What's killing our relationship

  


John Gottman studied the problems of marriage and family for 40 years. It is enough a five-minute conversation with 91-percent accuracy to predict whether the spouses divorce.

As he defines it? In his book “the Seven principles of successful marriage,” Gottman calls the four indicators, which can tell whether the marital relationship future:

Criticism: “the Complaints and dissatisfaction is normal. Criticism – the phenomenon is more global. This means attacks on the personality of the partner, not on what he does. He doesn't take out the trash, not because he forgot but because he's such a bad person”.

Contempt: “...public insults, eye rolling, mockery, ridicule and bad jokes. Demonstration of the contempt in any form is the most dangerous of the “four horsemen” of marital relations, because it carries aversion. If you all the time demonstrate that the partner causes you disgust, to solve any problem virtually impossible.”

Defensive behavior: “Take a defensive stance – one way of blaming the partner. This could be voiced as: “Reason is not in me and in you.” Defensive behavior only exacerbates the conflict and threat”.

Otmuchivanie: Stop talking. Build a “stone wall.” Otmalchivayas, you are just shying away from conflict, you kill the relationship, get out of them emotionally.

Gottman's research showed that the relationship destroys not the difference in the views and preferences of the spouses.

69 percent of problems in a pair cannot be resolved. They're not going anywhere, despite the fact that many are fighting year after year trying to change each other. Often these conflicts are related to fundamental things like lifestyle, personality characteristics or values. Such argument is a waste of time and emotional energy.

What to do with the fact that you cannot change? To accept it as it is.

These couples intuitively understand that a particular problem is part of their relationship, like one of the chronic diseases that appear with age almost all: knee pain, gastritis, “tennis elbow”... They do not like us, but we adapt to live with them and try not to do anything that could lead to its exacerbation.

Psychologist Dan Wylie wrote in his book “After the honeymoon”: “When you choose a partner with whom we intend to live life... you will inevitably get a set of unsolvable problems that you have to deal with the next ten, twenty or fifty years.”





And a few interesting facts from the book by John Gottman:

“...a bad marriage increases susceptibility to disease by about 35 percent and even shorten life by an average of four years.”

“In 96 percent of cases in the first three minutes, you can predict what the outcome of the fifteen-minute conversation...”

“I found that in 94 percent of cases, the future of the pair has a pleasant shared memories, too, is happy. If memories are changed and distorted – this is an alarming signal”.

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