TED Talks Daily - Talks on Love Playlist (2/5): Even healthy couples fight — the difference is how | Julie and John Gottman

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

Can conflict actually bring you and your partner closer? It depends on how you fight, say Julie and John Gottman, the world's leading relationship scientists. They share why the way couples fight can predict the future of their relationships — and show how anybody can transform conflict into an opportunity for deeper connection and understanding.This episode originally aired in 2024. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

June is LGBTQ Pride Month for many around the world. It's a time to celebrate the fight for rights and the many forms love and relationships can take. In honor of this, today we're dropping five of our favorite TED Talks from the archive on love and relationships. Happy listening. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day.

I'm your host, Elise Hu. I'll be honest, I don't get starstruck very easily. I do live in Los Angeles, after all. But at TED 2024, there were two speakers who I just had to go say hello to when I saw them. John and Julie Gottman. See, there's John and Jordan. Can I just say I'm so starstruck seeing you all? Big fan.

You're responsible for so many of our relationships staying intact. Or getting better. So thank you both. See later. So fan girl. I got to ask you to take a picture. Doctors John and Julie Gottman are world-renowned psychologists and experts on healthy relationships and how to have healthy conflict.

I find their work fascinating and insightful, and other Tedsters shared my feelings. We saw Dr. Gottman already walking by. Yeah, I would Starstruck. Yeah, I know. You do. We'll dive into this talk right after the break. Without further ado, John and Julie Gottman. So most of us think that fighting is bad for romantic relationships, right?

How many people do you know who say, Hey, I had a great fight the other day? Oh, yeah, my partner and I fight all the time, and we're super happy. 52 years ago, we put love under the microscope. Julie and I are the founders of the Gottman Institute and the Love Lab. And we've made the study of relationships our life's work. And our research tells us that fighting is good for relationships. Not bad.

In our lab, we saw that almost all couples fight. In fact, how they fight in the first three minutes predicts with 96% accuracy not only how the rest of the conversation will go, but how the rest of the relationship will go, six years down the road. My God, I know. It's terrifying.

isn't it? So it's not if we fight that determines relationship success. It's how we fight. In fact, our research has revealed that some fighting actually increases connection and even improves our sex life. So how do we fight right? Early on, John and his colleague, Robert Levinson, in their lab, simply watched couples interacting. Sounds simple. But nobody has to be. But nobody has had ever done that before? Over time, 3,000 couples came to the lab. As they were being videotaped, they were monitors that measured such things as respiration, heart rate, and stress hormones.

And then they had a conflict discussion, and they talked about the events of their day. Afterwards, they rated how they felt during each conversation before returning home. They would return to the lab every year or two. and repeat the same procedure, and some were followed for as long as 20 years. Video tapes were synchronized to the physiological data,

and then in a split-screen video, second by second, we measured the couple's words, emotions, facial expressions, and physiology, year after year. Over time, we saw that some couples separated or divorced, some remained together unhappily, while others stayed together happily. What made the difference between the couples who were successful and the couples who were unsuccessful, or as we call them, the masters and the disasters? The couples in our studies were all ages, sexual orientations, and ethnically diverse.

After a while, Just by watching a couple, we could predict what would happen with over 90% accuracy, what would happen in their relationship six years later, which meant we never got invited to dinner anymore. We found that there were three major styles of fighting. Conflict avoiders who just agree to disagree and would rather wash the dishes

is an arguer point. I'm the conflict devoider. He is, believe me. Conflict validators would bring up an issue by expressing their feelings calmly and then jumping immediately into problem-solving.

So think of your most patient, kindergarten teacher. Then there were the conflict volatiles. They would express their feelings intensely and very passionately. Notice, I say, just fine, not bad. And then they would leap into trying to prove that they were right, and their partners were wrong.

Okay, so think of a very expressive basketball coach on the sidelines, or me. I'm a volatile. And some partners had different styles of fighting from one another. But the good news we discovered that whether you have those three styles of fighting or you're mismatched, you can have a successful relationship as long as the ratio of positive to negative responses during the conflict discussion. It was at least five to one. And examples of positive responses were head nods, affection, interest, shared humor, and words like, fair enough. Okay, so what about the negatives?

Were all the negatives equally negative? No. There were four big predictors of relationship demise that we called the four horsemen of the apocalypse. All right. The first one was criticism. And criticism means blaming a problem on a personality flaw of your partner.

For example, if you walked into a messy kitchen and you wanted to be critical, you would say, oh my God, this place is such a mess. Why are you such a slob? How do you answer that? The second horseman is contempt. Contempt is like criticism, but it has a dash of superiority.

So with contempt, you include sort. scorn, disgust, sarcasm, and nasty insults. Like, you're such a loser. Why did I ever marry you? The third horseman is defensiveness. That's the most common one. And that's when we act like an innocent victim. I did too pay the bills.

Or we counterattack. Oh, yeah, well, you didn't pay the bills on time. The fourth horseman, is stonewalling. When we shut down completely, and we don't even give the speaker any signs that we're listening, in stonewalling,

we really wall ourselves off from our partner. Hmm. Hmm. The fourth is a bad one, but here's another one that may be related to it. It's called flooding, or fight, flight, or freeze. So a partner in the middle,

middle of a conversation, maybe sitting there and looking totally calm on the outside, but inside their heart rates are rocketing up above 100 beats a minute. They feel like they're being attacked by a tiger, but it's only our partner. And when we're flooded, we can't think straight, we can't listen very well, and we certainly can't creatively problem solve. if you get flooded, here's what's crucial. You stop immediately and call for a break. Then say when you'll come back to continue the conversation.

