Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 418: How Not to Ruin Your Relationships | Drs. John & Julie Gottman

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

If you care about your long term health and happiness, the quality of your relationships is an area you should focus on. And the good news here is that love – as it applies to friends, family, and romantic partners – is not a factory setting, but instead a skill. Drs. John and Julie Gottman are the perfect guests to talk about how to cultivate good relationships in your life. World-renowned for his work on marital stability and divorce prediction, Dr. John Gottman has conducted over 40 years of breakthrough research with thousands of couples. He is the co-founder of The Gottman Institute and Affective Software Inc. as well as author of over 200 published academic articles and author or co-author of more than 40 books, including The New York Times bestseller The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Dr. Julie Gottman is the Co-Founder and President of The Gottman Institute and Co-Founder of Affective Software, Inc. A highly respected clinical psychologist and author, she is sought internationally by media and organizations as an expert advisor on marriage, domestic violence, gay and lesbian adoption, same-sex marriage, and parenting issues. She is the co-creator of the immensely popular The Art and Science of Love weekend workshop for couples and she also co-designed the national clinical training program in Gottman Method Couples Therapy. This episode explores: how to talk (and listen) to your partner in moments of conflict; what to do before you start trying to solve a problem together; why “there’s no such thing as constructive criticism;” the details of John’s research findings, which have allowed him to predict with stunning accuracy whether a couple will get divorced; how the Gottmans themselves do when it comes to operationalizing their findings/advice; how and why betrayal occurs; when a couple should consider separating; the role mindfulness can play in healthy relationships; and the role of humor in relationships.Content warning: There are a few mentions of sensitive topics, most notably domestic violence, which Julie discusses for a few minutes towards the end of the interview. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/john-julie-gottman-418See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, if you're listening to this show, that's probably because you're interested in doing life better. Whatever that means to you. Many people, when they get into this mode, attack personal growth and self-improvement with a type A, optimizer attitude. I'm going to get super fit, regularly achieve ketosis,

become an Olympic level meditator, basically just win at everything. But the data pretty clearly show that if you want to be happy and healthy, the most important variable is not how chiseled your abs are or how many days you can keep up a meditation streak, not that there's anything wrong with either of those goals. But instead, the most important variable is the quality of your relationships. If you care about your long-term health and happiness, this is an area where you should focus.

And the good news here is that love, and I use that term broadly to apply to friends, family, romantic partners, love is not a factory setting, but instead a skill. My guests today are two of the best people in the world from whom to learn how to hone this skill. Doctors Julie and John Gottman are the co-founders of the Gottman Institute. They have developed a clinical methodology for treating couples that is research-based. They have completed over 40 years of research with more than 3,000 couples. John is the principal researcher here, Julie,

is the clinician. In this conversation, we talked about how to talk to your partner in moments of conflict. What to do before you start trying to solve a problem together? Why there's no such thing as constructive criticism. The details of John's research findings, which have allowed him to predict with stunning accuracy whether a couple will get divorced.

How the Gotmans themselves do it when it comes to operationalizing their own findings and advice. How and why betrayal or infidelity occurs. When a couple should consider separating the role mindfulness can play in healthy relationships and the role of humor, which is a double-edged sword as you will hear. We thought this would be the perfect episode to post on Valentine's Day, and we hope you enjoy it. Heads up, there are a few mentions, though, of sensitive topics, most notably

domestic violence, which Julie discusses briefly toward the end of the interview. Okay, we'll get started with Julie Julian John Gottman right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change

that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist, Kelly McGonical, and the great meditation teacher, Alexis Santos, to access the course, just download the 10% happier app

wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm all one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from.

And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer, on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast. Julie, let me start with you. I'd love to hear a little bit of your collective origin story. How did you and John meet and get into this work? Great question. John and I met at a coffee house in Seattle. So I had just moved after getting my PhD to Seattle and John had moved there also from University of Illinois. I'd moved from San Diego where I was going to school. Finished and I walked in. I saw this super cute guy. He looked very sexy. He had on kind of dark glasses and a black leather hat and black leather coat. He was sitting and reading a book of course, because that's what he does all the time. And I needed to get some

coffee. I was driving to a party. And he asked me if I'd like to join him for coffee. And I thought, I'd much rather sit with him and have coffee than go to this party of my mothers and stepfathers. So I sat with him had coffee. and 45 minutes later, I think I was in love, he walked me to my car afterwards, and I fell in love with his car, Dan. His car was outstanding. It was ancient. It was red with big white blotches on it. And he told me later, it had been voted the ugliest car in the University of Washington faculty parking lot.

That was impressive. I thought that was very cool. We started. She called it Bando. I called him Bando because the car that is not John, because it had been rusted out in Illinois in the snow and he'd gotten some fellow to come to the door who offered to put Bondo on it, patch up the rust. The fellow did with big white blotches, but then John never painted the car.

So it kind of looked like a red Dalmatian if there can be such a thing. a red Dalmatian if there can be such a thing. And it was beautiful. I loved his car. And five months later, he proposed. So that's how we met. I was a psychologist working with folks who were deeply oppressed, deeply impoverished, very depressed, getting no services. I had worked with people who had been physically abused, sexually abused, emotionally abused, and that was really my love, working with post-traumatic stress disorder and combat vets torture victims as well. So, I kept my private practice separate from John's work. He was doing only research at the University of Washington, but fabulous research. And I guess what about eight years later?

