Transcription
Peggy Flynn is day chair for today's program. She is a communicator, trainer, and manager of projects and public affairs. Starting as a congressional aide in Washington D.C., she came West and worked in administration with the Washington State Convention Center. She's been involved in community leadership along the way and was a member of the Anacis Rotary Club before joining Seattle 4 in 2011.
On a thematic note for today's program, Peggy met her fiancé while walking on the beach in Naples, Florida. He was vacationing there from Munich. Peggy was visiting family. Their random meeting proves, "Our lives can change in a [Applause] day."
Today, we're going to talk about relationships. Um, and the dictionary defines relationship. It had a lot of definitions, but the one that I liked was, "A relationship is an emotional connection with another person. It's the way we talk to people, the way we behave around them, um, how we treat one another." And as humans, there's a wide belief that we're hardwired to want to connect. So, I want to just do, speaking of surveys, survey this room. So, I have a question, and and I'd like you to raise your hand if you have ever in your life been in a romantic relationship. Proves the theory that we like to be connected. And Dr. Gottman, we have a room full of captive people to your talk today.
All relationships are different, and Lord knows some of us have had more than one. You may be in a relationship now that just, I don't know, makes your heart soar and is happy and easy and kind of tickles your soul. And if you're in that relationship, do everything you can to protect it and keep it going. On the other hand, you may be in a relationship that begs the question, "What have I done? Where am I going? What am I going to do?" Well, the good news is, today the doctor's in the house, and we're going to hear from Dr. John Gottman in a few minutes. Uh, we're going to benefit from his years, his decades of insight and wisdom, education, and working with thousands of couples to bring about, um, stability and relationships. But before we do, to help us, as we say, there are a lot of different kinds of relationships, so we want to visualize some different ones. And we're going to take a minute now, two minutes, and look at a clip of relationships from the movie *When Harry Met Sally*.
"We fell in love in high school. Yeah, we, we were high school sweethearts. But then after our junior year, his parents moved away. But I never forgot her. You never forgot me? No. Her face was burned on my brain. And it was 34 years later that I was walking down Broadway and I saw it come out of Tattles. And we both looked at each other, and it was just as though not a single day had gone by. She was just as beautiful as she was at 16. He looked exactly the same. We were married 40 years ago. We're married 3 years. We got a divorce. Then I married Marjorie. But first, you lived with Barbara, right? Barbara. But I didn't marry Barbara. I married Marjorie. Then he got a divorce, right? Then I married Katie. Another divorce. Then a couple of years later, at Eddie Kiko's funeral, I ran into her. I was with some girl I don't even remember. Roberta, right? Roberta. But I couldn't take my eyes off you. I remember I snuck over to her and I said, 'What did I say?' You said, 'What are you doing after?' So I ditched Roberta. We go for coffee. A month later, we're married. 35 years today. After our first marriage, we were both born in the same hospital, 21, 7 days apart in the same hospital. We both grew up one block away from each other on the Lower East Side, on Delancey Street. My family moved to the Bronx when I, on M Road. Hers moved when she was 11, lived on 183rd Street for 6 years. She worked on the 15th floor, very prominent neurologist, where I had a practice on the 14th floor, the very same building. We never met. Never met. Can you imagine that? Do you know where we met? In an elevator. I was visiting and the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago was on the third floor. I was on the 12th. I rode up nine extra floors just to keep talking to her. Nine extra floors."
I think we all know which relationship we don't want to have. So, my hope today is that each of us leaves here with some tools, tools for our romantic toolbox, maybe with a little, um, magic sprinkled on top of that, so that we can make all of our relationships, both those romantic and those that are not romantic, a little better. I now welcome our colleague, um, and Seattle 4 member, um, Alan, to the stage. And he's going to, he's the, the Chief Executive Officer of the Gottman Institute. And Alan, Allen is going to do an introduction of our [Applause] speaker.
