Happily Ever After

The key to staying together ... It’s not what you think

- Charlotte Andersen

ANALYTICS AND DATA don’t sound like a formula for romance, but John Gottman has devoted more than 40 years to figuring out the math that makes relationships work. In his “Love Lab” at the University of Washington, in Seattle, he has analyzed how couples communicate verbally and non-verbally and followed them for years to find out if their relationships survived. More than 200 published articles later, he claims to be able to predict the outcome of a relationship with up to 94 per cent accuracy. Dubbed “the Einstein of Love” by Psychology Today, Gottman—along with Julie Gottman, his wife of 30 years and research partner—now teaches other marriage therapists the most common misunderstandings about love, based on observations from the Love Lab.

Myth:

Marriage should be fair.

Couples who engage in quid pro quo thinking—if I scratch your back, you should scratch mine—are usually in serious trouble, John says: “We become emotional accountants only when there’s something wrong with the relationship.”

He cites a 1977 study by the psychologist and researcher Bernard Murstein as the first to find that quid pro quo thinking was a characteristic of ailing relationships rather than happy ones, because of its indication of a low level of trust. “We’ve found in our research that the best marriages are the ones in which you’re really invested in your partner’s interests, as opposed to your own,” Julie says. Negotiating from a position of pure self-interest is dysfunctional; the happiest couples give without expecting anything in return because they can rely on their partner to operate with their best interests in mind.

Myth: Your partner isn’t a mind reader.