Eight years later, we were sitting in a canoe, Dan, out in the Pacific Ocean. And John had just published some of his incredible findings again. And I thought, God, why don't we do something to help people with all this great information? That was the beginning of our working together, creating new theory about couples, new interventions, and the Gautman Institute eventually in 1996, I think. Add anything love? No, that's it, really.

It's a combination of a researcher who didn't have a clue how to help anybody and a clinician who had a great deal of sensitivity, especially for people who had other kinds of problems that made relationships very difficult. So the two of us together really hammered out this theory that we tested over the next 26 years and refined and as we discovered, you know, what needed to happen to make the theory years and refined. And as we discovered, you know, what needed to happen to make the theory better and better. I want to get into the theory and some of your research findings. John, but can you describe briefly how you got into this field of research? What was so interesting to you?

Well, I think it was based on my complete incompetence in relationships. Most of this research was done before we met Julie about 25 years before I met her. My best friend, Bob Levinson, who is a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, and I were assistant professors at Indiana University when we met. And our relationships with women were not going very well.

We both went from one disaster to another. And so we had no hypotheses at all. We were kind of clueless. And we decided, let's do research on this. And we love working together. And so we just brought couples into this laboratory that combined Bob's expertise in looking at physiology with my interest in looking at interaction in relationships. And I was the one coding the emotions and the tapes and Bob was synchronizing the video time code to psychophysiological measures we were getting. So we just thought, let's just start completely afresh. And we were among the two or three laboratories in the 1970s that were doing observational research on what makes the difference between couples who are happy and stable and couples who are really miserable

in their relationships or eventually going to break up and divorce. And so Bob and I teamed up as two clueless guys with no hypotheses and just collected data. And we were quite stunned that we were able to predict with such high accuracy, over 90% accuracy, how our relationship would change over a three-year period. And we just did that same study over and over and over again with gay and lesbian couples, with couples across the life course,

and I was trained as a child psychologist, so I was really interested in how the relationships affect babies and children, how the children affect relationships. So that was an interest of mine. And Bob became very interested in old age and various forms of dementia and looking at relationship components to study emotion during frontal temporal dementia and Alzheimer's dementia. So we sort of went different ways eventually, but Bob was able to do a 20 year study of a group of couples who were in their 40s or in their 60s.

And I started the research with him, but Bob's tenacity allowed us to study the same group of couples for 20 years, bringing them back into the laboratory six different times over that period. And so I would say, Bob and I were quite surprised that what we measured actually made a difference in relationships. When you say you can predict with 90% accuracy,

whether a couple's gonna stay together, what are the variables that allow you to make that prediction? Great question. Our best prediction was in the area of conflict. So when couples are disagreeing with one another, and we interviewed couples about their worst conflicts, and we try to have them resolve their worst conflict in the next 15 minutes, just because

we thought it would be interesting. And it turns out that couples who were sort of the disasters of relationship who would stay in unhappy relationships or break up, talk to one another in a particular way. They would start with criticism, blaming their partner's personality for the relationship trouble. blaming their partner's personality for the relationship trouble, they would escalate to contempt, sort of insulting their partner's personality and character, and blaming their partner for all the troubles. They would sometimes, you know, get defensive when their partner mentioned something that they wanted changed, or they would still wall, they would actually withdraw from the interaction.

And we went up calling those the four orcemen of the apocalypse because those four things predicted relationship demise. Whereas the masters of relationship were not as defensive, took responsibility for even a part of the problem, were gentler in the way they brought up the issue, had a better sense of humor, especially gay and lesbian couples, had a better sense of humor, and they were less likely to withdraw emotionally from the interaction. They just stayed in there and kept working. And the physiology is self-predicted, so the couples whose relationships wound up getting worse and worse over time.

When they talked about a problem, had much higher heart rate, faster blood velocity, higher blood pressure, they sweated more and jittled around more in their chairs. They were more in fight or flight when they were talking about a problem, whereas the masters of relationships wound up being able to self-sudeance they calm. So looking at those things, in addition to just simply the ratio of positive to negative interaction, we found the masters had a ratio averaging 5 to 1, 5 times as much positive as negative interaction during conflict. And the disasters that ratio positive to negative average 0.8, So a little bit more negativity than positivity. And just that set of variables allowed us to predict within 15 minutes the future of our

relationship with almost 90% accuracy. So Julie, John's the quant jock, the nerd, the numbers dude, you're a little bit more the way I'm wired, which is a more qualitative skills based as I understand it. As I listen to John Talk, I sort of flash back to my moments of conflict in my marriage and previous partners and even friendships and business partnerships. And I think that I am, I have tendencies toward disaster and I'm wondering can one train oneself toward mastery? Absolutely, absolutely. First of all, it's not all skill-based. We do a lot of emotional searching also, helping people to connect with their own hearts, their own spirituality to some degree,

their own existential sense of purpose, life purpose. But to your question, Dan, absolutely. People can really change dramatically. So if you're teaching yourself how to do this, what one has to do is basically learn a different way to speak and a different way to listen. So when one is speaking to their partner, particularly regarding conflict, the big mistake that people make is they'll describe their partner rather than themselves.