Fellow Rotarians, I have the honor of introducing this wonderful, wonderful man to you. And in the interest of time, I'm going to keep it short so that John has more time to speak. So, John was born in the Dominican Republic in 1942 to parents who were Viennese Holocaust refugees. He graduated from high school at age 16 and taught college mathematics to support himself through university. He received a master's degree in mathematics from MIT and then decided to switch to psychology after reading through a roommate's psychology textbooks. After receiving his PhD, he studied, uh, friendships amongst children. And he received a career scientist award from the National Institute of Mental Health that funded his research for the next 21 years. He has devoted more than 40 years to studying thousands of couples and marital relationships. John has published more than 200 academic articles and authored 45 books, including the New York Times bestselling *The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work*. He's commonly referred to as, "Oh, that guy. The guy who can predict with over 94% accuracy whether a couple will stay together or get divorced." Please welcome to the podium, Dr. John Gottman.
Well, good afternoon. It's a pleasure to be here. One of my heroes, uh, Albert Einstein, once said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible. And indeed, the history of science has shown in the last 320 years that we can really understand a great deal about the universe. But what about love? Can science really tell us anything about love?
So, let me tell you the story. The story of this research, uh, really began over 40 years ago when I was an assistant professor at Indiana University. And I met, uh, the guy who was best man at my wedding and my major collaborator, Bob Levenson, who's now professor at UC Berkeley. And Bob and I, uh, started commiserating with each other, uh, because our relationships with women were not going that well. We sort of moved from one disaster to the other. And, uh, and Bob once said to me, "You know, John, you can either have a relationship or you can study relationships. You can't do both." And indeed, you know, we started studying relationships in the mid-1970s and built this laboratory that was based on kind of an assumption that there really were such things as the masters of relationships. There were people who kind of intuitively knew how to have a good relationship, and there were other people who were really the disasters of relationships. And, you know, both of those are big assumptions that actually, you know, the Masters would be similar in some way, and the disasters would be similar in some way, and they would be really different from one another. That was another big assumption. And, you know, Tolstoy had said in the novel *Anna Karenina* that "All happy families are the same, but every miserable family is miserable in its own unique way." That's a tall story, said so he wouldn't have agreed with this assumption. And, um, and actually, you know, Bob and I started collaborating, something assistant professors really aren't supposed to do. And, uh, the people evaluating us for tenure promotion said, "You know, psychology is really bad at predicting individual behavior. And in fact, the best measures can only account for 9% of the variation in people." That was true in the 1970s. So, 91% of all the variation in human behavior was error, unpredictable. So how are you going to predict two people's behavior, you know, in a relationship? You'll just square your error, you'll never learn anything, nothing will replicate, you'll never get a grant. And also, we don't like people collaborating, they said, because we can't, we don't know who to evaluate, you know, who's made the major contribution. And so Bob and I started doing this research because, uh, academic freedom means you can get fired for anything you want to. So we wanted to study relationships. And we brought couples into this laboratory and had them talk about how their day went. Had them talk about a major conflict area in their relationship, which we asked them to resolve in the next 15 minutes, just because, you know, we didn't know what we were doing. Um, another great quote by Albert Einstein is, "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research." Right? So, and then we asked them to talk about something positive. We showed them their videotape, and they turned the dial to tell us how they were feeling from very negative to very positive. And we collected measures that told us how fast their blood was flowing, how fast their hearts were beating, how much they were sweating from the eccrine glands of their hands, how much they were jiggling around. And, uh, and then we sent them home. So, these were 30 couples, and we re-contacted them again three years later. And we found that instead of being able to predict 9% of the variation in how those marriages had changed in three years, we could predict 90% of the variation. Now, you know, our, the people evaluating for tenure said, "Well, it's just a fluke. It'll never replicate, and you'll never get a grant, and you certainly won't get tenure if you keep collaborating because we don't like people to collaborate." So Bob and I decided to keep collaborating. And and we've now replicated this finding. And it took us 25 years to do this same study over and over again