Gottman and Murray published their work as The Mathematics of Marriage: Dynamic Nonlinear Models:
Their subjects initially included 130 couples who had applied for marriage licenses in King County, where, at the time, the professors taught at the University of Washington in Seattle. Some of the couples were newlyweds, others were about to be married, and each pair was videotaped for three 15-minute conversations.
In one exchange, the couples were instructed to talk about their day. In another they were told to talk about something positive. And in the third, they were asked to talk about something contentious. The topic didn’t matter — it could be about money, sex, food, in-laws or anything else — as long as they disagreed.
The contentious exchange proved to be the most predictive.
The couple’s interactions were scored by two independent observers who rated every emotion in the exchange.
Altogether, 16 different emotions were coded. At one end of the spectrum, contempt, the most corrosive emotion, according to Dr. Gottman, was scored -4. At the other end, shared humor, one of the best ways to defuse tension, he said, was scored +4.
“They both have to be laughing together,” Dr. Gottman said. “A lot of contempt happens with one person laughing and the other person looking stunned. That’s a minus 4.”
The scores for the various emotions expressed during each exchange were summed, and the researchers plotted the scores for each subsequent exchange as a time series on a graph.
Once the emotions were scored and plotted, the researchers found that the positive and negative progression of the exchanges eventually settled down and didn’t change very much.
That steady state, they concluded, described how a couple resolves conflicts.
“It’s like a Dow Jones curve,” Dr. Murray said. “The ones that went continuously down, it was clear they found it very, very difficult to appreciate what the other one was thinking. That’s what made it clear the marriage wasn’t going to last.”
For low-risk couples, the ratio of positive to negative responses was approximately 5 to 1. For high-risk couples, the ratio was about 1 to 1, and based on their observations, the researchers were able to predict divorce with 94% accuracy.
The researchers followed the couples for a decade, and in that time, all of the pairs they predicted would divorce did, most within four years. A few other couples they predicted would remain married, though unhappily, also divorced, lowering their overall accuracy.
Marriages, they found, fell into five categories: validating, volatile, conflict–avoiding, hostile and hostile – detached (a significantly more negative pairing). Only three — validating, volatile and conflict–avoiding — are stable, they write in their book, but a volatile marriage, though passionate, risks dissolving into endless bickering.
Notably, they also found that as the years passed, each couple’s style of communication changed very little from that initial videotaped contentious exchange.
“We found about 80% stability in couples’ interaction over time,” Dr. Gottman said, a result that was based on bringing the couples back to the lab for additional scored discussions, usually at three-year intervals.
This is why you should never be in a relationship with someone who doesn’t share your sense of humor.
But never laughing together is not the worst thing. Never laughing at all is worse. People who can’t laugh are broken.
I’ve seen it work, but I’ll be damned if I know how.
I think that there’s a certain degree of risk, though, in projecting the values of the here-and-now to other operational environments. Some cultures/families/milieus would have it that you should never have a relationship with anyone who makes you laugh, because that indicates insufficient seriousness. Can that work? I don’t know, personally, but the rules of the game are prone to changing once you shift bases.
It is difficult to cast yourself out of your time and place, or even into another current milieu. I have known, as an outsider, families that were eminently successful, and yet which felt like I was entirely alien to, simply because of how they interacted with each other in my observation. It was like watching a nature documentary describing the behavior of an insect colony, or something equally out of my experience.
People are so widely variable that it’s nearly impossible to make a general pronouncement on what is “normal”. In one situation, one milieu, things might be one way–And, in another, entirely different.
Teasing out the rules of the game is what drives many of us nuts, with regards to a lot of this interpersonal stuff. You learn the rules by osmosis, growing up, and think “This is how it is…”. Then, you find yourself transplanted into another set of conditions, and discover that all the rules you thought hard-and-fast are now totally erroneous.