My Love Gottman Summary

John Gottman researched the 7 principals for making a marriage work and they are called Enhance your love maps, nurture your fondness and admiration, Turn toward each other instead of away, Let your partner influence you, Solve your solvable problems, Overcome gridlock, and Create shared meaning. The first principle that Gottman found is “enhance your love maps” which is when happy couples are well known about their significant others world. Coming from Gottman, these types of couples will have a very thorough love map, which is known as the part of someone’s brain where they are known to put away all the important information about their significant others life. People usually know every little thing from your significant others favorite tv show as well as what is currently the

Throughout his paper an analysis of the conflict management in a romantic relationship as a tool for relational maintenance will be discussed. Couples in marriages and in long-term relationships will be interviewed and their results will be discussed as well. In the end it will be clear the importance of conflict resolution in order for a blossoming relationship to reach a long term status or even marriage in the future.

Multitudes of people live with the negative idea that half of marriages fail and end in divorce. In reality, the divorce rate has never even been close to such discouraging statistics. When young newlyweds are bombarded with these false statistics, they lose hope and use it as an excuse to give up when their marriage goes through a rough patch. In contrast, researchers should focus more on the positive aspects and give couples hope. Hope can produce a lasting impact on marriage and can help them thrive. A woman

John Gottman asserts that within minutes of observing a couple, he can with 94% accuracy, predict whether their marriage will succeed and be happy or end in divorce. He bases this prediction on their ratio of positive to negative interactions between the couple. If he is correct, then using communication tools which increase positive interactions in a marriage will increase the chances of a successful marriage. No marriage is perfect, but there seems to be identifying markers that characterize marriages which end in divorce. John Gottman calls these indicators, “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” These four behaviors are criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling.

Unsatisfied with their partners results in divorce rates and infidelity. These have increased over the years, blemishing the institution of marriage. People may believe that compromises and self sacrifice in a marriage make it a failed institute but the same reasons make a marriage successful. A married man has a constant in his life- his partner. The security and companionship in the relationship helps him achieve happiness. The same sharing is now a pleasure, a way to prevent loneliness (Argyle; 1999). Marriage is known to cause greater satisfaction, greater self esteem and less distress. Evidence shows that married men and women are happier.

Marriage is an adjustment between two people getting married Communication can cause a relationship to succeed or fail. If you do not share how you feel, it can cause your partner to withdraw. Listening can save a relationship. Schonberg (2011) found that “affective affirmation –basically, behavior that makes your partner feel loved cared for or special plays a role in a happy marriage and those men need it more than women. There are several factors and problems that can cause marriage to either succeed or fail. It is important to discuss problem things left unsaid can cause your partner to with draw.

When a couple has been together for at least forty years, one may ask them, how have you put up with one person for so long, or what is your secret to marriage? Unfortunately, a secret may not even exist, but learning how to deal with everyday relationship conflicts, maybe the answer to a lasting marriage. “Gottman and Declaire, discovered that couples have conflict over the same issues sixty-nine percent of the time” (1997) (pg.214) Gottman quotes “We need to teach couples that they will never solve most of their problems, and that couples need to” establish a dialogue” about the problems.”(1997) (pg.214) Validating, volatile, and conflict avoiding, are three approaches couples use, when resolving conflict. Gottman studies show how managing conflict could lead to lasting marriages. Communication practices are also important when trying to resolve conflict. Gottman’s Four Horseman of the Apocalypse are “four communication practices that have very negative outcomes for the particular interaction and for the relationship.”(pg.225) Conflicts are going to occur in every relationship, but learning how to communicate with one another is essential.

Marriages are faced with symbolic interactionism. Interactions between spouses involves shared understandings of their arrangement( New edu). Often times husbands and wives have different ways of communicating and social class affects expectations that spouses have of their marriages (New edu). Often times, love is the basis for American marriages but it is not like that is many countries around the world. Polygyny, polyandry, monogamy, and group marriages are types of marriages that are practiced in different parts of the globe.