across the whole life course. We studied newlyweds. We studied couples in midlife. We spent 20 years studying two groups of couples in the San Francisco Bay Area, one group in their 40s, one group in their 60s. And for 20 years, these couples came back every three years to the laboratory, and we just followed them up. And in these 25 years, we never tried to help anybody. Um, we found in our own data that the people who got any kind of therapy were more likely to get a divorce than the people who got no therapy. So we didn't want to join the people who were trying to help people because, you know, we were, we were making a good living just watching people deteriorate. So, you know, why try to help anybody? But then my, I married a therapist, and, uh, and I got lucky. So I'm in a really great relationship. And by the way, Bob got lucky too. He got married for the first time a couple of weeks ago at the age of 67, and he's in a great relationship. So we're both in really great relationships now. I married a therapist, and she really wants to help people. And, uh, so, you know, I really didn't want to help people, and she really did. So we compromised and decided to help people. And this has been true in my marriage, you know, throughout. I mean, she wanted to get a dog, and I didn't want to get a dog because I had been bitten by every dog in New Jersey growing up. And so we compromised and got a dog. And that first dog really cured me of my fear of dogs. And now our second dog, after the first one unfortunately died of cancer, our second dog is really a Zen master, and he's teaching me how to live life well. So we compromised and decided to help people. Well, okay. So Bob and I had shown that the same things that predicted whether a couple would stay together or get a divorce, and if they stayed together, whether they'd be happy or miserable, held across the whole life course for heterosexual couples. And we spent a dozen years looking at gay and lesbian couples, and the same things were true for gay and lesbian couples. Probably the most replicated finding in the literature, research literature on families. And if you've read, if you've read the newspaper in the past couple of weeks, you know that a lot of things don't replicate in psychology, and a lot of stuff is made up. But this data really is very robust. It really, really winds up holding.
But Julie and I, my wife and I, when we decided to help people, we were embarking on, you know, a whole different kind of adventure. Could we use this information about how the Masters and disasters were different to actually avoid disaster? Could we turn a disaster into a master? And that's been the last 20 years that with Anna and Alan Kovecsi at the Gottman Institute, we've done this research. And the answer is yes, we can. So all of this research in the past 40 years has really shown that science can, in fact, make a difference. And actually turns out to not be very complicated. That's the surprising thing. That the universe really is comprehensible, and relationships are a lot easier to understand even than things like dark matter and dark energy and the nature of the universe and its evolution. Couples really aren't that complicated.
So let me tell you what we found. First of all, we found that the disasters of relationships really approach dealing with a problem in their relationship in a particular way. They basically start off and they say, you know, they say to their partner, "I've been watching you, and as far as I can tell, I'm pretty much perfect, but you are defective. And we're not going to have a happy marriage until you get therapy and change your personality." So we call this criticism. And, uh, now, you know, it's not that criticism is really mean-spirited, really. You know, when the person who approaches their partner this way, they're really hoping their partner will respond by saying, "Thank you so much, John, for pointing out all the ways in which I'm failing as a human being. Can we have lunch next week so you can tell me more?" That's the way the critic wants people to respond. Unfortunately, most disaster people respond with defensiveness, a natural response to being criticized. We call these four things that predicted divorce so well the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, you know, after the New Testament book of Revelations, which in which the four horsemen were war and pestilence and famine. So there's the same kind of Four Horsemen in disaster relationships. People get defensive, they counterattack, they whine, they act like an innocent victim, or they, or they attack back, you know, really strongly. And some people are so good at defensiveness that they can be an innocent victim and attack at the same time.
Now, what are the Masters doing? Well, instead of pointing their finger at themselves, at their partner, they're pointing their finger at themselves. And they're really saying, "First of all, this is not a big deal. You know, we're talking about a problem here in this silly lab, the psychology lab, but really, you know, I love you. Everything's fine. You know, and I don't need you to change. You're fine the way you are. But there are a couple of things I'd like to change, and they're not a big deal. And here's kind of what I need. Let me explain what I need. This is my recipe for you being successful." So we call that gentle startup.
