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and complaints). It doesn’t matter if the couple is emotionally volatile, quarreling eleven times a day, or emotionally placid, quarreling once a decade; it is the ratio that matters. “Volatile couples may yell and scream a lot, but they spend five times as much of their marriage being loving and making up,” Gottman found. “Quieter, avoidant couples may not display as much passion as the other types, but they display far less criticism and contempt as well—the ratio is still 5 to 1.”9 When the ratio is five to one or better, any dissonance that arises is generally reduced in a positive direction. For example, social psychologist Ayala Pines, in a study of burnout in marriage, reported how a happily married woman she called Ellen reduced the dissonance caused by her husband’s failure to give her a birthday present. “I wish he would have given me something—anything—I told him that, like I am telling him all of my thoughts and feelings,” Ellen said to Pines. “And as I was doing that I was thinking to myself how wonderful it is that I can express openly all of my feelings, even the negative ones … The left over negative feelings I just sent down with the water under the bridge.” 10

When the positive-negative ratio has shifted in favor of those negative feelings, however, couples resolve dissonance caused by the same events in a way that increases their alienation from one another. Pines reported how an unhappily married woman, Donna, reacted to the same problem that upset Ellen: no birthday present from her husband. But whereas Ellen decided to accept that her husband was never going to become the Bill Gates of domestic giving, Donna interpreted her husband’s behavior quite differently:

One of the things that actually cemented my decision to divorce was my birthday, which is a symbolic day for me. I got a phone call at six o’clock in the morning from Europe, from a cousin, to wish me a happy birthday. Here is someone miles away who’s taken the trouble. And he was sitting there listening, and didn’t wish me a happy birthday…. And I suddenly realized, you know, that here are all these people who do love me, and here’s a person who doesn’t appreciate me. He doesn’t value me, he doesn’t love me. If he did he wouldn’t treat me the way he did. He would want to do something special for me.

It is entirely possible, of course, that Donna’s husband doesn’t love and appreciate her. And of course we don’t have his side of the story about the birthday gift; perhaps he had tried giving her gifts for years but she never liked any of them. Presumably, though, most people don’t decide to divorce because of a missing birthday present. Because Donna has decided that her husband’s behavior is not only unmodifiable but intolerable, she now interprets everything he does as unmistakable evidence that “he doesn’t value me, he doesn’t love me.” Donna actually took the confirmation bias further than most spouses do: She told Pines that whenever her husband made her feel depressed and upset, she wrote it down in a “hate book.” Her hate book gave her all the evidence she needed to justify her decision to divorce.

When the couple has hit this low point, they start revising their memories, too. Now the incentive for both sides is not to send down the negative things “with the water under the bridge,” but to encourage every negative thing to bubble up to the surface. Distortions of past events—or complete amnesia—kick in to confirm the couple’s suspicion that they married a complete stranger, and not a particularly appealing one, either. Clinical psychologist Julie Gottman worked with an angry couple in therapy. When she asked, “How did the two of you meet?” the wife said, contemptuously, “At school, where I mistakenly thought he was smart.”11 In this twist of memory, she announces that she didn’t make a mistake in choosing him; he made the mistake, by deceiving her about his intelligence.

“I have found that nothing foretells a marriage’s future as accurately as how a couple retells their past,” John Gottman observes.12 Rewriting history begins even