The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country's Foremost Relationship Expert

Neuroses or personality problems ruin marriages. Research has found only the weakest connection between run-of-the-mill neuroses and failing at love. The reason: We all have issues we’re not totally rational about. We call these triggers “enduring vulnerabilities,” a term we borrowed from Tom Bradbury of UCLA. They don’t necessarily interfere with

Repair attempts save marriages not just because they decrease emotional tension between spouses, but because by lowering the stress level they also prevent your heart from racing and making you feel flooded. When the four horsemen rule a couple’s communication, repair attempts often don’t even get noticed.…

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Horseman 1: Criticism. You will always have some complaints about the person you live with. But there’s a world of difference between complaint and criticism. A complaint focuses on a specific behavior or event. “I’m really angry that you didn’t sweep the kitchen last night. We agreed that we’d take turns. Could you please do it now?” is a complain

an unhappy marriage can increase your chances of getting sick by roughly 35 percent and even shorten your life by an average of four to eight years. The flip side: people who are happily married live longer, healthier lives than either divorced people or those who are unhappily married.

One of the most startling findings of our research is that couples who have maintained happy marriages rarely do anything that even partly resembles active listening when they’re upset.

That’s why I can often predict a divorce by hearing only one discussion between a husband and wife. The failure of repair attempts is an accurate marker for an unhappy future. The presence of the four horsemen alone predicts divorce with an 82 percent accuracy rate. But when you add in the failure of repair attempts, the accuracy rate reaches into

they assume the worst about each other to such a pervasive degree that they become trapped in an absorbing state of negativity that I call the Roach Motel for Lovers. This horrible place is marked by endless conflict and bad feelings. Couples “check in” to it and then discover they can’t get out. When couples become trapped in the Roach Motel, they

Recurring episodes of flooding lead to divorce for two reasons. First, they signal that at least one partner feels severe emotional distress when dealing with the other. Second, the physical sensations of feeling flooded—the increased heart rate, sweating, and so on—make it virtually impossible to have a productive, problem-solving discussion. When

Some people leave a marriage literally, by divorcing. Others do so by staying together but leading parallel lives. Whatever the route, there are four final stages that signal the death knell of a relationship. 1. The couple see their marital problems as severe. 2. Talking things over seems useless. Partners try to solve problems on their own. 3. Th