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By Root 415 0

criticisms about a specific behavior are fine, but criticisms that attack someone’s character are not. The other three emotions to watch for are defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling. As you might expect, most stonewallers are husbands—85 percent—and this type of behavior is particularly destructive because emotional distance, rather than conflict, is usually what determines whether a marriage will succeed or not. If couples can’t fight in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the husband emotionally, he is likely to resort to stonewalling. There is one final relationship killer to add to the mix: repairing. During and after fights, happy couples often make attempts to repair the damage. Unhappy couples also make those attempts. The problem is that they usually fail. Either the other person rejects them, or the repair comes with a sting attached. If couples have unleashed the four horsemen and are failures at repairing, that is a guaranteed recipe for divorce. If all of this is a little complicated to keep track of, Gottman has a simpler method: ask a couple about their marital history. He found that if the couple has a positive memory of their life together, they are very likely to have a happy future as well (94 percent likely—not too shabby).

Besides avoiding the four horsemen, there are several things that couples can do to improve their marital happiness. The first is simply to pay better attention to your spouse. According to Gottman, there are key moments every day when your partner asks for your interest in something, and you can either respond positively or not. Although these are generally small matters (a discussion of what to eat for dinner or a problem at work), they can quickly become a pattern of behavior so that couples either regularly show interest in each other or consistently ignore each other. You would be surprised by how little time it can take over the course of the week to develop this pattern. And husbands really do need to listen to their wives. Happier marriages generally have men who are willing to accept the influence of their spouses. Couples also have to be good at calming each other down so that arguments don’t rage out of control. There is even a division of labor when it comes to marital arguments. Husbands are usually the ones who de-escalate a low-intensity conflict, while wives are the ones who de-escalate a high-intensity conflict.

None of these are necessarily large changes, and that is one of the heartening findings of Gottman’s research. Turning a marriage around doesn’t require whole-scale reinvention. It requires lots of small things done on a regular basis. What causes trouble is the very dailyness of marriage. The petty squabbles and minor annoyances that act like a form of Chinese water torture. Any one individual incident is not necessarily that significant, but when you add them all up, they can become overwhelming. If you can turn those routine interactions around—so that, for example, a couple learns to laugh a little bit when they argue—then those daily interaction start working to reinforce, rather than undermine, the marriage.

KNOW THYSELF—EXCEPT WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR MARRIAGE

The funny thing is that happy couples don’t just succeed because they have mastered these techniques—they also succeed because they cling to an inaccurately rosy view of their partner and of their married life. That’s right. Happy couples seem to engage in a certain amount of what could be called healthy self-deception. This is so common that psychologists have even coined a term for it, “marital aggrandizement.” For example, one study revealed that some spouses assume a greater level of similarity than actually exists and that the assumed level of similarity is a better indicator for marital satisfaction than the actual level of similarity. So, happy couples aren’t necessarily more similar than unhappy couples, but the more that couples perceive themselves to be similar, the happier they are likely to be.

Offering some confirmation that husbands may be more like Homer Simpson than any