They'll point out the personality flaw, the cracks in their partner's perfection when they're trying to bring up some kind of issue. That doesn't work because it will sabotage you getting listened to. The partner will become defensive and feel attacked. So they're not going to hear what you have to say. Instead, what we need to do is describe ourselves. This is the formula for it. Here is what I feel about what's the situation, not what about the personality of the partner, but what's the situation that's eliciting feelings in you? And what is your positive need? Positive need means what is it that your partner can do to shine for you? What do you

really want them to do as opposed to what you resent they're doing or you don't like? That's the formula I feel about what and I need. The listener is very helpful then if the listener can oh just summarize a little bit of what they hear their partner saying. And then ask some significant questions to understand the deeper subterranean level of what the speaker is trying to convey. Questions like, are there some values or ethics or kind of guidelines that you're following, some beliefs that are important to you in this position you have? How about your childhood? Is there some background history that's a part of your position on this issue? We have a beautiful intervention. We love it. It's called the Dreams Within conflict. It's where the

listener asks those kinds of questions. Six in all. A couple of others are what would be your ideal dream here? And is there an underlying purpose or goal you have in your position on this issue? The listener doesn't bring up their own position on the issue until they've really understood the speaker's point of view. Then the roles reverse, then the listener can now become the speaker, bring up their own position on the issue. And the first partner now will summarize a little bit

of what that partner is saying. And then ask those same questions. What's absolutely pivotal, Dan, is that people have a deep understanding first before they move into compromise and resolution. And once they have that understanding, we have a way of talking about compromise in which each partner separates out what they are inflexible about versus what they're more flexible about in their position on this same issue. Because when people are asked to compromise on something that is so essential to them, it's like giving up the bones of their body, they're going to get rigid and not compromised. But if that part, that belief or corneed or ideal dream can be preserved for each

person as part of the compromise, then they can be flexible around the edges and reach a compromise. That's how it looks. I have a million questions because what you just said was fascinating. You said that a cardinal rule here as I understand it is really to use what some people might call eye language to talk about your own feelings, your own situation, as opposed to launching into a damning diagnosis of your interlocutor or partner. But is it never appropriate to kindly describe a problematic or challenging behavioral trend or pattern of thought in your partner? It's not going to work. There's no such thing as constructive criticism. That's what we found out.

So, let's see. Let me give you an example. If I were to say, John, I love you deeply. You're absolutely wonderful, but you always leave the kitchen a mess. Okay. He's going to feel defensive. He's going to respond by saying, I don't always leave it a mass. I cleaned it up like six months ago. That's good enough, right? So always

and never are criticisms. He's not going to be able to hear that. But if I say to him instead, honey, I'm feeling annoyed and frustrated because the kitchen is a mess. Would you please clean it up this afternoon? Yeah. Totally different. Totally different response to it. It's kind of like you're saying, I, I, I, as opposed to you, you, you.

You're the difference. That's all it takes. Right. And another blueprint that we've devised is that is an important part of this approach to the conflict is a way of revisiting past or regrettable incidents or past fights that have driven an emotional wedge between partners and revisiting that regrettable incident and reprocessing it so you can understand your partner better and how you miscommunicated there and really put those past or regrettable incidents in the mirror. And so you get past them.

Can you have successful conflict when only one side is following the rules, your rules? You probably don't like the term rules, but is working within this context of constructive conflict, or did both sides need to be engaged in the right way? You know, I think I would say that it's not quite so black and white. So typically, what we see is if one person is really following this blueprint, let's call it, for how to bring up a problem, how to explore a problem, how to work on compromise. There may be a few partners out there that don't hear the changes and thus don't change

themselves. But what I've seen at least is that oftentimes the other person will soften. They'll back down a little bit. They won't be quite as abstract or as dominant or belligerent because they're not pushing against something. It's like trying to push against a cloud. There's a big difference between pushing against a cloud and pushing against a raging bull that's charging at you, right? So it no longer is very functional for that partner

to just keep pushing away at you or socking you. they're not going to do it typically as aggressively as you would think. And so one person changing the system can actually have, I think, a moderating effect on the entire system between partners. Coming up, Julie lays out the Gottman's comprehensive theory of healthy relationships, and I ask both John and Julie how good they are at following their own advice. That's right after this. Life is short, and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are

the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is Short, with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly,

the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times. But if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering App.

John, before you reference this term, the theory or your theory, what is the theory? Well, we call it the sound relationship house theory. And it's a house that has, if you can imagine, a drawing of a house that has seven floors, seven levels, and two weightbearing walls. The weightbearing walls are labeled trust on the left side, and commitment on the right side. And part of the theory that Julian, I devised, a disconfirmable theory. So we can measure everything on the theory,

accurately, in a clinician's office or a laboratory. And we have, in the theory, basic suggestions for how the levels relate. So the first three levels are the San Relationship House, the bottom levels are the components of friendship and intimacy. And they're called love maps, build love maps, build fondness and admiration at sort of respect

and affection system, and turn toward your partners attempts to connect with you emotionally. Your partners bids for connection. And those three form the basis of connection and intimacy in the relationship. Our theory says that if those are working well, then your overall perspective on the relationship tends to be much more positive. And you're in the positive perspective rather than a negative perspective. Kind of your cost-benefit analysis of the relationship is much more in the positive side

than on the negative side. You're more likely to give your partner the benefit of the doubt when your partner is grumpy, for example. And then the next level of Sambo relationship house deals with conflict. How do you deal with conflict? And what Bob and I discovered was that 69% of conflicts in a relationship are perpetual. They don't ever get resolved. They're just based on personality differences between partners. And you have to really learn to accept your partners' differences. And so that's what the dreams within conflict. Blueprint comes in, it's very important. 31% are solvable.

