Snippet 20: 4 Signs That Your Relationship Will Fail - Relationship Experts Dr John & Julie Gottman
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What are the things that predict whether a relationship is going to work, would be happy, and what are the things that sort of herald the disaster in a relationship? Now, one of the things that Bob and I found right away is we just looked at how

positive people were when they talked to each other, how affectionate, how much they laughed together, interest in one another, curiosity versus hostility, anger, you know, content, sadness and disgust. And we just took a ratio of how many seconds of positive emotion was where they're compared to negative emotion.

And we discovered that the masters, even in conflict, had five times as much positive emotion as negative. Whereas the disasters, that ratio of positive to negative, averaged 0.8. Just a little bit more negativity than positivity.

So that was one of our first discoveries. And then we asked, are there some negative things that are more predictive than others? And we came up with the four horsemen of the apocalypse. And Julie can explain what that is if you want. Oh, sure.

So these are the great big predictors that can predict with over 90% accuracy six years down the road where you're going to be. You're going to be together happily with your partner, unhappily, or will you already be separated and divorced?

So the first one is criticism, and all of us are familiar with that one. There's no such thing as constructive criticism. None. What do you mean? Yeah, when your boss tries to critically tally

tell you feedback, that's not a good thing. So what criticism means is blaming a problem between you on a character flaw of your partner. So some examples of that are you're so lazy you wouldn't think of cleaning up the kitchen. Why are you so irresponsible? You're always postponing how long it takes to pay the bills.

you know, what's happening with you? What's wrong with you? It's one of the great criticisms. How are you supposed to answer that? You know, it's saying you in general are wrong. So those are criticisms and they hurt.

And the natural response to that is the second horseman called defensiveness. And defensiveness, we're familiar with two. There's two types. One is whining like, I did too pay the bills on time. Or counterattack. Oh, yeah? Well, when was the last time you took the car in for repair? You know, it's a counterattack.

So that's defensiveness. We have criticism, defensiveness. The third is really the sulfuric acid for a relationship. It's called contempt. And what we mean by contempt is it's criticism too, but from a place of moral superiority. So it includes some scorn, some disgust. It's often expressed through sarcasm.

Like, oh, yeah, I'm sure you picked up the tickets. Ha. You know, contempt is

is also name calling, all those horrible names when we get very angry that we'll call somebody. Could be mockery also. "Ooh, you're so scared!" You know, that kind of stuff. So contempt is horrible and it not only is the strongest predictor of relationship demise, contempt also destroys the immune system of the listener.

We discovered that in 15 minutes of conflict, the number of times a listener heard something contemptuous predicted how many infectious illnesses they would have in the coming years.

Isn't that amazing? So the immune system suppresses or fights off viruses, colds, flus. Tumors. Tumors, right. And the people who experienced more contempt got sicker.

over time. So that was scary. Finally, the fourth horseman is what we call stonewalling. And stonewalling is when one partner completely shuts down, absolutely gives no response to the person, pretends they're not even there. Will sit there but not give any nod of the head, anything verbal.

And that's related to another finding of ours about physiological flooding, which John can explain. But that, what we call stonewalling, turning into a stone wall in the middle of a conversation, is our fourth horseman.

Right. So the physiology was very predictive. And what we found was that when people's heart rate gets above 100 beats a minute, or if you're an athlete, 80 beats a minute, we start secreting our two stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline.

And that shuts down the ability to listen. People repeat themselves. They think they're being more persuasive when they yell instead of, you know, talking quietly. They, you know, they really escalate their behavior and they can't listen very well. They can't take in any new information. So the physiology is very important because once people are

secreting those two stress hormones, the conversation might as well be over because nobody makes any advance. They don't get creative as problem solvers and so on. Yeah, another word for this is fight or flight. And I'm sure your listeners have heard of that. That's what we're talking about. So when you're facing your partner, it feels like you're facing a saber-toothed tiger. Yeah.

So in that context, let's say you're in the middle of, I don't know, an argument with your partner and you're finding yourself feeling those triggers of fight or flight. What do you do in that context? In order to succeed or in order to fail? Which one, Ali? Let's say both. What does success and what does fail look like? What are the kind of options that we have in this context?

Okay. So fail looks like staying there in the conversation when you're in fight or flight. And what happens is you escalate. You get louder. You repeat yourself, you know, ad nauseum. You start to move into more criticism, more contempt.

You can't think straight. You don't hear your partner at all. So nothing you say is a response to your partner. You're just yelling your own point of view. Maybe, maybe even getting physical in the worst cases. In a successful couple, here's what they do. The minute they sense that they're getting flooded in fight or flight, one of them will call for a break and say when they ask for a break...

when they'll come back to talk about the conversation, you know, that topic again. So they'll say something like, honey, I've got to take a break. I'll be back in an hour. Then let's talk again. That way they don't leave the other person feeling abandoned and not knowing if they're ever going to talk about it again. Then when the partners separate into separate quarters, right?

They each do something that is self-soothing.

Not think about the fight because if they think about it, they'll stay escalated. But do something else. Distract yourself. Read a magazine, a book, listen to music, meditation, go for a run, all kinds of things you can do to self-soothe. Take a bath. And then come back at the designated time when you're calmer. And a way to tell if you're calmer is take your heart rate.

And if your heart rate is back down to normal, then you're good. If it's not back, go back to your partner anyway and ask for more time. Give a second time, you'll return until you can talk calmly with one another and the conversation will look like you've just had a brain transplant.