Transcript
Unfortunately, criticism, which is stating the problem in the relationship as a defect in the partner, leads to the second predictor we have of what predicts relationships’ demise: defensiveness. And defensiveness is any way of warding off a perceived attack. But unfortunately, the masters do the opposite; they say, “Interesting, that’s an interesting point. Tell me more about what you see is our problem and how I contribute to this.” The disasters become defensive and say, “It’s not my fault; it’s your fault,” and they raise something that’s a counter-attack rather than responding by saying, “Interesting point, tell me more,” or they whine. They present themselves as an innocent victim.
So we saw a pattern in the way conflicts begin, and our best predictor of relationship demise was a behavior we call contempt, which is any statement you make to your partner from a superior place. And if you think you’re more punctual than your partner, more intelligent, more knowledgeable about something, or a better parent, or cleaner, or tidier, then usually what you say is really speaking down and has an air of superiority. And I collect these ways of people being superior. Some people collect stamps, and some people collect coins; I like to collect ways that people can be contemptuous.
The most common way we found was direct insults and name-calling, calling people a jerk and an idiot, saying what they’re saying is ridiculous. But one of my favorite ones is correcting somebody’s grammar when they’re angry with you. I think that’s a really effective way of being contemptuous. So if my wife says, “I could care less about that,” I would say, “Hold on there, honey. It is not ‘I could care less’; it is ‘I couldn’t care less.’ That’s the right way to say it. Now, what was your point?” So it’s one of my favorite ways.
So contempt is our best predictor of divorce and breakup in same-sex relationships as well, and also a predictor of how many infectious illnesses in the next four years the recipient of contempt will get. So it’s been shown that contempt is a very wide-spectrum down-regulator of immune functioning.
The final predictor that discriminates the masters from the disasters during conflict we call stonewalling, which is basically listener withdrawal from the conflict. And the stonewaller basically doesn’t give the usual cues that a listener gives, like head nodding, eye contact, brief vocalizations, “Yeah,” and facial movement, “Yeah, huh, that could be, yeah, sure, oh, interesting, yeah.” The stonewaller is really tuned out, like a stone wall.
But when we try to predict stonewalling from our data from our stream of interaction, we found that an elevated heart rate, heart rate above the intrinsic rhythm of the heart around 100 beats a minute, predicts stonewalling. And in heterosexual relationships, 85 percent of our stonewallers were guys. So stonewalling is particularly a male thing to do. Now, do lesbians stonewall? Absolutely, they do. So it’s not biology.
So we interviewed stonewallers about these moments in their interaction, and it turned out what they were trying to do was really calm down and not make the interaction worse. So the internal monologue of a stonewaller was something like this: “Okay, just don’t say anything. Let her burn herself out. How long can this last? 10 minutes to the game. She can’t touch me then.” You know, that was the hope anyway.
The stonewall, and what the—now, did the masters, the guys who are in master relationships, stonewall? They did, but they were able to self-soothe physiologically.
Now, so we had these basic findings that discriminated the masters from the disasters, but they didn’t help us in understanding it. So you have a diagram here in your handout that looks like a house, and if you’ll get hold of that, I’ll give you an idea of what our basic findings were, and then we should have time for some questions, and I’ll try to stay within my time limit.
So by putting together the data that we had, looking at couples over long periods of time, we discovered that one of the most important discriminators between the masters and disasters of relationships was the ability to repair interaction. That in fact, in all relationships, regrettable incidents and arguments that go out of control and hurting your partner’s feelings are inevitable. And one of the contributions Bob and I wound up making was that we wound up studying really good relationships. And before this research, therapists really had to fantasize about what a good relationship would be like. Oprah Winfrey hasn’t had one, for example, and Dr. Phil just got divorced, so we don’t know; these guys don’t really know what a good relationship is like from their own experience. And we were able to do that by doing research on good relationships.
Every relationship experiences conflict and periods of alienation, but the difference between the masters and the disasters is they’re able to repair. And so repair turns out to be really the sine qua non of relationships, being able to say, “I’m really sorry. I blew it at that time. That didn’t go very well. Can we talk about it?” And what we thought was that maybe the way the repair was made would make an enormous difference. And for several years, we looked at the nature of repair, and we discovered that we were looking in the wrong place. It was really the recipient of repair that was the important person to look at, and what made the difference in repair working and being effective was the quality of the friendship in the relationship, not looking at conflict but looking at how people maintain friendship and intimacy and emotional connection.
So the first three levels of the Sound Relationship House diagram, which is our theory of how relationships work and why our prediction was able to work, is really about friendship. And the great thing about being a researcher is you can’t stay vague about this stuff; you have to measure it. So here’s what we mean by friendship.
The first level of the Sound Relationship House is called Build Love Maps, and we found that the masters of relationships really had a roadmap in their mind of their partner’s internal psychological world. They knew a lot about their partner, and the fundamental process that allowed them to know that is asking open-ended questions. Not questions like, “Did you pay the plumber?” but questions like, “How do you feel about your career right now?” or “How do you feel about injustice in Africa?” “What’s your mission in life right now?” “How are you thinking about yourself as a mother, and how is that changing now that our kid has left high school and left home?” Those kinds of questions are the ones the masters are asking, and they’re remembering the answers, which is another part of building a love map.
Now, you laugh, but actually, I’ve had a lot of couples in my office where one of them will say, “I really don’t know what you find erotic,” and the other partner says, “I’ve told you many times,” and I say, “Here’s a pen and some paper, take notes this time. Okay? Try to remember the answers.” So love maps is a very interesting thing because it builds a basic sense that your partner is really interested in you and knows something about you, and it’s something a lot of people don’t do, not because they’re mean-spirited or have a psychopathology, but because they really don’t know this information. And we teach people how to do this in the first couple of hours of our couples workshop, and we have ways of doing it that are entertaining and a lot of fun. And so building a love map is a process that anybody can do; it doesn’t take a lot of skill, and yet you’ll find, you might want to observe this, how many times even at parties people ask questions, and you’ll find that it’s a very rare thing for people to do.
The next level of Sound Relationship House we call Building the Fondness and Admiration System, and that was very interesting because what happened was that in the disaster relationships, people had a habit of mind where they were scanning the environment for their partner’s mistakes. They were trying to understand why they were so irritated with their partner and annoyed and alienated, and so they looked at their partner to see what their partner was doing wrong so they could help their partner become a better human being and thereby be happier. Whereas in master relationships, they were looking for what was going right, and they were appreciating that, and they were building a culture of appreciation and respect and affection on a moment-to-moment basis. And changing that habit of mind from looking for what’s going wrong turns out to be very critical, not only in couple relationships but also in parent-child relationships. Very, very different when a parent is noticing what a child is doing right when the child is trying to learn something, then pointing out the mistakes the child is making. Very, very different performance patterns. So that was the Fondness and Admiration System, and the next system, the next level of friendship, is really what we call Turning Toward.
