The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work

The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work — summary

A scientist who watches couples fight, and knows the ending

Imagine sitting on a couch in a small apartment that looks like a holiday rental. There are coffee mugs on the table, a fridge full of your favorite snacks, books on the shelf. The only odd thing is the cameras tucked into the corners and the thin wires taped to your fingers. You are here for the weekend with the person you love. You will cook, talk, argue about whose turn it is to take out the trash, watch a movie. The whole time, a team of researchers in another room is watching your heart rate climb and fall, your skin sweat, your jaw clench. They are listening to the way you say "pass the salt." After fifteen minutes of one good argument, they will tell their grad students whether you are still going to be married in six years. They will be right about nine times out of ten.

That apartment exists. It sat for years on the campus of the University of Washington, run by a psychologist named John Gottman. Over four decades he wired up thousands of couples and watched them go about ordinary life. He came out of it with a strange and useful claim: love is not as mysterious as we pretend, and most of what marriage counselors teach is wrong. The things that doom a marriage are obvious once you know what to look for, and the things that save one are smaller and more boring than any romantic comedy will ever admit. Marriages do not die in big fights, they die in the silence after a thousand small bids for attention go unanswered. This book is the field manual that came out of his lab.