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By Root 1219 0

before a couple is aware their marriage is in danger. Gottman and his team conducted in-depth interviews of fifty-six couples, and were able to follow up on forty-seven of them three years later. At the time of the first interview, none of the couples had planned to separate, but the researchers were able to predict with 100 percent accuracy the seven couples who divorced. (Of the remaining forty couples, the researchers predicted that thirty-seven would still be together, still an astonishing accuracy rate.) During the first interview, those seven couples had already begun recasting their history, telling a despondent story with confirming details to fit. For example, they told Gottman they had married not because they were in love and couldn’t bear to be apart, but because marriage seemed “natural, the next step.” The first year, the divorced couples now recalled, was full of letdowns and disappointments. “A lot of things went wrong but I don’t remember what they were,” said one soon-to-be-ex-husband. Happy couples, however, called the same difficulties “rough spots” and saw them as challenges that they proudly had survived, with humor and affection.

Thanks to the revisionist power of memory to justify our decisions, by the time many couples divorce, they can’t remember why they married. It’s as if they have had a nonsurgical lobotomy that excised the happy memories of how each partner once felt toward the other. Over and over we have heard people say, “I knew the week after the wedding I’d made a terrible mistake.” “But why did you have three children and stay together for the next twenty-seven years?” “Oh, I don’t know; I just felt obligated, I guess.”

Of course, some people do make the decision to separate as a result of a clear-eyed weighing of current benefits and problems; but for most, it’s a decision fraught with historical revisionism and dissonance reduction. How do we know? Because even when the problems remain the same, the justifications change as soon as one or both parties decides to leave. As long as couples have decided to stay in a relationship that is far from their ideal, they reduce dissonance in ways that support their decision: “It’s not really that bad.” “Most marriages are worse than mine—or certainly no better.” “He forgot my birthday, but he does many other things that show me he loves me.” “We have problems, but overall I love her.” When one or both partners starts thinking of divorce, however, their efforts to reduce dissonance will now justify the decision to leave: “This marriage really is that bad.” “Most marriages are better than mine.” “He forgot my birthday, and it means he doesn’t love me.” And the pitiless remark said by many a departing spouse after twenty or thirty years, “I never loved you.”

The cruelty of that last particular lie is commensurate with the teller’s need to justify his or her behavior. Couples who part because of clear external reasons—say, because one spouse is physically or emotionally abusive—will feel no need for additional self-justification. Nor will those rare couples who part in complete amicability, or who eventually restore warm feelings of friendship after the initial pain of separation. They feel no urgency to vilify their former partner or forget happier times, because they are able to say, “It didn’t work out,” “We just grew apart,” or “We were so young when we married and didn’t know better.” But when the divorce is wrenching, momentous, and costly, and especially when one partner wants the separation and the other does not, both sides will feel an amalgam of painful emotions. In addition to the anger, anguish, hurt, and grief that almost invariably accompany divorce, these couples will also feel the pain of dissonance. That dissonance, and the way many people choose to resolve it, is one of the major reasons for postdivorce vindictiveness.

If you are the one being left, you may suffer the ego-crushing dissonance of “I’m a good person and I’ve been a terrific partner” and “My partner is leaving me. How could this be?” You could conclude that you