Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [95]
Perhaps most important, happy couples manage to maintain a remarkably high level of positive to negative comments—fully five to one—even when they are fighting! The contrast with failing relationships couldn’t be more stark. Unhappy couples generally don’t even achieve a ratio of one to one (averaging roughly 0.8 positive comments to every one negative comment). That sounds impossible. How do couples maintain a positive ratio during the fight itself? The key is that happy couples never go for broke in an argument. They never find themselves in that fatal position when each partner is simply trying to wound the other because of how angry he or she is. A woman in a happy couple will say, “I appreciate how hard you work at the office, but I still think I deserve more help at home,” rather than “You never help me at home, and you don’t even make enough money so that we can afford a cleaning lady.” So, the key for a married couple is not to avoid fighting but simply to fight well, abiding by a marital version of the Marquee de Queens-bury rules.
To look at the ways unhappy couples go wrong, let’s take another representative couple from literature, Martha and George from Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
MARTHA: I don’t know what you’re so tired about . . . you haven’t done anything all day; you didn’t have any classes, or anything. . . .
Notice the harsh opening. She doesn’t just ignore his previous complaint about being tired. She argues that his complaint is without any legitimacy and then turns it into a criticism of him for not being more active.
GEORGE: Well, I’m tired . . . If your father didn’t set up these goddamn Saturday night orgies all the time . . .
George is defensive. Rather than respond to her remarks, he opens up a new line of attack about her father and about the life her father forces them to lead.
MARTHA: Well, that’s too bad about you, George . . .
A line dripping with sarcasm and filled with contempt for George’s inability to be more vital.
GEORGE (crumbling): Well, that’s how it is, anyway.
A defensive repetition.
MARTHA: You didn’t do anything; you never do anything; you never mix. You just sit around and talk.
She heightens the conflict, moving to a general character assassination. Whereas she complained a few lines earlier that he didn’t do anything all day, now she complains that he never does anything.
GEORGE: What do you want me to do? Do you want me to act like you? Do you want me to go around all night braying at everybody the way you do?
This leads not just to more defensiveness but to his own contempt and sarcasm. Although more restrained, his choice of the word bray with its connotations of being loud and uncouth is designed to wound.
MARTHA (BRAYING): I DON’T BRAY!
And it has the desired effect—driving Martha to a mini-tantrum.
A textbook example of how not to fight.
WHAT TO AVOID—AND WHAT TO DO
If you do want to look for signs of divorce, don’t focus your attention on fighting; instead, focus on the emotions you express toward each other. If either partner regularly expresses negative, judgmental emotions, that is a clear warning sign that a marriage is headed for failure. Gottman narrows it down even more and argues that the real culprits are four key emotions, what he calls the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The first is criticism. But Gottman is only interested in a certain kind of criticism. Concrete