The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work

by John Gottman, Ph. D.

  The cast of characters in my partner’s life

  Friends:

  Potential friends:

  Rivals, competitors, “enemies”:

  Recent important events in my partner’s life

  Upcoming events

  (What is my partner looking forward to? Dreading?)

  My partner’s current stresses

  My partner’s current worries

  My partner’s hopes and aspirations (For self? For others?)

  Although this exercise offers you just a snapshot of your partner’s life, it can be quite illuminating. Couples who have completed our workshop say this exercise offered them plenty of surprises that helped them better understand their spouse. Joe, for example, never realized just how deeply Donna longed to be an author and how frustrated she was in her banking job until he asked her point-blank about her hopes and aspirations. And she never realized that his recent irritability was rooted in his concern about his new boss and his job performance, not her mother’s visit.

  This love maps form is useful for creating a broad outline of your current lives. But love maps shouldn’t just be broad—they should also be deep. The next exercise will ensure that yours are.

  Exercise 3: Who Am I?

  The more you know about each other’s inner world, the more profound and rewarding your relationship will be. This questionnaire is designed both to guide you through some self-exploration and to help you share this exploration with your partner. Work on this exercise even if you and your spouse consider yourselves open books. There’s always more to know about each other. Life changes us, so neither of you may be the same person who spoke those wedding vows five, ten, or fifty years ago.

  Many of the questions in this exercise are powerful. Please make sure you have enough time and privacy to do them justice. In fact, it may be best to reserve this exercise for an uninterrupted stretch when you do not have work to do, deadlines to meet, phone calls to answer, or children (or anybody else) to look after. Most likely you won’t be able to complete this questionnaire in one sitting, nor should you try. Instead, break it up by section and do it slowly, over time together.

  Answer the questions in each section as candidly as you can. You don’t have to answer every aspect of each question—just respond to the parts that are relevant to your life. Write your answers in your private journal or notebook. If writing so much is hard, you can do it in outline form—but the process of writing this down is important to the success of the exercise. When you’re ready, exchange notebooks and share with each other what you have written. Discuss each other’s entries and what this added knowledge implies for your marriage and the deepening of your friendship.

  My Triumphs and Strivings

  1. What has happened in your life that you are particularly proud of? Write about your psychological triumphs, times when things went even better than you expected, periods when you came through trials and tribulations even better off. Include periods of stress and duress that you survived and mastered, small events that may still be of great importance to you, events from your childhood or the recent past, self-created challenges you met, periods when you felt powerful, glories and victories, wonderful friendships you maintained, and so on.

  2. How have these successes shaped your life? How have they affected the way you think of yourself and your capabilities? How have they affected your goals and the things you strive for?

  3. What role has pride (that is, feeling proud, being praised, expressing praise for others) played in your life? Did your parents show you that they were proud of you when you were a child? How? How have other people responded to your accomplishments?

  4. Did your parents show you that they loved you? How? Was affection readily expressed in your family? If not, what are the effects and implications of this for your marriage?

  5. What role does pride in your accomplishments play in your marriage? What role do your own strivings have in your marriage? What do you want your partner to know and understand about these aspects of your self, your past, present, and plans for the future? How do you show pride in one another?

  My Injuries and Healings

  1. What difficult events or periods have you gone through? Write about any significant psychological insults and injuries you have sustained, your losses, disappointments, trials, and tribulations. Include periods of stress and duress, as well as any quieter periods of despair, hopelessness, and loneliness.

  Also include any deep traumas you have undergone as a child or adult. For example, harmful relationships, humiliating events, even molestation, abuse, rape, or torture.

  2. How have you survived these traumas? What are their lasting effects on you?

  3. How did you strengthen and heal yourself? How did you redress your grievances? How did you revive and restore yourself?

  4. How did you gird and protect yourself against this ever happening again?

  5. How do these injuries and the ways you protect and heal yourself affect your marriage today? What do you want your partner to know and understand about these aspects of your self?

  My Emotional World

  1. How did your family express the following when you were a child:

  • Anger

  • Sadness

  • Fear

  • Affection

  • Interest in one another

  2. During your childhood, did your family have to cope with a particular emotional problem, such as aggression between parents, a depressed parent, or a parent who was somewhat emotionally wounded? What implications does this have for your marriage and your other close relationships (friendships, relationships with your parents, your siblings, your children)?

  3. What is your own philosophy about expressing feelings, particularly sadness, anger, fear, pride, and love? Are any of these difficult for you to express or to see expressed by your spouse? What is the basis of your perspective on this?

  4. What differences exist between you and your spouse in the area of expressing emotion? What is behind these differences? What are the implications of these differences for you?