Now, the second thing they're doing, instead of defensiveness, even if their partner is critical, and that did happen quite often, even in these master couples, just happened less often. But what they did when their partner was critical was to say, "You know, that's a good point. I probably was kind of grumpy the other day. I probably don't listen to you a lot of times. So talk to me, tell me more." You know, because, you know, they seem to have a motto, these masters: "When you're upset, the world stops, and I listen." And they take responsibility, even for a small part of the problem, rather than getting defensive. They listen. This is huge. Really, really big difference. Now, it took us seven years to discover that one little fact that accepting responsibility is very powerful when you're talking about a problem. So the Masters are doing that, and they have this motto, you know, that, you know, is about listening. At one of our workshops, a guy came up to me in the morning break and said to me, "Dr. Gottman, when will they invent a form of Viagra for women that will make them more want to have sex more often?" And I said, "You know, they've already invented that." He said, "Really? Where can I get that?" I said, "Well, it's called listening." And that is what the Masters are doing. Whereas the disasters are basically saying, you know, "Baby, when you're upset, when you're angry with me, when you're feeling sad and lonely, I don't want to hear about it. When you're happy and positive, positive, come talk to me. But when you're upset, I don't want that negativity in my life." The opposite motto.
The third thing that the Masters were doing was escalating their criticism to contempt. And contempt is really sort of talking to somebody from a superior place. And there are many ways of being contemptuous, but that was our single best predictor of divorce in all couples. Not only was it a great predictor of divorce, but it predicted how much in how many infectious illnesses the recipient of contempt would have in the next four years. And the Glazers at Ohio State University actually showed that criticism, contempt was related to how much adrenaline and cortisol people were secreting as they were arguing with each other. So they mapped out the general suppression of immune functioning because they took small bits of blood from people as they talked to one another. They looked at the immune system, and they looked at the endocrine system. So contempt is really a very interesting thing. And it became one of my, uh, small hobbies to collect all the ways in which people can be contemptuous. And people are very creative in it. In a way, they're contemptuous. One of my favorites is correcting somebody's grammar when they're angry with you, you know. So if my wife is angry with me, and she, and she's, you know, talking on and on, she says, "I could care less about this." I said, "Just a minute, Julie. The proper way to say that is, 'I couldn't care less.' Now, what was your point?" That's a great way of being contemptuous. And recently, a clinician came up to me and said, "I've got another one for your collection." So, you know, I was working with a couple, and this husband got very angry, and he said, he said to his wife, "Do you think you're better than me?" And his wife said, "Better than I." It's another one in my collection. And we found out when we went to, to Lexington, Kentucky, that in the American South, there's a particular way of being contemptuous that is acceptable. So, you know, I can turn to my friend, and when a woman comes into this room, I can say, "You see that woman over there? Harry, doesn't she look like a, in that dress? Bless her heart." If I say "bless her heart," I can say the worst thing about her, and it's totally acceptable in the American South. So there, contempt is a very interesting thing. And the Masters basically don't do it. In fact, what the Masters are doing is in very small moments, they're creating a culture of respect and affection in the relationship. They have a different habit of mind. The disasters appear to have a habit of mind in which they're scanning their social environment for other people's mistakes, and they hope to be able to advise and correct and mentor people so that they don't make mistakes because they themselves don't make mistakes, but everyone else on the planet really makes a lot of mistakes. And that's sort of the habit of mind of the disasters. The Masters really ignore their partner's mistakes, and they scan their social environment for what's going right, and they express appreciation in very small ways. And in our apartment lab at the University of Washington, we saw this. People are saying things like, you know, "Thanks for getting me the butter," or, "You know, I enjoyed the conversation at dinner," or, "You know, for some reason, you look really hot today. I'm having all these lewd thoughts about you right now." You know, and so they're expressing this appreciation and affection verbally and non-verbally, often. And so we say, any, any small positive thing you do in a relationship is really foreplay. And that's what the Masters are doing. So those are some of the things that allowed us to predict what was going to happen in a relationship. So we found that when those things really, you know, were high in a relationship, people divorced an average of 5.6 years after the wedding. But then, as we kept collecting data and following couples for longer and longer periods, we found another group of people, you know, those couples that come into a restaurant and they don't talk to each other for the whole meal, okay? We found those people, and they don't have this criticism and defensiveness and contempt. They just don't have anything positive going on. There's no affection, there's no humor going on for those couples. And they divorce an average of 16.2 years after the wedding. They can last longer. They can raise kids up to adolescence, and somehow during adolescence, things go haywire for those couples. So that emotional withdrawal from the relationship is another sign of a disaster relationship. It can last longer.