It focuses upon the amount of emotions that men and women make during different parts of their lives. How some people have good friends from the opposite sexes in their young lives but slowly lose their interest until they achieve puberty and start dating. Studies are used to prove that girls can show their emotions better than boys. The reason lies in the fact that girls mature faster than boys do. Dr. Goleman says that men don’t talk with their wives too much about relationship. He also observes that men may have a rosier view than their wives of just about everything in relationship—lovemaking, finances, ties with in-laws, how well they listened to each other, how much their flaws mattered. Married women, in general, complain more than their husbands, particularly among unhappy couples. He suggests “mirroring” which can be used for marital therapy. When your partner is covertly-hostile he or she may find a fault in your fair

And how can we, exactly? Well now, Gladwell walks us through how Gottman determines the success or failure of a couple. First, he talks about the complex and intricate coding system that Gottman created, the SPAFF, that has twenty separate categories, which correspond to every emotion a married couple could possibly make during a conversation (21). Gottman uses the SPAFF codes to assign an emotion to every second of the couple’s interaction. So, when a 15 minute conversation is broken down in this way, it could end up looking like this: angry for 6 seconds, defensive for 10 seconds, whining for 5 seconds, and so on. Gottman discovered that typically, the couples who stayed together had more positive emotions compared to negative emotions during these 15 minute conversations. The couples that ended up divorced had a higher ratio of negative emotions to positive ones instead (26). When Gottman sat down, watched 15 minutes worth of married couple’s conversations, and then analyzed them using the methods Gladwell described to us, he was 90% accurate at determining which couples would

Reading Gottman 's article reminds me where i stand with my current relationship and how different my past relationship was due to no connection. John Gottman is a researcher in human relationships. Gottman suggested that “ Relationships grow bid by bid”(146). With that in mind he wrote a self-hand book called “The Relationship Cure.” Which gives advice on different ways to connect emotional.

People often think that marriage life is ideal without knowing that that many challenges and difficulties are waiting for them. When people are in trouble, their true characteristic will appear. Couple will know if their partners have responsibility and ability to overcome the difficulties to be successful or not. Therefore, the decision they make at that time normally be the right choice. In addition, when people are in love, they appear to each other with the best look. They show good things. They are clean, tidy, generous, elegant, etc. But when living together, couple expresses each other routine and it is a good way to discover partner’s bad habits. People might see an opposite image. They are untidy, dusty, aggressive, lazy, etc. When people know these bad habits, they will consider if they can accept them or not. If they decide to get married, the conflict in marriage life may no longer exist. This helps people have a better marriage life. Moreover, through solving problems in daily life will help them grow up and accumulate more experiences in future marriage life.

Conflicts which lead to unresolved issues can influence the quality of the marriage. Although several research was made on marital relationships, the factors which influence the arising of continuous conflicts are still not clear. Unresolved issues are problems which are continuously brought up in a marriage. However, marital conflicts are not the only source of unresolved issues in a relationship. Unresolved conflicts within the marriage can affect the longevity and quality of the marriage, but personal background and individual trauma contribute to marital problems more often than conflicts within the marriage. In fact, marital conflicts are usually started because of personal unresolved issues. If a person develops a behavioral property

Rather than giving up and ending the marriage, many couples could save the marriage by trying to work through the problems that arise. Many people do not realize how much hard work has to be put into a marriage for it to be successful. When planning a wedding, some couples spend a lot of time preparing the vows that will be exchanged during the ceremony, but sadly the partners fail to live by the vows day after day. Scores of married couples drift apart because their hectic lives do not allow them to spend enough quality time together, which is important for a healthy marriage. Communication is also an essential factor in working through problems in a marriage.

     As with any marriage, problems will obviously occur, and the manner in which these problems are handled will most often affect the happiness of the couple. Another major issue of dicussion is the amount of time a couple spends with each other, as well as the quality of the interaction, and lastly, the issue of similarity will be addressed. In order for a marriage to succeed, the communication patterns of the couple must be similar and compatible if there is to be any agreement between the spouses.