And then there are six skills that we've discovered that facilitate the goal of conflict, which is mutual understanding. Conflict is not dysfunctional. It really gets it. Being able to understand your partner better. And then the next level of the sound relationship passes, not dysfunctional, it really gets it being able to understand your part for better. And then the next level of the sound relationship process, making life dreams come true, and the final level is building a sense of shared meaning and purpose together.

So we can measure all of this, and our basic idea in building the theory was, if you can measure it, you've got a better chance of being able to build it than if you can't measure it. So once you know what you're talking about, then you can build something like you, you know how to build trust. We know how trust is eroded in a relationship. We know how people build commitment, a sense of, this is the love of my life, a sense of carishingness, person is the love of your life, versus betrayal. And we understand how betrayal happens as well. So the great thing about the theory was that, first of all, we were mostly wrong at our hypotheses when we started building a

theory. And then I kept track of my hypotheses and I'm 60% wrong in my own intuitions about relationships. And if I didn't collect data, I would think I was 100% right. But I now know from actually looking at the data, most of my ideas are just baloney. And it's really the laboratory that informs our knowledge and that has made this theory work over time, both clinically and also in our research studies testing the effectiveness of this theory.

I want to go back over the sound relationship house because it seems like you're a unified field theory of love and get you and Julie to go through these seven levels here because you ran through them pretty quickly, which I appreciate, but I think there's a lot more to say. Just to recapitulate a little bit, I'm looking at a drawing of the house. It has these two load bearing walls. As you reference, they are trust and commitment. And then the space of the house is taken up by these seven levels, the lowest of which,

or the first of which, is taken up by these seven levels. The lowest of which or the first of which is build love maps. Julie, what does that mean? So yeah, let me describe each level for you Dan, and for our audience. Build love maps refers to how well do you know your partners internal world? How well do you know your partner's internal world? How well do you know feelings, needs, beliefs, values, childhood history, most embarrassing moment in childhood, favorite novel, favorite movie, favorite tree? The way that we do that is to ask our partner questions. You might remember that when you first dated, you asked your partner things like,

what brought you to St. Louis? What do you like about being here? Where did you grow up? We asked those questions in the beginning, but then if we commit to one another, start living together and or have children, all of a sudden life is taken up with an endless to-do list and we forget to ask each other those kinds of questions. But the reality is

that over time each individual is evolving into a slightly different person, different feelings, thoughts, needs and so on. So we have to keep asking those questions throughout our time together to understand how our partner is changing. So love maps means being able to map the internal landscape of who your partner is. That's the first level. Then comes create fondness and admiration. And the big one about that is that all of us,

no matter how long we've been together, we need to hear words of care, of fondness, of love, of respect and admiration. We need to hear the words, we need to feel the expression of it in touch. So that doesn't go away either. We need to keep expressing our fondness, our care, our love, and our respect for one another. It's got to come out of your mouth or out of your fingertips. Never stop doing that. We need lots and lots of that. That's the second level. The third level, if we're going up the house, the third level we call

turning toward. And this is an incredibly simple thing to do. What it means is how do you respond to your partner's bids for attention, bids for interest, bid even for a deeper need? So for example, if I'm looking out this window and I say, wow, John, look at that gorgeous bird that's sitting right there in the tree, he has three options of how he can respond to me. He can either totally ignore me and keep reading his mathematics book. He can say something hostile, like, stop interrupting me. I'm trying to read. So we call that turning against. The first one was turning away with no response. This hostile one is turning against.

Then what he can also do is we can look up, look out the window, look at the tree and say, wow, that's it. That's all it takes turning toward. Just a response, it's a little positive response to your partner's bid for connection. We call that turning toward. Now your partner may want to express deeper needs like, honey, would you please do the dishes

tonight? I'm exhausted. Or would you please drive us to the beach because I'm scared of driving at night? We can ask for things like that. We can ask for, would you please clean up the kitchen? How does our partner respond to those needs? We found in successful couples, they responded to each other's bids for connection 85% of the time, right?

They should sit. I always get that wrong. I'm not shitting it. All right. And the folks who did not do so well in the future, who are more than disasters, they responded 33% of the time. So big difference between 86 and 33. But it takes such a little thing like wow, or ha, that's all it takes. That's a positive response. So that's turning toward the third level. The next level, we call either the positive

or the negative perspective. Now that one really is not when you work on directly. It's related to what comes above it, which is more conflict-related, or below it, these three levels I just described, which are part of friendship. If you're in the positive perspective, you give your partner the benefit of the doubt. Let's say that I come downstairs, I had a bad night, and I feel really grouchy, and I snap it, John. Well, if he's in the negative perspective, he'll get defensive, he'll get angry. If he's in the positive perspective, he'll say to himself, huh, bet she didn't sleep very

well last night. I think I'll just give her a wide berth. And he'll say, can I make your coffee for you this morning? Perfect. That's the positive perspective. He's giving me the benefit of the doubt. He's not thinking I'm just a mean rotten person. He's thinking something must have gone wrong. Therefore, I'm not doing so well today. That's giving me the benefit of the doubt. So that's the positive perspective. When you're in the negative perspective, the opposite, your partner can look at you with a big smile and say, God, you look gorgeous today. You'll hear it as criticism. Well, you didn't say that to me yesterday.

