples planning marriage, trained them to manage conflict in better ways, and then compared them to untrained couples over time. Four years later, only 4 percent of the trained couples had broken up before marriage, compared to 21 percent of the controls. Trained couples communicated better and fought less often. Among couples who went on to get married, 16 percent of the untrained couples but only 8 percent of the trained couples got divorced.
Markman and Stanley's genius is to transform the jargon of social science research into something intelligible and useful. Gottman's dire scholarly warnings about "unregulated behavior"--too many negatives, not enough positives--become simple folk wisdom here. Think before you speak, they suggest. If you don't have anything good to say, try saying nothing at all. It beats saying something stupid that will just start a fight.
Saying nothing, of course, isn't a long-term solution. Withdrawal is, after all, that other great marker of troubled marriages. So another essential step to marital happiness is to find a way to keep men talking during disputes. That means that men have to be kept calm, so their bodies aren't sending them the signals that make them shut up and slink off.
How to manage that? The key is structure, say Markman and Stanley. Men do fine resolving problems on a ball field or in a courtroom. That's because there are rules of engagement. But marital conflict is unstructured. Anything can happen anytime. "That's crazy-making!" Markman says. You've got to create some rules.
First, he tells the couples, set a time and place for talking about problems. If now isn't good, then whoever wants to put off the discussion should take responsibility for picking a better time.
When the discussion starts, Markman says, use a domestic version of Roberts Rules of Order. One person speaks at a time. The person with a gripe explains what the problem is, when it occurred, and how it made him or her feel, being careful to avoid personal attacks. Then the listener should paraphrase what the speaker said to make sure the message was understood. This isn't the time to put up a defense or offer excuses.
Generally speaking, Markman and Stanley say, men have a tendency to push aside a description of the problem and start moving quickly toward a solution. Resist this urge, they say. Slowing down the discussion has several advantages. It helps to keep men's hearts from pounding. Also, a slower discussion is less apt to degenerate into  name-calling or worse. It helps rein in the negatives that corrode a marriage.
Once there's a common understanding of what's wrong, it's time to brainstorm for solutions. When you've reached an agreement, schedule a follow-up to examine whether the problem is really solved.
Despite the simplicity of the message, it takes Markman and Stanley most of the day to get it across. By midafternoon, they are ready to turn their charges loose. Before the couples can file out, though, they're given an assignment. Tonight, don't try to use any of these new rules to settle the problems that brought you here. Don't fight or argue at all. Instead, agree on a plan to have fun and carry it out. Then come back and tell us about it.
There's a research-driven theory working here. Men and women have different views of what constitutes intimacy. In most men's view, participating in some activity together--not necessarily sex, though it is a top contender--is a form of intimacy. Women see intimacy and talking as tightly linked. Working up a plan together is a nod toward women; doing something together engages men. Having a good time together helps remind weary couples of why they wanted to get married in the first place.
By the next morning, a bizarre transformation, not quite believable, seems to have occurred. Couples who had sat stiff-necked on Saturday morning are now leaning against each other, stroking each other's necks. So what did they do together? Get brain transplants?
They pass descriptive notes to Stanley, who reads them aloud. They went shopping. They had sex. They made lists of what they liked about each other. They went out for a special meal. They had sex.
"This is the kind of thing that helps a couple most quickly," Stanley says. "Doing fun things together has the greatest benefit." Of course, there's a caveat. "Provided you can find a way to keep issues from coming up or table them quickly for later."
There are frills and flourishes to their program, but this, basically, is what behavioral marriage research has to offer in terms of hardheaded advice: Have fun together. Schedule your fights. Fight in a structured way to keep a lid on negatives and to keep the man of the house from turning into stone.
Is this stew perhaps a little thin? Stanley has heard the complaint before. He has a ready answer.
"We strongly believe in the power of the simple to bring about the sublime," he says. "Think about baseball. A complicated, beautiful game, which has tremendous psychological dimensions. Yet, the most fantastic plans and strategies happen because the players have drilled and drilled on the fundamentals. Without that, the fantastic never happens." It's the same with marriage, he says. Learning how to fight sensibly--not insulting your partner, not throwing in the kitchen sink, not descending into hopelessness--is the marital equivalent of baseball's fundamentals. "You can't produce the fantastic," says Stanley, "when the mundane is far off track."
Of course, no bride strides down the aisle yearning for her first well-managed fight. We seek in our spouse a loving companion, a good parent for our children, a comfort in old age. Levenson, who has recently turned his attention to older couples, wonders if we don't expect too much.
"If your expectations are unduly high, you're probably going to be unhappy with your marriage," he says. "The older couples we've studied largely wanted companionship. They didn't look to marriage to fill all their needs. In our generation, it's a vessel from which we expect to drink all good things. That's a lot to load on another human being."
If you watch enough of his tapes, you understand why Levenson thinks our expectations are out of line with reality. The disputes are so often soul-crushingly banal. He hates the way she wastes money. She can't understand what he's saving it for. She wants to hang on to her collection of miniature teacups. He wants to sell the whole lot. That research assistants are actually willing to study these exchanges, second by second, seems astonishing.
And yet sometimes you shove a tape in the player and witness an everyday miracle. Here is a middle-aged couple who could find a million ways to annoy each other. Her idea of a good time is to clean the house. He thinks there's always tomorrow for that. But in their bickering, there's a note of humor, a give-and-take.
After arguing for the cameras over his lackadaisical approach to home improvement, they move on to a final task. The researchers ask them to discuss a pleasant subject. They settle on a fantasy: what they would do if they won $12 million in the lottery.
There's not much difference for them between an argument and a daydream. They needle each other, they banter back and forth, but always there's an undertow of love.
"I'd give some money to my brother," he says.
"How much?" she asks. "A million?"
"Yeah, I would."
"But if you give money to your brother you have to give it to your sister. Do you want to give a million to that brother-in-law of yours?"
He has to laugh.
"We could go to Germany," she says.
"Germany is very expensive."
"What do you care?" she asks, poking at him. "You're a lottery winner!"
"Twelve million," he sighs, content.
He can only breathe so easily because he's stumbled into a far larger prize. Marriages are going up in flames around them. They have no shortage of differences themselves. And yet, using nothing more than native wit, they've found a way to live together.
What price tag would you put on that?
(c) 1995 HEALTH magazine
 Document ID: ras395m