  My Mission and Legacy

  1. Imagine that you are standing in a graveyard looking at your own tombstone. Now write the epitaph you would like to see there. Begin with the words: “Here lies . . .”

  2. Write your own obituary. (It does not have to be brief.) How do you want people to think of your life, to remember you?

  3. Now you’re ready to write a mission statement for your own life. What is the purpose of your life? What is its meaning? What are you trying to accomplish? What is your larger struggle?

  4. What legacy would you like to leave when you die?

  5. What significant goals have you yet to realize? This can be creating something, or having a particular experience. Minor examples are learning to play the banjo, climbing a mountain, and so on.

  Who I Want to Become

  Take a moment now to reflect on what you have just written. We are all involved in becoming the person we most want to be. In that struggle we all have demons to fight and overcome.

  1. Describe the person you want to become.

  2. How can you best help yourself become that person?

  3. What struggles have you already faced in trying to become that person?

  4. What demons in yourself have you had to fight? Or still have to fight?

  5. What would you most like to change about yourself?

  6. What dreams have you denied yourself or failed to develop?

  7. What do you want your life to be like in five years?

  8. What is the story of the kind of person you would like to be?

  THE NEXT STEP

  All of the above exercises and questions will help you develop greater personal insight and a more detailed map of each other’s life and world. Getting to know your spouse better and sharing your inner self with your partner is an ongoing process. In fact, it’s a lifelong process. So expect to return to these pages from time to time to u
pdate your knowledge about yourselves and each other. Think about questions to ask your partner, like “If you could add an addition to our home what would it be?” or “How are you feeling about your job these days?” One therapist I know has taken to wearing a Bugs Bunny pin and advising couples that the key to sustaining a happy marriage is to ask periodically, “What’s up, doc?”

  But love maps are only a first step. Happily married couples don’t “just” know each other. They build on and enhance this knowledge in many important ways. For starters, they use their love maps to express not only their understanding of each other but their fondness and admiration as well, the basis of my second principle.

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  Principle 2:

  Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration

  Remember Dr. Rory, the husband whose love map was the size of a postage stamp? Who didn’t even know the name of the family dog? For years his wife Lisa put up with his workaholism. But a turning point in their relationship occurred one year on Christmas Day, when Rory was, of course, working. Lisa decided to pack a Christmas picnic and bring the kids and herself to the hospital.

  As they ate together in the waiting room, Rory turned on Lisa, his face like an angry mask. He told her he resented being surprised with a picnic. “Why did you do this? It is really embarrassing. None of the other doctors’ wives would do this.” Suddenly a resident called him on the waiting room phone. As Rory picked up the receiver, his face softened and his voice became helpful, warm, and friendly. When he hung up, he turned back to Lisa, his face again full of anger. Something snapped inside Lisa. She had had it. Clearly her husband was capable of kindness—but not toward her. She packed up the picnic and took the kids home.

  Soon afterward she began going out in the evenings without him. After a while Rory asked her for a divorce. But in a last-ditch effort to work out their differences, they decided to try marital counseling. At first they got nowhere. When Lisa tried to be conciliatory toward Rory during their first session with a marital therapist, he was unable to respond in kind to her repair attempts.

  But their marriage’s hidden hope was discovered when the couple agreed to be taped in my lab for a segment of Face to Face with Connie Chung. The interviewer asked Rory and Lisa about their early years together. As Rory began to recall their first date, his face lit up. He explained that Lisa, unlike him, came from a traditional Armenian home. She was very sheltered by her parents and very inexperienced when it came to dating. Rory knew that getting her and her family to accept him would take a long time, but he was willing to hang in there. Here’s a little of what they recalled:

  RORY: I think she was very nervous, and I had some background about why she was nervous, some cultural things that she was trying to live with. And because of this I knew this was going to take a long, long time. So I wasn’t nervous at all. I figured this was stage one of a five-year marathon. . . .

  LISA: You mean you had a five-year plan on our first date?

  RORY: Maybe that’s exaggerating, but I knew it would take more than one lunch.

  LISA: Wow.

  Rory and Lisa actually held hands while they discussed this. Lisa was beaming—he had never before recounted his campaign to win her heart. This little vignette may not sound very dramatic (in fact, the TV show edited Rory and Lisa down to a snippet of air time), but to a trained observer there was much in this couple’s interaction that offered hope for their marriage. Rory and Lisa’s fond memories of their early days were evidence that underneath their mutual antagonism there were still glimmerings of what I call a fondness and admiration system. This means that they each retained some fundamental sense that the other was worthy of being respected and even liked.

  If a couple still has a functioning fondness and admiration system, their marriage is salvageable. I’m not suggesting that the road to reviving a marriage as troubled as Rory and Lisa’s is easy. But it can be done. By using techniques like those you’ll find in the pages ahead, Rory and Lisa’s therapist, Lois Abrams, showed them that they could unearth those positive feelings even more and put them to work to save their marriage.

