Book - The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work by John Gottman
Despite Gottman having a cult following, this bestselling book had sat unread atop my reading list since grad school. I shouldn't have been surprised to find so many of the ubiquitous couples treatment ideas introduced in this practical marriage guide.
Through his extensive quantitative research on marriage, Gottman offers more than just seven important principles to build a healthy marriage. He also helps explain why relationships get off track to begin with. I found his analysis and description of relationship decay easy to understand and easy to deploy.
He first normalizes that all relationships that involve two people will have conflict, but then he emphasize that how this conflict is engaged makes all the difference. When conflict isn't engaged it surfaces as criticism, which in turn contributes to contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. He describes these issues as the 4 horseman of the apocolypse of marriage, and uses their presence to predict the ending of a marriage. However, he also offers practical steps people can take to address these problems aggressively before it is too late.
Once these threats are understood, the 7 principles provide common-sense ideas to restore and strengthen a marriage. Each principle has a deceptively simple title:
Enhance your love map.
Nurture your fondness and admiration.
Turn toward each other instead of away.
Let your partner influence you.
Solve your solvable problems.
Overcome gridlock.
Create shared meaning.
With each principle, the book offers a helpful assessment you can take to evaluate your marriage or relationship in that domain. Furthermore, it offers client examples (taken from Gottman's research) on how each principle either is or isn't embodied, and techniques and strategies for bringing each principle to bear on your relationship.
This book was published in 1999, and it has the feel of being from a simpler time. Some gender role characterizations sound a little dated and virtually no reference is made to same-sex couples. However, the principles and techniques are timeless and will continue to offer couples relief for years to come.
"I was not able to crack the code to saving marriages until I started to analyze what went right in happy marriages. After tracking the lives of happily married couples for as long as twenty years, I now know that the key to reviving or divorce-proofing a relationship is not simply how you handle your disagreements but how you engage with each other when you're not fighting. So although my Seven Principles will also guide you in coping with conflict, the basis of my appraoch, which forms the first three principles, is to strengthen the friendship and trust that are at the heart of any marriage." (p. 51)
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