Why didn't you say it yesterday? You know, it is just, you can't win when you're in the negative perspective. All right. So that's that fourth level. Now, the fifth level, we've already been describing, and that's managed conflict, so create good conflict management. So that was part of how do you bring up an issue, how do you deepen your understanding of the issue,

how do you build, compromise. Also, how do you process password-readable incidents? You know, those terrible big fights you had in the past that created emotional wounds? How do you get past those? And we have a five-step process that's just beautiful. I've never seen it fail, actually, to really create healing around those past regrettable

incidents and do some healing of that emotional scar that got left. Also in this conflict management, we also really teach how to take a break when your physiology goes through the roof. When your heart rate is above 100 beats a minute, you flip your lid as our dear friend and colleague, Dan Siegel would say, and you cannot access the part of your brain that can problem solve, that can listen well,

interpret accurately, creatively problem-solve. Instead, you simply feel attacked and you go into fight or flight. That's what happens when you could be sitting there as calmly as John and I are, but your heart rates are above 100 beats a minute or if you're athletic above about 80 beats a minute. Then you're a mess, you're in fight or flight. So you need a break ritual, a way to take a break and back away until you can self-soothe by telling your partner when you'll come back to talk before you take the break. Then self-soothing without thinking about the fight.

If you think about the fight, you'll stay flooded. That's not going to help you. So you have to do something distracting and calming, like reading a magazine, reading a book, listening to music, going for a run, doing meditation, doing some mindful meditation is wonderful for this particular problem of people getting flooded. So that when you come back, you're in a much more composed state, calm, and gentle where you can really hear your partner better and speak in a kinder way to your partner about the issue you were discussing.

That's all part of that fifth level of conflict management. Then the sixth level is on or each other's dreams. I love that one. So in that one, that's actually a part of conflict too. Because oftentimes, when we are really as sconst in our position on an issue, that we just can't give it up, there's usually an underlying dream in there, something that's really important to you, like getting to have time alone, or being able to connect with friends more than you actually have. You know, whatever it is, it's some core need or core dream.

And when you work on conflict and work on compromise, it's super important to understand each other's underlying dreams and then try to build a compromise that honors each other's underlying dreams. That's a very important piece of the work that we've really given to folks. Finally, the upper level, the seventh level we call creating shared meaning. And here's where this comes from. There's a big myth out there that you've got to have exactly the same interest, the same mission, the same goals, the same purpose. It's not true. That's not what we mean by creating shared meaning. What you have to do is be able to talk about those and describe those with one another and have a partner who's curious about what gives your life

meaning in purpose and a partner who wants to share what gives their life meaning and purpose, even if it's confused, they're feeling lost, where are they traveling internally? Every person is a philosopher. Every person is on a life journey. We humans are meaning makers, right? And so talking about this upper level of the sound relationship house, what gives our life meaning and purpose, is some of the strongest glue that bonds two people together. That's it. The seven levels of the sound relationship house. Well done. I'm curious. You certainly don't have to answer this

if you don't want to, but how well do you feel that you each do in keeping up these seven levels yourselves after all these years of studying and teaching? Well, much better than we were at the beginning. You know, I have to say this, Dan, we are absolutely not gurus. We do not belong on a pedestal. You know, who does?

All the couples that came into our research lab, they were the teachers, they were the ones who taught us what successful couples do. So, you know, we're all in the same soup. So sometimes we do it well, and sometimes we don't. And then we have to process, we have to talk to one another, and just bring up our hurt feelings, our resentments, or bring up an issue that hasn't been resolved, try to do our best with it.

Truly, and I process a regrettable incident in every one of our workshops, a real one that we've had, and we've been doing this for 26 years, and we're never at a loss for a regrettable incident to talk about it to the audience. So true. And we've been doing this for 26 years, and we're never at a loss for a regrettable incident to talk about it to the audience. So true. So, hey guys, we're just like you. We struggle, and that's what relationships are about. It's about doing that work, so you can really

keep understanding each other over time. True enough. The more I hear you talk about your own fallibility, the more I hear you talk about your own fallibility, the more I believe you. Glad to hear it. We'll talk more about it if you want. That's not a bid for unnecessary self-disclosure. I don't want to make it.

Let me tell you about what he did. Last week, that drove me nuts. Unbelievable. Coming up, the Gotman's explain how and why betrayal or infidelity occurs in relationships and how to avoid it. They also talk about the double edge sort of humor, something I've wrestled with, and they share some stunning data about the stakes of getting your relationships right. That's after this break.

I've been taking some notes here because each, as I listen to you speak, you say things that I want to circle back to. So I want to circle back to a few things that you've little nuggets you've dropped along the way that I think might be worthy of further explanation. John, at one point, many minutes ago, you said something about, in your research, you came to understand how and why betrayal happens. Right. Can you talk about that?

