The Biggest Reason Marriages End
Today's marriages fight over money, sex, children, career, and many other reasons. The more number of divorces these days has brought up the topic of the future of the institution of marriage in question. From outside, happy couples all of a sudden come to the verge of divorce, those who continuously fight with each other become lifelong couples. Of course, many variables make up the continuity of marriages. But what really is the backbone of a healthy relationship? The results of a long-term study included in Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink" teach us the answer to this question.
Love Lab Experiments
One of these long-term experiments on married couples was conducted by Washington University research psychologist John Gottman and his colleagues. The goal was to establish whether or not it would be possible, using certain clues, to predict today the future of marriages.
Accordingly, the couples invited to the lab were asked to talk for 15 minutes about a specific topic that was causing them a dead end. Meanwhile, other data from sensors measuring heart rates and skin temperature were recorded in addition to the spouses' video and audio recording.
We believe that we need to witness every moment of a couple in order to get to know them. How are they when they are happy, angry or sad? However, John Gottman proves that this is not necessary. Gottman and his team, who have examined more than 3,000 couples from the 1980s to the present in a research center called the love laboratory developed a coding method called SPAFF which was made up of 20 categories matching every possible emotion that can be expressed during a conversation. Accordingly, facial expressions and speech of subjects were interpreted and coded into this scale. The results were indeed very fascinating.
When an analysis of the spouses' 1-hour conversation was made, it could be said with a proved accuracy rate of 95% that this or that couple would be married after 15 years. With an observation period of 15 minutes, the success rate was around 90%. It is noteworthy that the forecast could be made by looking at three-minute recordings.
The most observed and measured things with couples were positive and negative feelings. This ratio of feelings needed to be at least one in five if one wished to have a sustainable marriage, based on the findings of Gottman. At the heart of his research lay the idea that every marriage has a unique routine-a kind of marital DNA-that shows itself in communication. This ritual immediately came to light when spouses were asked to describe the most important part of their relationship-how they met. Immediately, when in narration a negative routine was noticed, there was a negative prediction about the future marriage. What was astounding was that there was a distinctive style that naturally and involuntarily emerged in the relationship between two people. This pattern could be decoded and interpreted to determine whether or not divorce would take place.
Four Reasons of Relationship Problems
Gottman discovered that each marriage has its own blueprint and this could be known by taking into consideration a couple's communication and gather detailed information about their changing emotions. After a while, however, Gottman realized that he did not have to give meaning to everything small within the conversation. Hence, by paying attention to the criteria called the "Four Horsemen", he managed to reach what needed to be known about the future of a couple: namely, the defensive attitude, indifference, criticism, and contempt. The most important of these four, according to Gottman, is contempt. Therefore, whether one or both of the couple are found to contempt the other person, then it will be appropriate to be referred to as a bad marriage. Among the other four, speaking from above as a form of contempt hurts the relationship much more. These are the acts of contempt that usually include insults, for example, You are disgusting. What makes contempt destructive is that when you despise, you push the other person below you and create a hierarchy. That is why, if you can measure the degree of contempt in a relationship, you don't need to know the other details. . .
Therefore, so far with the information we have given, communication is the most destructive factor in a marriage relationship and in the core of that, the behaviors of contempt exist. These results are based on years of experiments and practical studies conducted with more than 3,000 couples. Of course, these results need to be tested on different levels. But it is undeniable that these results bring forth clear data for us. Many specific problems that seemingly lead to divorce may come to the fore because each relationship has different dynamics. However, when coming to the general picture as a whole, that relationship would not seem to work healthily and extend over many years, as the communication problems caused by contempt become constant within a relationship.
Source: Malcolm Gladwell (2013) Blink (Çev. Dilan Sarıoğlu) MediaCat Kitapları, İstanbul
