Transcription
DR. JOHN GOTTMAN: And we found in the apartment lab that people were making these bids for emotional connection. They were trying to get their partner's attention. They were trying to tell a joke. You know, they'd start off saying, "Okay, there's four lawyers in a boat..." and then the camera would look at the other person, and some people would be maybe cleaning their glasses, and they'd hear this joke, and they just keep doing what they're doing. No response.
And some people would say, "Yeah, okay, four lawyers in a boat?" And we call that "turning toward." And the no response, we call "turning away." Or sometimes, people would give an irritated response, like, "I am trying to read." And we call that "turning against."
Now, we studied 130 newlyweds, a representative sample in Seattle, and looked six years after the wedding. That the couples that were still together — not divorced — had turned toward one another in the apartment laboratory, turned toward bids of their partner 86% of the time. Couples who were divorced had turned toward their partner 33% of the time. And we're measuring a couple of months after the wedding. So that was an excellent predictor, building this emotional bank account by turning toward bids.
Bids are really ways in which your partner, a lot of times very subtly and nonverbally, expresses a need. The need for affection, for conversation, for interest, for emotional support. And when people really build an awareness of that, that's a fundamental process. Then they start really building this emotional bank account. So those were the elements of friendship that we could work on in our workshops, and we could train therapists to really work on in therapy, that build positive emotional connection in the relationship. That is the basis for repair during conflict, that makes conflict work — be constructive rather than destructive. So the conflict really can be a way that couples get closer to one another, and they can understand each other better. Conflict is inevitable, and it's really a mechanism for learning how to love one another better, because we all make errors, we all communicate badly, and that's par for the course in every relationship. So that's what friendship was about.
Now, the surprising thing was that these three elements of friendship: Love Maps, turning toward, and fondness and admiration, were also the basis for satisfying sexual relationships, romance, and passion, in the relationship. In many marriages, and also in gay and lesbian relationships, once people have a committed relationship, they appear to stop courting one another. They appear to stop having romance.
Now, this dimension of romance is very interesting. At a recent workshop, one of our women in one of the couples in the workshop raised her hand, and she said, "Could you please define romance?" And, you know, we opened it up to the audience, and we got maybe 30 different definitions of romance. What is romance? My daughter, I asked my daughter this question. She's 18, and she gave me the best answer, because I went on Google and tried to find out all these ways people defined romance. None of them were very satisfying. But my daughter said, "Romance is an agreement that you make with your partner..." "...that there would be magic in your relationship." "And it's a shared fantasy that eventually becomes a reality." I love that definition.
So anyway, that shared fantasy that becomes a reality, the way we create magic by really cherishing our partner, is something that happens only when these first three levels of The Sound Relationship House, the components of friendship and intimacy, really are happening. And they're things you can build. They're not ethereal, you know, they're measurable, and they're things that we can really teach therapists to build, and we can teach couples to build in our workshops.
If you work on the friendship, you automatically are in the positive perspective, which is the next level of The Sound Relationship House. And what that means is that, generally, your cost-benefit analysis of your partner's character and the relationship are more positive than negative. So when your partner says something maybe in an irritable way, you don't take it personally. Whereas the negative perspective people really have a chip on their shoulder, and they have that chip on their shoulder because they don't feel like this person is their irritating friend, they feel like this person is their adversary, and so they're looking for negativity. They're hypervigilant for slights and put-downs, and they distort reality, and even see positive things as potential put-downs. So there are some research studies that show that if you're in a negative perspective, you tend not to see 50% of the positive things that your partner is actually doing in an evening, as measured by outside observers. So that's what the positive perspective is about.
Now, the theory is that the positive perspective or the negative perspective is the litmus test of the quality of friendship and intimacy in the relationship. If you have a chip on your shoulder and you're hypervigilant and hypersensitive for negativity in your relationship, the chances are your friendship isn't working very well, and repair's not going to work very well. So the management of conflict, which is the next level of The Sound Relationship House, will not work very well. Conflicts will escalate, and that's what allows us to predict so well.
So what happens here is that people are in a state of hyperarousal when they start dealing with conflict. During conflict, the disasters of relationships at the very outset are hearing what their partner's saying, whatever complaint that is, as a personal attack. And their heart rates are going up, they're secreting adrenaline. Many physiological systems are firing, and they're becoming flooded, so that they're in a mode of not being interested in what their partner's saying, but really guarded. We call it "What the hell is this?" mode, rather than "What's this?" mode. That's what makes conflict go badly from the very outset. Whereas if you're really talking about an area of conflict with your friend, even if it's a tough area to talk about, then you're more receptive, and you're more in a "What's this?" an interested mode, and conflict goes entirely differently.
Now, we also learned that some conflicts are very different from others, and the conflicts that were compromised seems unthinkable, and are usually not about the topic that the couple is discussing. But really about the meaning of each person's position, the existential meaning. So, for example, conflicts about money that seem intractable, and a lot of couples are arguing about money now with the economic downturn starting. We know a lot about this, and how unemployment and job loss and economic hardship really predicts more stress and more conflict, particularly about finances and money. Most conflicts about money are not about money. They're not about the budget. They're not about arithmetic. They're about what money means, and the history that money has meant to that person's family in the past.
We can really have people talk not so much about the issue, but about their hopes and their dreams. Once they are aware of what those dreams are, then we can resolve those conflicts, usually 86% of the time in our workshops. So making life dreams come true is an essential part of these kinds of existential conflicts, but also really asking the question of, "What is that you really want in life?" and knowing that.
One of my favorite movies is a movie called "Don Juan DeMarco." Marlon Brando and Faye Dunaway are in that movie. They're married. Marlon Brando is getting ready to retire, he's a psychiatrist, and Johnny Depp is his patient. Johnny Depp really loves women, he just, he thinks he's Don Juan, but he loves femininity, and he is very poetic about it. It affects Marlon Brando tremendously. So in one scene, he's talking to Faye Dunaway about his retirement. He's trying to convince her that it's going to be a good deal. She's really pretty wary about it. At one point, he says to her, "What are your dreams?" "What do you want?" "What do you hope for?" "What do you wish for?" She gets real quiet, and she says, "I thought you'd never ask." That's what this level of The Sound Relationship House is about. It's really about asking those questions.
The top of it is about the way people create a sense of shared meaning and purpose, because when people start to have a committed relationship, they're really not just having a relationship with one another that's romantic, that has conflict, but they're really building a life together. A life with meaning and purpose and mission and legacy and culture, and values. Unless they have the conversations they need to have that make those meanings intentional and shared, then they go through life not really building this very important existential part of their connection together. That is really the final part of The Sound Relationship House. And that's pretty much everything I know about relationships, so I'll stop there. Thank you for listening.