Sure. And this knowledge is built on the lifelong work of a woman named Carol Rusbalt. And Carol really taught us about commitment. And what she wound up unveiling is that there is a choice point in a relationship and that happens quite often when things aren't going well Between two people in a relationship There's a choice point where you can either say you know

I'm really going to talk to my partner about this because I'm disappointed or I'm angry or my feelings are hurt I'm going to talk to my partner about this issue. Or you can decide to talk about your partner to another person and complain to another person about what you're suffering. And that choice point turns out to be very critical. If you give voice to your complaints, you're really showing that you've invested everything. All your eggs are in one basket. They're in this relationship. And you're going to go talk to your partner. So if I'm really upset with Julie, I'm going to go talk to her about it. And part of what goes along with

giving voice to those complaints when the chips are down, when things aren't going well, is that I cherish the things that I love about her. And nobody can replace her. She is the love of my life. So I'm going to talk to her about what's making me unhappy. Whereas if I go talk to somebody else, that nice lady down a Starbucks who has such a nice smile and is so welcoming and has the funny umbrella, and I complain to her about Julie, what I'm doing, Carol Ruspel showed is that I'm thinking,

you know, I can do better than Julie. There's a relationship out there that compares more favorably. And I'm magnified Julie's faults when I do that. Whereas if I talk to her about my issues, I really magnify her positive qualities and cherish those. So Carol showed that we don't decide to be loyal once at the wedding ceremony or the commitment ceremony. We're deciding it every day all the time to really cherish what

we have or think the grass is greener somewhere else. And so betrayal is actually built over time, and loyalty is also built over time. And you know, it's really either cherishing your partner or trashing your partner in your mind. And that's the central thing that's going on. It's really, in some ways, it's a slope process. Betrayal doesn't happen overnight, it gets built over time, and loyalty doesn't happen overnight, it gets built over time.

And so, the same thing with trust, we've also learned that trust is about thinking for two all the time, thinking about not just what benefits me, but what benefits my partner and looking to maximize benefits for both of us, whereas you erode trust by just thinking about what you need regardless of what your partner needs, and then it becomes a zero-sum game. You're maximizing your benefits regardless of what whether it hurts your partner or not. You're maximizing your benefits regardless of what whether it hurts your partner or not. So that's kind of what we've learned about commitment and trust. Knowing that, we can actually see how couples build trust and commitment over time. So we can help people when it's eroded how to rebuild it.

I assume that you're not saying that in a successful relationship, there's never any inner trashing of your partner, but that instead, when you notice in a successful relationship that the trashing is happening, you try to bring that to your partner in a constructive way rather than venting, unconstructively, to others, which would sow the seeds. Exactly. Yeah, that's what Count Rusbal found. She called it an investment model. You know, if I've invested everything in this relationship, you know, Julie's the love

of my life. Nobody can take her place. Then if I'm unhappy, I have to talk to her about it. I've got to tell her what's really bugging me. And I don't give myself permission to complain about her to somebody else. You talk about investment and my mind immediately what with that is to a type of bias that psychologists have noticed, which is the sunk cost bias that if you're I've already spent five dollars on this so I might as well you know spend a million more because I'm already invested. But aren't there times when we should divest from unhealthy relationships and how do you talk to people who you think might actually be better off separate?

If folks are in therapy and one person just has absolutely no feeling whatsoever, left over for the partner. And I'm saying they're not angry, they're not hurt, they're not furious, they are apathetic, they have no feeling. Then that's a time when a couple ought to separate. Another time is when one person is a batterer, the other person is a victim. And domestic violence is an interesting category. John with his colleague, Neil Jacobson, did a nine-year-long study on domestic violent couples, did a nine-year-long study on domestic violent couples, and they found two types of domestic violence, only 20% of those domestically violent couples were what we call characterological domestic violence. Those are the ones that need to split up. What's happening there is the perpetrator takes no responsibility for the violence, blames it on the victim, causes major injury, terrible injury, and possibly even death to the partner or to the partner's children or their own children, and no matter what the victim says, the violence doesn't stop.

But that's only 20% of domestic violence couples. The other are 80%. So in the other situational domestic violence, the violence is not typically a major violence. And the violence occurs because the partners both get flooded. So there's that physiological flooding showing up again. They get so upset that they both go into fight or flight and they don't have a way to take a break. They don't.

They stay engaged. They stay together. And because of that, the quarrel gets more and more escalated to the point where they collide physically. They both really want to change. They're both taking full on responsibility for it. That's 80% of our domestic violence. And we can treat those. I'm sorry. And we can treat those comments. Yes, I was going to say that. Thank you. He's from New York.

I'm from Oregon. I talk really slowly. He talks really fast. So if I pause, he thinks I'm done. I'm not done yet. Hey, wait, you're describing him. That's right. So what happens then is that we created actually a treatment for couples

with situational domestic violence that not only eliminated the violence at the end of the treatment, but a year and a half after the treatment ended, there was still no violence. Hostility was much lower. There was greater friendship and so on. Julia, I want to go back to something you said very early in the conversation. When I use the term skills-based, you said not everything we teach is skills-based. Sometimes it's deeper work. And it kind of went over my head in the moments I'd love to hear more about what you meant by that. Okay, so a lot of people mistakenly think that we're behaviorists, it's a form of psychology that just works to change behavior or learn new skills. So you're trying to make the couples better mechanics.