That's really important. And during the break, do not think about the fight. Instead, simply self-soothe and then come back at the designated time. When you're physiologically calm, you look like a totally different person, and it's much easier to be reasonable and to listen well. Now, what do a couple's do who fight right versus fight wrong? The couples who are really struggling in distressed may bring up an issue in that first three minutes of the conversation,

with something we call harsh startup, which almost always includes criticism or contempt. The couples who fight right will bring up the issue with what we call softened startup. So what's softened startup? Softened startup consists of a bunch of eye statements that describe you and not your partner at all. You start with what you feel,

then you describe the situation at hand, and then what you do need from your partner to make things better, rather than what you resent. And here's an example of harsh versus softened startup. All right, so let's say you've been cooking dinner every single night for the last year. Yeah, you're a little tired of it. All right, so what would a harsh startup sound like? You're just too cheap to take me out to dinner. Look. All right. A softened startup would sound more like this.

I'm feeling frustrated. There's your feeling. About needing to cook dinner every night. That's the situation. Hear all the eyes? Would you please take me out to dinner tonight? That's your positive need. At a workshop with 1,200 people.

We posed that question to the audience and asked them to come up with a softened startup for that situation. And one guy raised his hand, and he was competent but very succinct. He said, I'm feeling hungry. I'm going out to dinner. Would you like to come along? Later on, we gave an example about sex. The entire audience went silent and very shy,

except for this same guy. So I had to call on him, right? So he went over the top a little bit, and this is what he said for a softened startup. Honey, I'm feeling horny. I'm going to go upstairs and have sex. Would you like to come along? One finding that really shocked us in our research was this.

69% of all relationship conflict problems are perpetual. which means that they never go away. They never get fully solved. And so we learn that conflict really mostly needs to be managed rather than solved. In our lab, the couples who came back year after year kept bringing up exactly the same issue, even 20 years later. Right. So when we think about fighting right,

whether talking about a perpetual problem, or a solvable problem. What is the biggest mistake that the disasters of relationships make? The answer is that they fight to win, which means somebody has to lose. What do the masters do instead? They fight to understand.

Fighting to understand means taking a conversation about an issue and going much deeper to understand what's beneath what's beneath a question what's beneath your partner's position on the issue. That builds the connection. At the core of fighting to understand is asking one another a set of pre-designed questions

that are designed to get at people's thoughts and feelings behind their position on the issue. They don't interrupt, and then they trade roles. Now, we call this the dreams within conflict conversation, because it really helps people get at their thoughts and feelings behind their position without feeling judged or attacked. There are six questions in all. And these questions unearth each person's values, feelings, background history,

an ideal dream regarding the issue. I'm going to give you an illustration using just two out of the issue. of the six questions. So there was a couple who were really fighting over whether or not to get a dog. Okay. There was a woman who we will call Jenny, who was adamantly opposed to getting a dog. But her partner, a woman who we will call Allison, was all for it. So they decided to try the dreams within conflict conversation. So when Allison asked Jenny, do you have some background or childhood history that's part of your position on this issue? She said, absolutely. When I was a kid, I got chased and bitten by just about every dog in our neighborhood. Wow. But the real

understanding came with the dream question. So what is your ideal dream here, You know, if we don't have a dog, we're not tied down, we're not burdened. We're free to travel the world together and have adventures together. That's what I really want. Now listen to what Allison said when she was asked about the childhood history question. She said, You know, when I was a kid, I was all alone. Okay, so my golden retriever was my best friend.

He really kept me from feeling good. from feeling totally alone. And to the dreams question, she said? You know, I see getting a dog as a practice run for having kids and having a family. I know that dogs and kids are a lot of responsibility, but they both bring so much love with them

into the family. That's what I want. So on the surface, this fight was about, whether or not to get a dog. But beneath the surface, it was about leading a life of adventure and travel versus staying home and raising a family. Without the dreams within conflict conversation,

they never would have gotten to this level of understanding of one another. In an unpublished study, we found that 87% of 600 couples, many of whom were distressed, made major breakthroughs on gridlock conflicts using tools like this. So now, if we look around our world, we see a world that is caught in win-lose battles

that are so polarized. So the same thing we're seeing in our couples who are also locked in wins, lose standoffs, we've never seen such furious, uncompromising, fighting before. It's enough to fill you full of despair. But our research has taught us that there are science-based tools that can gentle down a conflict, scrape the escalations off the ceiling, and lead people to a mutual understanding of one another's positions, ending this win-lose mentality, and leading a couple to a compromise that honors both people's dreams.

You all know that relationships are the foundations of our communities, our society, and our world. If we can all work on learning how to fight rights, even at home, there is hope we can build a more loving and peaceful world, one couple at a time. Thank you. Thank you. That was John and Julie Gottman at TED 2024.

This talk was originally published in June of that year. If you're curious about Ted's curation, visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team. Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Tobner, and Tonzica, Sungmar Nivong. Additional support from Daniela Ballerazo, Christopher Faisi Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Ban-Ban-Chang, Brian Green, and Lainey-Lott. Learn more at podcasts.com.com.

I am Elise Hu. Hume. Thanks for listening.