Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [91]
This is only one of a number of surprising findings. For example, it turns out that even large differences in taste are not important to the success of a marriage—unless you brood about them. Brooding, they found, leads to divorce. And conflict itself is not a sign of trouble; instead, the key for couples is to preserve positive feelings for each other. Loss of affection, not conflict, is the great predictor of divorce. Even longevity is not necessarily an indication of success. Huston has found that some couples have lackluster relationships but do not divorce. They basically accept that married life is a source of modest dissatisfaction.
The PAIR project does offer support for some folk wisdom. For example, women should trust their intuition. Women in the study who feared that the marriage might have future problems generally discovered that their fears were well founded. You also don’t have to hang around for years to see if the marriage will improve. According to Huston, the first two years tend to reveal whether or not you are going to be happy. And forget about having a baby to solve your problems. The birth of a child does not change how a couple feels about each other. The project also confirms what numerous other studies have suggested—men with feminine traits make better husbands.
I know what you are thinking. You would never fall into any of these traps. You are too savvy. You probably feel that you can just look at a couple and predict with great accuracy whether or not they will stay together. Well, I’m here to tell you that you are deluded, at least according to a study by Rachel Ebling and Robert Levenson. The two researchers showed people three-minute videotapes of five couples who stayed married and five couples who got divorced and then asked the viewers to make predictions about those couples. Most people were terrible at predicting which couples would get divorced and scored at a level only 4 percent above random chance. In this instance, women’s intuition also proved to be no help. The study found that women were no better at predicting than men. And in a stunning confirmation of body language over spoken language, the researchers found that listening to the actual content of the conversations made for less accurate predictions. But the scary part is what Ebling and Levenson found when they gave the same test to trained professionals, such as therapists. It turned out that the pros were just as bad at figuring out what would happen to the couples as the ordinary people and scored no better than if they had randomly guessed.
Married couples who are feeling smug about how well they know their partners should also take stock. According to another study, the longer couples were married to each other, the worse they became at reading each other’s minds. They also became more confident over time in their ability to guess what their partner was thinking. In other words, they were getting more confident in their predictions at the same time that their predictions were getting less accurate. The reason for this failure of marital communication was that the longer a couple was married, the less attention they paid to each other. For any theory of marriage predicated on good communication, the study reveals just how daunting that task can be.
THE LOVE LAB
While you or I may not be very good at predicting whether or not a couple has the right stuff or even what our partner is thinking, there is someone who is very good at it—John Gottman, a psychologist at the University of Washington. He runs the Gottman Institute, which has been affectionately dubbed “the love lab.” Gottman has been studying couples and trying to understand why they succeed and fail since the 1970s. To do this, he has come up with a method of analysis that is probably the most rigorous