Well, we do much more than that. You know, a lot of people who come into therapy not only have relationship problems, but they've got a lot of old baggage, old pain, old trauma from either earlier relationships or childhood backgrounds or some, as I mentioned earlier, were combat vets. They've lived life and they are covered with scars. So can you just change somebody's skills and expect to have a great relationship?

Well no, because that individual oftentimes has a very troubled relationship with himself, herself or themself, that is agony for them. And that agony is manifesting in what Martin Boober would call the between, that space between partners that can either be a beautiful golden warm sphere or a fragmented sharp barbed fence. So one has to work in relationship therapy with what is the person bringing into the session internally, each individual, and to draw that out so that there's greater understanding of the other partner for this person and vice versa. So we have to dive deep. Also, it's really wonderful to help couples develop ways of connecting with themselves at a deeper level.

So mindfulness is one of the ways to do that meditation, different ways of calming and connecting with the most internal, deepest parts of themselves, so that when they go to connect with their partner and speak to their partner, they're not just speaking superficially using the right proper language, they're also able to express their deepest vulnerability, you know, their soul, if you will, so that the other person can respond with more compassion to where that speaker is coming from. That's what I mean, by we're not just skill-based. Got it. John, as you know, we're coming up on Valentine's Day, John, as you know, we're coming up on Valentine's Day and I know that you and Julie like to talk about what you call small things often. What is that? Yeah, that's a very good question, Dan. Part of what we've done, you know, by having a laboratory with three cameras bolted to the wall, is that we can see moment to moment couples either connecting or failing to connect. And they're just, they're very tiny moments.

They're moments when, you know, one person really wants to have more affection or wants to say something nice to the partner or moments where one person is annoyed or irritated. So there are these emotional moments that a lot of times people don't really attend to, but if you actually attend to what your partner is asking for in that moment, and thinking about what your partner needs, and also getting in touch with your own feelings in that moment, expressing your affection, your admiration for your partner,

or just gratitude for small things. That habit of mind, of noticing what your partner is doing right and expressing gratefulness is very powerful. And Julian I are always saying things like, thanks for making me the coffee or thanks for making the bed or boy, you look really hot this morning. I'm having all these looots about you. You know, I enjoyed the conversation at dinner or, you know, baby, I really need an adventure with you. You know, I want to just leave this rainy climate. You know, let's go somewhere sunny, maybe the summer.

Let's take a vacation to Arizona or someplace that's sunny. And these small expressions, these small moments of connection, positivity, gratefulness, really mount up, they actually seem to build kind of an emotional bank account. It's like depositing into a bank account, but you're depositing something. You're creating a cushion, basically, for lean or times,

and when things aren't going so well. So just a bit of mindfulness really leads to a habit of mind, where you're noticing all the stuff your partner is doing that you don't notice. That's why that positive perspective is so important. And research that was done by two women, having observers in couples homes, just looking at positive things they did for one another in an evening. Our Robinson and Price discovered that the problem and not happy relationships

is not that people need to be more positive. It's that they need to notice the positivity that's already there. And that was just a brilliant study because therapists initially thought, well, the couples are unhappy, they're probably not doing nice things for each other. But turns out they are, but their partners just not noticing it. They're brushing it off. So the small things often is about not only doing small things, but noticing what your partner is doing. That is a contribution in your life. And it becomes a habit of mind. Small steps toward one another often really builds this emotional bank account.

steps toward one another often really builds this emotional bank account. Julie, I've tried to be good here about not asking too many selfish questions as the host, but I do want to ask one, which is an area where I have struggled. I think it's both a sort of strength and a weakness. And I suspect this is not rare is humor. So I can use humor in a way in my marriage, but in lots of my relationships to put people at ease and often to make fun of myself a little bit. But it can also be a little sharp or it can be dissociative. In other words, I'm trying to avoid what somebody's trying to point at. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about this double edged sword of humor. God, what a great question, Dan.

So you're absolutely right. I mean, humor is actually one of the strongest connectors in couples when both people share a similar sense of humor. So one person really gets the other's sense of humor. However, there can be time when humor is used to deflect away from a sensitive topic that goes deeper. And typically that topic is something that is anxiety provoking or painful for the individual who is using the humor to brush it off, to minimize it, to not feel it. That's that dissociation. Don't want to feel it. The other person then may feel literally brushed off or minimized or distanced, kind of pushed away. And so it's a way of disconnecting from the other person. And the way the partner can respond to that is simply saying, you know what,

this is serious for me. Can we not use humor right now? Now notice the use of we. Can we not use humor? By saying it that way, the partner is not finger pointing at you and blaming you for doing something bad. They're just saying, let's get humor out of the picture, okay? Because this is a deep topic. When your tendency is to use humor, if you can be mindful of that as a distensor and say, God, I really want to tell a joke right now, I think I must be anxious in talking about this. And translate the urge to crack a joke into what emotion is beneath this urge to crack a joke. That is, you know, what you're needing to say instead. The other thing that I wanted to say about humor in relationships, how it's a two-edged sword, it can be a great connector,

but also probably the trickiest sharp edge of humor is sarcasm. And when you use sarcasm at the minimizing of your partner, at the kind of attack of your partner, we call that contempt. It's actually a way of really putting down your partner from a position of superiority and using your sarcastic humor or mockery as a way of putting down your partner. Contempt is one of our four horsemen of the apocalypse, one of the big predictors. In fact, it's one of the biggest predictors of relationship demise over time. And not only does contempt predict relationship demise, it's like sulfuric acid also for the immune system of a listener.

