Will Your Marriage Sink Or Swim? One Researcher Thinks He Has Found What Causes Some Couples To Split

An unhappy marriage can literally make you sick.

By counting the number of contemptuous facial expressions a husband makes during an argument, marital researchers can accurately predict how many infectious illnesses his wife will suffer over the next four years.

Perhaps that’s why Dr. John Gottman’s phone never stops ringing. A University of Washington psychology professor, Gottman has become the Northwest’s own medicine man of marriage.

The media love him.

He’s been on “Good Morning America,” “Today,” “20/20” and “Oprah.” He’s been interviewed for The New York Times, Health and Psychology Today. This fall, camera crews are descending on him for reports on “PrimeTime Live” and “Dateline NBC.”

It’s because Gottman’s marital advice is backed by more than 20 years of research with 2,050 couples. His electrode-wired couples now regularly appear on those network news magazines. Armed with data on couples’ heart rates and perspiration, Gottman discovered a method for predicting divorce with 94 percent accuracy.

He believes he’s found what makes a marriage a life-enhancing elixir, and what renders it an energy-draining toxin. His research shows that the health of a marriage profoundly affects the well-being of its partners, and that it’s the husband who usually holds the cure.

“Leo Tolstoy said all happy marriages are alike,” Gottman said recently. “We’ve found the opposite.”

This fall, Gottman received a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health to study the effects of his research-based therapy on married couples. The grant will run until the year 2001.

In the meantime, Gottman and his wife, Julie, have set up the Seattle Marital and Family Institute, where they field at least 90 calls a day. Clinicians want training, couples register for workshops, and reporters angle for interviews.

“It’s overwhelming,” Gottman said. “We can’t handle all the calls we get.”

The Gottmans now dream of opening a national center for training therapists. It would be a place where Gottman’s research could become a legacy.

His work began in 1980 with a study of 30 couples at Indiana University.

That study, with colleague Robert Levenson, located a link between marital satisfaction and couples’ physiological responses to one another.

In the years since, he and his colleagues at the University of California and Stanford have used that link to help them discover the factors that predict divorce.

He calls them the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

They are, in order of severity, criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling.

Once a marriage spirals down through all four, watch out. There could just be a divorce lawyer lurking.

That’s a prospect Gottman hopes his research will help couples avoid. He cites studies that link divorce to increased risk of mental illness, automobile accidents, physical disease, suicide, violence, immunosuppression and terminal illness.

That’s not to mention the evidence of its negative affects on children - depression, withdrawal, poor social skills, illness, decreased school performance, misbehavior and a shortened life span.

That’s why he trains therapists to detect signs of hope.

“If there is an ember of fondness and respect for one another, that’s the most important predictor of success in marital therapy,” he said.

As for extramarital affairs and domestic violence, they’re profoundly destructive.

“If you have a piece of Waterford crystal and it breaks, you can fix it and it will hold water,” Gottman said. “But it won’t sing anymore.”

According to his view of the research, Gottman believes that it’s the husband who holds the key.

His studies show that men who are capable of accepting influence from their wives have the longest-lasting and happiest marriages.

“The men who are doing this are way ahead of the game,” Gottman said.

“Their lives are more meaningful. Their relationships are better with their wives and children, and their children are turning out better.”

Even their immune systems are stronger, Gottman said.

In a study of 60 of the most violent, miserable marriages, Gottman didn’t find a single husband who said anything like “Good point” or “I never thought of that.”

Like a machine in a batting cage, these men consistently bat back the same response to all their wives’ requests: “No.”

In contrast, when Gottman examines data on satisfied couples, he finds husbands willing to hear their wives’ opinions, gracefully negotiate compromises and offer constructive solutions.

This is the husband, who when he hears that his wife has a busy evening planned on Thursday night and would appreciate his help, arranges his calendar to accommodate her needs.

The wife of such a husband usually flourishes, testing psychologically and physically healthier than less happily married women.

Curiously, the converse is not true. Gottman’s research shows that wives regularly accept their husbands’ influence, in both happy and unhappy marriages, and it predicts nothing.

“It seems inherently unfair that men (have to learn to) accept the influence of their wives,” Gottman said. “The process is unequal, but the outcome is equal.”

While the message delights feminists, it confounds many men.

“This wasn’t intended to be political,” Gottman said. “I’m just a plumber.

“I do the research, and these are the results. … If the data came up the opposite, I’d be saying the opposite.”

Husbands need to realize that they can’t possibly win by crushing their wives’ dreams.

