Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [94]
WHY FIGHTING IS LIKE DEATH AND TAXES
The good news is that Gottman has also identified what does work in a marriage. Let’s start by dismissing one item that many couples think is important but that actually isn’t: fighting. The common myth of the romantic story line is that happy couples don’t fight, but Gottman has found that fighting is not a predictor of divorce. Happy couples fight just as much as unhappy couples. While it is true that some couples rarely argue, this is probably a sign of poor communication, not of marital bliss. Arguing regularly is healthier than never fighting, so couples who fight less are also less satisfied over time. The problem for non-fighting couples is that, by never fighting, they let things build up too much—way too much. Couples with serious problems wait an average of six years before they seek professional help, and six years is a lot of bad juju to try to undo.
What this means is that conflict and disagreement are an inescapable part of marriage. Just how inescapable? Gottman has found that most of the subjects married couples disagree about are never resolved. That’s right. NEVER. From his examination of thousands of couples, he has discovered that 69 percent of them never resolve their conflicts. So, if you ever have the feeling that you are caught in some bizarre version of Waiting for Godot and are having the same argument yet again, you’re probably right. Most couples fight about the same things as well (typically money, the division of labor, and children), so we are all caught in the same version of Waiting for Godot. The good news is that a failure to resolve conflicts is not a sign of marital failure.
What matters is not whether you fight but how you fight, and once again, marital therapists had been peddling snake oil to an unsuspecting public. Traditionally, in a therapist’s office, conflict is dealt with forthrightly and unrelentingly. When one person gets uncomfortable and wants to change the subject, he or she is forced to stay the course and keep slogging through the argument, which may be a useful way to run a meeting in a corporation but is a disaster for a marriage. Gottman found that happy couples didn’t follow this method and disrupted their arguments in all sorts of ways. They told jokes or went off on irrelevant tangents for a while (they also didn’t escalate the argument; “Pick up your clothes” never became “you’re a bad person”). They did all sorts of things while they were arguing that many marital therapists would put a stop to. But it turns out that there are some very good reasons for changing the subject. Remember all those sensors that Gottman attached to couples in the love lab? He was measuring their physiological response during the conversation, and what he discovered was that our ability to argue is dependent on our ability to remain calm. Once the argument starts to get heated, and the person’s heart rate goes above one hundred, that person loses the ability to argue in a reasonable fashion. In effect, the body goes on tilt and swamps the person’s ability to be rational. So, all those conversational dodges that happy couples resort to when they are disagreeing serve a useful purpose—they give the couples a chance to catch their breaths and to keep their bodies from rocketing past the physiological breaking point.
Gottman also found something else that will come as a surprise to those who view women as the more emotional sex. During arguments, men are much more likely to be overwhelmed by their physiological response, to become, in Gottman’s words, “flooded.” That helps