Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [93]
WOOSTER: Nonsense! A cheerful pink. Nothing more.
Still defensive, although hardly amplifying the conflict.
JEEVES: Unsuitable, sir.
WOOSTER: Jeeves, this is the tie I wear!
Wooster remains impervious to his wife’s, I mean his valet’s, influence.
JEEVES: Very good, sir.
Jeeves is intelligent enough not to push the argument to any sort of breaking point. After a number of pages of hijinks on the part of Wooster and sagacity on the part of Jeeves, we return again to the tie.
WOOSTER: Jeeves!
JEEVES: Sir?
WOOSTER: That pink tie.
JEEVES: Yes sir?
WOOSTER: Burn it.
Ultimately, Wooster overcomes his defensiveness and accepts Jeeves’s influence on the all-important subject of the proper fashionable attire for a gentleman, a model of marital communication that aids their sturdy partnership through many a tight spot.
Besides helping explain the success of certain literary partnerships, Gottman can even give you a rough time frame for when you might get divorced. If a couple has a lot of what he calls negative affect (i.e., nastiness toward each other), they will probably get divorced in the first seven years. But Gottman found that using this metric alone missed many couples who later divorced. So he went back and studied the videotapes again and found that a lack of positive affect (being nice to each other) also undermined a marriage. It didn’t work as quickly, but around the time the couple’s first child reached the age of fourteen, the couples had generally become so emotionally detached that they ended up divorcing.
CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?
Gottman’s fine-grained analysis has revolutionized our understanding of how and why relationships work or don’t work. In the first place, many of the traditional techniques of marital therapy have turned out to be completely ineffective. In fact, unhappy couples who had undergone therapy fell back into their dysfunctional ways at such a high rate that many considered it a crisis for the profession. To give you one example, let’s look at an approach known as active listening. This technique became so popular for a while that you didn’t just come across it in marital counseling. You were probably taught some version of it if you participated in any kind of workshop having to do with conflict resolution. Active listening involves the listener constantly checking to see if he or she has correctly understood the speaker, usually by paraphrasing and repeating what the speaker has said. The theory is that you are forced to listen and understand first, rather than respond, which—if the theory were correct—would foster understanding and communication and help defuse defensiveness. As you might imagine, this leads to incredibly stilted conversations. Here is how a typical active listening exchange might develop:
JOHN: I’m really angry that you were late tonight.
LISA: I hear what you are saying. You are angry with me for being late.
JOHN: Yeah, you never show up on time! It’s like my own time doesn’t matter.
LISA: You feel like I don’t value your time as much as my own. Etc.
Gottman decided to put active listening to the test in his lab. The first thing he found was that happy couples don’t use anything remotely like active listening, and the vast majority of couples who had been trained to use it didn’t find that their problems were lessened. A small group did manage to adopt the techniques with some success, but follow-up studies showed that all of those couples had relapsed into their old habits within a year.
He also looked at another therapeutic technique that is probably most accurately described as the quid pro quo method. As you might expect, this approach involves responding to your partner in a tit-for-tat fashion. If your partner does something nice for you, you are supposed to do something nice back. When Gottman looked at this method, the news was even worse: the quid pro quo approach actually harmed