  Two years later everything has changed for this couple. Rory has revised his work schedule. He trained a resident to do much of the hospital work that he had been doing single-handedly. He now eats dinner every night with Lisa and the children. He and Lisa also go out together in the evenings, especially to folk dance. Despite the agony they put each other through, Rory and Lisa saved their marriage.

  Fondness and admiration are two of the most crucial elements in a rewarding and long-lasting romance. Although happily married couples may feel driven to distraction at times by their partner’s personality flaws, they still feel that the person they married is worthy of honor and respect. When this sense is completely missing from a marriage, the relationship cannot be revived.

  LEARNING FROM HISTORY

  As it was with Rory and Lisa, the best test of whether a couple still has a functioning fondness and admiration system is usually how they view their past. If your marriage is now in deep trouble, you’re not likely to elicit much praise on each other’s behalf by asking about the current state of affairs. But by focusing on your past, you can often detect embers of positive feelings.

  Of course, some marriages do come up empty. In these relationships the antagonism has metastasized like a virulent cancer, even going backward in time and destroying the couple’s positive memories. We saw that sad result in the marriage of Peter and Cynthia, who argued over washing her car. Their relationship was ruined by his contempt and her defensiveness. When they were asked the same questions about their early years, it became clear that their love was gone. They could remember very little about the beginning of their relationship. When asked what they used to do when they were dating, they gave each other a brief “help me out here” glance and then sat silently, racking their brains for an answer. Peter couldn’t remember a single thing he admired about Cynthia back then. Their marriage was not salvageable.

  * * *

  I’ve found 94 percent of the time that couples who put a positive spin on their marriage’s history are likely to have a happy future as well. When happy memories are distorted, it’s a sign that the marriage needs help.

  * * *

  In contrast, when another couple in my newlywed study, Michael and Justine, were asked about their history, they glowed. Their wedding was “perfect,” the honeymoon was “fabulous.” What’s telling isn’t just that they feel positive about their early years, but how vivid their memories are. Justine recalls that they had gone to the same high school, he a few years ahead of her. He was a big sports hero. She had such a crush on him that she had clipped his picture from the newspaper and kept it in a scrapbook. (She confessed and showed him the scrapbook on their fourth date.) They met formally a few years later, when she tagged along with his foster sister (a friend of hers) who was going to visit him at college for the weekend.

  Michael sensed right away that Justine was the one, but he worried that she wouldn’t like him. She recounts with a giggle discovering the letter he slipped under her leather purse at the end of that weekend to let her know how he felt about her. “I was never very aggressive about chasing women,” he says. “She was the first girl I ever actually pursued. That’s how I knew something was different about this one.”

  They recall the long walks and talks they had, the letters they wrote every day while he was at school. The only bad part of those days, says Michael, was “being away from Justine. Just missing her a lot.” You can hear Justine’s fondness, pride, and admiration for Michael when she says, “I thought, ‘God, if I don’t marry this guy, someone else will. I’d better get him while I can.’ ” Michael says, “I would look at other girls, and I didn’t want to be with them. I just wanted to be with her. I wanted to become a legal couple and let everybody know how special she is to me.” Justine recalls the unity they felt in dealing with one of his buddies who resented that Justine was taking so much of Mic
hael’s time. “He didn’t get it that I was giving her my time,” Michael says.

  It won’t come as much of a surprise to hear that Michael and Justine continue to be happily married. That’s because having a fundamentally positive view of your spouse and your marriage is a powerful buffer when bad times hit. Because they have this reserve of good feeling, Justine and Michael will not have cataclysmic thoughts about separation and divorce each time they have an argument.

  THE ANTIDOTE TO CONTEMPT

  At first, this may all seem obvious to the point of being ridiculous: People who are happily married like each other. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be happily married. But fondness and admiration can be fragile unless you remain aware of how crucial they are to the friendship that is at the core of any good marriage. By simply reminding yourself of your spouse’s positive qualities—even as you grapple with each other’s flaws—you can prevent a happy marriage from deteriorating. The simple reason is that fondness and admiration are antidotes for contempt. If you maintain a sense of respect for your spouse, you are less likely to act disgusted with him or her when you disagree. So fondness and admiration prevent the couple from being trounced by the four horsemen.

  If your mutual fondness and admiration have been completely extinguished, your marriage is in dire trouble. Without the fundamental belief that your spouse is worthy of honor and respect, where is the basis for any kind of rewarding relationship? But there are many couples like Rory and Lisa, whose fondness and admiration have receded to barely detectable levels. Although it seems that the fire is out, some embers still burn. Fanning them is the crucial first step in salvaging such a marriage.