The number of times the listener hears sarcastic contempt in, let's say, a 15-minute conversation correlates directly with how many infectious illnesses that listener is gonna have in the coming year. So it's one really has to watch yourself, if that humor becomes sharp-enched. I think Julie's absolutely right, but let me say something in defensive humor. So a shared humor is very interesting because it really lowers physiological arousal and very

powerfully. So being able to laugh at yourself, being able to get your partner to laugh with you is really a wonderful thing. And it's especially powerful during conflict to reduce physiological arousal. So we were really wondering, how could you get people to laugh more at themselves during conflict? And it turned out that the answer was in those small moments often, it's that turning toward your partner. If you increase the turning toward that sort of mindful sensitivity of what your partner needs,

or just noticing the positive things your partner does. If you increase the turning toward, you automatically get more humor during conflict. We've talked about so many aspects of healthy relationships. And I just wonder if you could articulate what you believe the stakes are here for society of the work that you are doing? Well, that's a great question, Dan. It's a field that developed very much in parallel to Bob and my research called social epidemiology,

which discovered that the basis of health and longevity is the quality of people's closest relationships, their friendships, their relationships with their family, and their love relationships. And this field was started by a guy named Len Syme at University of California, Berkeley. And it turns out that in modern society, the basis for longevity is really the quality of your closest relationships. It actually predicts how your immune system functions, because it doesn't have your relationships or chronically secreting our stress hormones. The court is a horn or adrenaline, and it's wearing away our ability to fight infection. So relationships turn out to be really important

when there's a pandemic, for example, that compromised immunity, a lot of times comes from a relationship that is not working very well for either person. And if you can help people really improve the quality of their relationships and get closer, then you're actually extending their life by an average of 17 years. It's a very dramatic effect.

And not only are people healthier, not only do they live longer, but they recover from illness more quickly, and they're less susceptible to infection. And in fact, all through their bodies, there is less inflammation going on in their heart and their lungs and their GI system and in their genitals. So they're functioning better so that relationships turn out to be very powerful, projecting physical, endless, and mental illness as well, or health. It's fascinating, and it's a great way to think about the stakes of this work. In our remaining moments, I wonder if I could get both of you to describe some of the resources that you have on offer for people who might want to investigate further and operationalize some of your insights.

At the Common Institute, we have many different resources for couples. We have online courses for learning all of the ways that you can improve your relationships, strengthen your relationship. There is an online course called The Art and Science of Love that's easily accessible and wonderful. We're also developing an app.

And that app is called GottmanConnect. And it is absolutely wonderful. It has ways built into the app where you can either assess your relationship as if you were in the love lab itself, but now just in the privacy of your own home, a therapist isn't necessary, and you'll get full feedback about how your relationship is doing,

the strengths and challenges, and you'll be pointed to particular interventions or exercises that are on the app that will strengthen your relationship. We're pretty sure. And those include little bitty videos of John or I teaching a little bit about that particular exercise and why it's necessary, as well as hilarious videos about how not to do the exercise, as well as how to do the exercise. In addition, we have lots of books out there.

Eight dates is our latest book that we just love. And it's not just for couples who have recently met and are wanting to have interesting conversations. These are chapters of structured conversations you can have no matter how long you've been together to learn much more about who your partner is regarding things like money, parenting, how you prefer to do conflict. Not you're not having them in these conversations, but how you prefer to manage your conflict. Spirituality, adventures, fun and play, there's all kinds of things. We have at the Gopman Institute as well a whole set of free

card decks that are an app and those card decks are wonderful. They lead you right into some of the ways of managing your relationship in a much better, healthier way. So those are free and easily accessible at the Gotman Institute. And probably one of the best primers, I guess, for everything that we've ever done is the book that John wrote called the Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. That's a sweet one. But eight dates is great. We've got lots of books. If there's betrayal, a wonderful book is what makes love last, which describes how we get to betrayal as well as how to heal from betrayal. And also, if you're really looking for a therapist at the Gopman Institute, we have what's called the Gopman referral network that has a map showing Gopman trained therapists where they practice

all over the world actually, but especially all over the United States and some in Canada too. So that's all at the Gopman Institute. Gopman.com. Gopman.com. Right. Well, this was the light. Thank you both for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Dan. This has been a great interview. Thanks so much. It was fun. Thank you again to Julian John. Thanks as well to the people who work so hard to make this show a reality. Samuel John's Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ, Kashmir, Justin, Davey, Kim Baikamom, Maria Wartell, and Jen Plant with audio engineering

from our good friends over at Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode. My interviewee will be Arthur Brooks from Harvard and the Atlantic. And he's going to be talking about what I call the good news about your eventual decline. We all decline professionally. Much sooner the research shows than many of us might think. And there are ways to prepare for it now so that the second half of your life and career can soar.

That's coming up on Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com-slave-survey. Do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com

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