“To me, it’s just so clear that men who hear this message are going to have much better lives,” Gottman said. “Men do not want a passive, obedient child whose spirit is broken. The same thing is true in a marriage.

“You do not want to be that successful at being a leader. You don’t want to have a depressed wife.”

Gottman wears a yarmulke, the traditional skullcap of Jewish men, and speaks with a New York accent.

He believes his cultural heritage - removed from the white-male “strong, silent type” cultural ideal - helped him make this discovery.

“Being a Jew allows me to see the data more clearly,” he said. “This tradition of very assertive women has a long history in our culture - at least 3,500 years.”

He cites a Bible passage in which a group of Israelite women approached Moses to protest his method of dividing up their land. They argue that it’s unfair, that he’s denied them their inheritance, and Moses, in effect, says, “You’re absolutely right.”

In American couples, Gottman finds that women too easily give up their dreams for the sake of making the marriage work.

“Like prairie dogs in South Dakota that vanish the minute there’s a predator, the dreams of a partner disappear when it’s not safe,” he said.

Gottman believes couples should seek marriage counseling much sooner.

“The average wait time when a woman discovers a lump in her breast is four weeks,” he said. “For couples, it’s six years.”

His style of marital therapy focuses on helping couples reveal and learn to support one another’s dreams.

“We try to do a minimum that will move a couple into a new life course,” he said. “It’s very gentle and very positive.”

In his book, “Why Marriages Succeed or Fail” (Simon and Schuster), and in his therapy, Gottman teaches couples to make deposits in an imaginary emotional bank account. He believes it takes five loving deposits to offset one angry withdrawal.

He also teaches men to construct love maps of their wives’ lives in their heads.

“Lots of guys have a huge amount of their cortex devoted to baseball statistics, with only a small part devoted to the color of their wife’s eyes and how they met,” he said.

The happiest husbands make room in their brains for complex diagrams of their wives’ worlds: her concerns, her friends and enemies at work, her dreams and desires.

“These men think about the positive qualities of their partners,” Gottman said. “They’re likely to be at work and thinking about what a terrific woman they married.”

For women, Gottman finds it helps to teach them to go easy on the criticism and to soften their complaints. It’s not: “You did it all wrong. Ever since you picked up the living room, I can’t find a thing.”

He suggests instead: “I really appreciate your picking up the living room. Unfortunately I had to spend 45 minutes looking for my blue folder. If you find it, could you put it on the chair for me?”

For both partners, happiness often depends on their ability to “turn toward” their partner regularly throughout the day rather than turning away. These can be a subtle expression of warmth, humor or affection.

These moments are so fleeting that many couples fail to value them.

But, said Gottman, “When you add up all these moments, you’ve got something the size of a Russian novel at the end of the year.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo Staff illustration by Charles Waltmire

MEMO: Dr. John Gottman will present “The Marriage Survival Kit,” a weekend workshop for couples, at the Seattle Center Nov. 16-17. The cost is $295 per couple before Nov. 1 or $325 after that date. For more information, call the Seattle Marital and Family Institute at (206) 523-9042.

This sidebar appeared with the story: How to tell if your marriage is in trouble It pays to fight right. Dr. John Gottman’s marital research has identified four predictors of divorce, “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”: Criticism: This consists of attacking one’s personality or character rather than a specific behavior, and often includes blaming. Partners need to distinguish criticism from complaints. A criticism would be: “You talked about yourself all through dinner and didn’t ask about my day. How can you treat me this way?” A more tactful complaint might be: “You talked about yourself all through dinner and didn’t ask about my day. That hurt my feelings.” Contempt: These words and body language are intended to insult and psychologically abuse your partner. This can take the form of insults, name-calling, mockery, a “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”-style hostility, or facial expressions such as sneering, rolling your eyes or curling your upper lip. Taking a break for at least 20 minutes to calm down can help. Avoid a morally superior stance. Pair specific complaints with a big dose of admiration - the opposite of contempt. Defensiveness: This means playing the innocent victim by denying responsibility, making excuses or whining. Try hearing your partner’s words not as an attack but as information that is very strongly expressed. Make a genuine attempt to empathize. Stonewalling: This means coldly withdrawing from the conversation, glancing away or down and turning into a stone wall. Gottman’s research found that 85 percent of stonewallers are men. Whether it’s done by men or women, it’s highly predictive of divorce. It’s far healthier to continue the discussion, or call for a short break, than to withdraw from communication completely. Jamie Tobias Neely