So we really asked the question, well, what, what is it about people that make them start, uh, a conflict discussion, bringing up an issue, in this very harsh way, this critical, contemptuous, defensive way? What is it that does that? And it turns out that when you watch people talk about how their day went, that the people who are really not very interested, especially men, who are not interested in what their wives are talking about, they have the four horsemen in their conflict discussion. So we started realizing that you can't just look at how people deal with a conflict. You have to really look at friendship. And we discovered that friendship has three components. And this came out of the research as well. The first component is building, kind of, a roadmap of your partner's inner world. And you do that by asking open-ended questions, like questions like, you know, "So, what do you think about this house we're living in? You know, if you had all the money in the world, how would you change it? What do you like about it? What do you dislike about it? How would you like your career to be different in the next five years? You know, what are you thinking about as a mother of her youngest daughter? What are you worried about with her? What would you like to change?" These open-ended questions are something that the Masters are really asking quite often, and they're remembering the answers, also. That's the other part of love maps. And they're building these love maps. And we actually have an app on the iPhone that you can buy for very cheaply, and, you know, or a smartphone where if you shake your phone, you get another open-ended question, and you can ask these questions on dates and have these great conversations. And where there's also an app for building an erotic love map, your partner's erotic world. You can shake your phone and ask another question about your partner's erotic world. 100 questions you can ask a man, and 100 questions you can ask a woman about their erotic world.
The other part of friendship, we found that was so important, was this fondness and admiration system. These small things, often, that are like foreplay, you know, really expressing appreciation and affection and respect in the relationship, and building that in a very systematic way by having a habit of mind where you're noticing what's going right in the relationship.
The third part turned out to be very interesting. Now, this part was fascinating for another reason. When we studied 130 newlywed couples who were representative of Seattle, and we studied them a couple of months after their wedding, 130 couples, and we followed them for 6 years. 17 of those couples divorced within six years. And when they were in the apartment lab, we just watched them. And when one of them would say something, then the one of our three cameras would swing over to their partner and see what the response was. And we noticed that people were constantly making these attempts to connect with their partner, to get their partner's interest, affection, humor. They were, they were doing these bids for connection. Now, this turned out to be very interesting because when I get interviewed by the media, they say, you know, "What is it that couples argue about? You've studied thousands of couples arguing. What is it that couples really fight about all the time?" And the answer is, they fight about absolutely nothing. They don't fight about topics. Most fights are about the failure to connect emotionally. So, for example, a couple is watching television, and he has the remote, and they've made popcorn, they're going to have an evening watching TV. And she says, "You know, that's interesting on that channel. Leave it there. I'd like to watch that show." And he says, "Okay, well, let me see what else is on." And she says, "No, no, no. Leave it there." He says, "Well, I will, but let me see what else is on." She says, "No, leave it there." And he says, "Fine." And he throws the remote in her lap. And she says, "Well, you know, the way you said 'fine' makes me not want to watch TV with you." And he says, "Fine." And he walks out. What did they argue about? Was it sex? Was it money? Was it in-laws? Was it children? All these topics we were studying in prior labs. No, it was about the failure to connect. And that's what we found in the apartment lab. The 17 couples who divorced had turned toward their partner's attempts to connect, we call them bids for connection, 33% of the time. And the couples who were still married had turned toward these small moments 86% of the time. A moment like somebody looking out the window and saying, "Wow, there's a beautiful boat." Because where our lab was on the Montlake Cut, and a boat would go by, and the camera would immediately pan the husband. And this guy was eating cereal and watching television. He'd go, "There's a beautiful boat." No response, just keeps eating the cereal. And we call that turning away. And sometimes there'd be a response like, "Huh?" And we call that turning toward. And that's as good as it gets. Sometimes just a little acknowledgment. But that's all that's necessary to build this emotional bank account. These small moments when your partner wants something, like to tell a joke, you know, like somebody would say, "Okay, baby, listen. There's four lawyers in a boat." And then the camera would swing to the other person. And sometimes that person would be ready to laugh. They'd go, "Yeah." And sometimes no response, right? Turning away. So this is very powerful.
Now, let me tell you why it was so powerful. Because another thing we found about about couple's interaction was that rather than the idea that sparks fly and there's a lot of electricity in a great relationship, what we found was that what predicted the the stability and happiness in a relationship was the opposite. People being calm, even when they talked about an area of disagreement. Heart rates are low, blood is flowing slowly, they're not secreting adrenaline and cortisol, those stress hormones. They're able to talk to each other in a very neutral way. And most people think that's a bad relationship, but they're wrong. That physiological calm is very powerful. And the best way to get people to be physiologically calm turns out to be shared humor. Humor is very powerful. But there were only 60 seconds more humor in the in the conflict discussion of newlyweds that stayed married than the newlyweds who divorced. So 60 seconds. That's not a lot in a conflict discussion. And yet we found it was being used very precisely when the partner's heart rate and blood velocity got high, humor would emerge, okay, and that arousal would go down. Very powerful. You know, I mean, I would even suggest that, you know, when people pick somebody, they pick somebody where they have a similar sense of humor, shared humor, okay? Very powerful.
But how do you use that? Julie and I are trying to help people. How do you use that to help people? Can you say, "You know, next time you argue about his mother, please smile and laugh more"? You'd have to be an idiot as a therapist to do that. Well, people have actually tried that experiment, you know, believe it or not, and it doesn't work. How do you get people to have more of a sense of humor when they're arguing and disagreeing? The answer is, turn toward bids for connection. That's the secret. People who are turning toward their partner's bids, they have spontaneous humor. And if you increase the amount they're turning toward bids, guess what? Humor emerges automatically. So not only these three things powerful in friendship, love maps, building fondness and admiration, and turning toward bids, really responding to your partner's needs for immediate connection, but they're also the basis of great sex, romance, and passion.
What have we learned about sex, romance, and passion? And you'd say, well, okay, so, you know, Masters and Johnson did their research, and Kinsey did their re, all this research. There's only one thing that discriminates, well, two things that discriminate couples who have a great sex life from couples who have an awful sex life. The first is they stay friends. When they have a great sex life, love maps, fondness and admiration, and turning toward bids, that's what friendship is, okay? Second, they make sex a priority. It's not the last thing on a long to-do list. It's special and make it important. That's the only thing that's different about couples with a great sex life and couples who don't. So the couples I see, and I see many couples who haven't had sex in eight years or 15 years, and one of them will say to me, you know, as a couple last week, did said, "So, what's the secret for us? How can we start having sex again? We used to have great sex." And I said, you know, "It's not complicated. The secret to great sex is kissing." Kissing is the secret to having a great sex life. Huge representation in the sensory cortex for the lips. But your partner has to want to kiss you. How much time? Three. Stop now. Okay. What, what is it that makes your partner want to kiss you? Love maps, fondness and admiration, and turning toward bids. Thank you very much.
We have time for some questions. Here's a question from a newlywed. I love this. Thank you. Um, my question is, you talked a lot about what a couple looks like when they divorce early, and when they, um, stay together forever. But what does a couple look like who stays together forever, but maybe for the wrong reasons? What do you mean by "wrong reasons"? I don't think there are any wrong reasons for staying together. Now, certainly, if you're in an abusive relationship, that's that's really a bad thing. And people do stay together in very unhappy and even abusive relationships. And, you know, and, you know, that's something we can describe and understand. People do stay together. We don't control whether they stay together or not, not right, even as therapists. It's their decision whether they want to be together or not. Um, so that, all we can do is describe that scientifically and point out that there are alternatives, right? Um, but who knows if it's the wrong reason? I don't know why my wife stays with me. It's a mystery to me. But, is it the right reasons or the wrong reasons? So who knows?
Next question. Question: I've just become an empty nester. So I'm curious, any observations of that transition? Yeah. So the empty nest is, you know, one of the ones, one of the transitions we can really describe, and also the transition to retirement. And it turns out that people's adaptation to that is really dependent on the quality of their marriage and their relationship before becoming empty nesters. So for many couples that I see in therapy, a lot of times the emptiness is a challenge because the relationship has become so child-centered that there's not much else going on. And that's not unusual in America. A recent study done in Los Angeles found that the average amount of time that couples talk to one another is 35 minutes a week, and most of that is errand talk, who's going to do what when. So, you know, it seems to be the case that particularly when children are around, but also, you know, when people get married, that they make the relationship the last priority on a very long to-do list. And you've got to really work to make that not happen. You've got to preserve romantic getaways. You know, my wife and I do an annual honeymoon every year. We've, we've rented the same room in the same bed and breakfast for the past 16 years, and we take our kayak, and we, you know, disconnect from the world, and we talk to each other. And sometimes we argue with each other. And you've got to make the relationship a priority. You've got to make romance and courtship something that doesn't end. And fun and play are the first victims of a relationship, and adventure is another victim of relationship. You can't let that happen. So I think if that's happened in your relationship, the emptiness is a good time to rebuild all that and reconnect. I think that's the same secret.
Do we have time for one more? So, um, now that you're doing therapy, are you able to describe, uh, how to recognize couples that are going to be successful versus those that, uh, go into therapy and, um, are not going to be successful? Yeah, that's a great question. Um, you know, what, uh, we've started doing is, you know, generally we have, uh, I would say between 75 and 80% success. But all of medicine has this huge relapse problem. If you take all the people in the United States who have asthma, hypertension, and diabetes, turns out only 50, 50% take their medicine. So when I talk to a client, you know, I talk about relapse at the end of our treatment and I say, "So, what are you going to do? Are you going to be in the group of people who doesn't use what's good for you and doesn't do what's good for you? Or are you going to be intelligent and do what's good for you?" And so we make a plan to avoid relapse. And I think that's the secret. And my late colleague, Alan Marlott, at the University of Washington, just died last year, discovered that we can really prevent relapse, and we can make a difference. But, you know, it's that choice, that willingness. When you walk out of therapy, and you know what to do, and you can make your relationship better, and you already have, and you abandon that, you know, that's really a mystery. Why do people stop doing what's good for them? And we don't know. We don't understand that.
Thank you very much. Thank you, John.
I dated Cliff Van Horn for one lunch hour in the seventh grade. Neither of us spoke a word. A note brought us together. Another brought our end. At our 30-year high school reunion, with his darling wife at his side, we agreed we had evolved immensely since then. Connection is our human distinction, our deepest yearning, and it fuels our refining. Yet, polarity is fierce. We cannot have joy without pain, love without fear, bliss without disappointment, or connection without loss. No wonder we sometimes recoil. But returning brings insight and possibility, and an authentic connection that disrupts our expectation of what should be is well worth our risk and investment. See you next week.