Keep marriage on track by avoiding these bad habits
Dr. John Gottman is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Washington. He heads The Relationship Research Institute.
I think John Gottman is a marriage savant. I commend to you his book "The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work" (1999).
Gottman borrows a biblical metaphor, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, to describe four immensely destructive marital habits that, when chronically habituated, are near-certain predictors of divorce.
Criticism
Criticizing our mate is not the same as offering a critique or rendering a complaint, the latter two being essential in a great love affair. No, criticizing is an attack on our mate's very selfhood: You are incompetent, forgetful, selfish, lazy, stupid, thriftless, etc. It's the difference between "You are so insensitive" (criticism) and "I need you to be more sensitive" (complaint).
A criticism attacks our mate's selfhood. A complaint is focused more on something we rightly need from our mate and are not receiving.
Contempt
Name-calling, derision, ridicule, humiliation, belittling, scorn and scornful tones, even something as subtle as eye rolling and exasperated sighs -- contempt is just plain mean. It's amazing to me how husbands and wives entitle themselves to speak to one another in ways they would never speak even to the lowliest citizen stranger.
Defensiveness
Defensiveness is not the same as a relevant explanation. Indeed, sometimes our mate's ire is misapprehended and even unjust, because our mate is without sufficient information or has jumped to a reactive conclusion. No, defensiveness is a reactive, often whiney and strident tirade of excuses in response to our mate's legitimate complaint. It's the difference between "I'm sorry I had no right to speak to you that way" (accountability) and "Well, I was really mad at you!" (defensiveness).
Defensiveness dismisses our mate's just complaints, and lets him/her know we have no intention of listening to real needs, let alone to be nakedly accountable to the relationship. If you're really good at defensiveness, you can even make your mate feel like having a need makes them a bad person.
Stonewalling
We withhold. Withdraw. Stop talking. Find reasons to be busy and unavailable. We disappear from the relationship even as we stand right next to our mate in the kitchen. We're there, but we're not present or participating.
For reasons I can't explain, in our culture, criticism is a particular bastion of the feminine, while stonewalling is the default destructive strategy of the masculine. In fact, it's a "pathological loop." The more critical a wife is, the more a husband stonewalls. The more he stonewalls, the more she'll criticize. Nothing produces anxiety faster in a man than a woman's criticism. And nothing produces anxiety faster in a woman than stonewalling. This dynamic is as ordinary as dirt in couples counseling across America.
Gottman asserts -- and I agree -- that contempt is unique amongst "The Four Horsemen" in its power to destroy love, intimacy and marriage. And it's not enough merely to stop metaphorically spitting on your mate. No, we replace the despicable habit of contempt with what Gottman calls "positive sentiment override."
Positive sentiment override is something you'll notice immediately about all great, enduring love affairs. It does not mean that either would indefinitely tolerate crummy behavior, but it does mean that each offers the other a preponderant benefit of the doubt. Said ironically, each partner relentlessly "errs" on the side of giving his/her mate a break! Each moves many times more often to understand, advocate and encourage, and only rarely to judge. It's the difference between "Yeah, my wife's a real (expletive)" and "She's having a bad day."
Put it this way: What if spouses begin every verbal encounter -- especially the difficult, hurt, angry encounters -- with the presumption they are about to engage their best friend. The beloved. The partner who, while in no way perfect, still deserves to be respected, loved and cherished, and who can largely be counted on to respect, love and cherish me!
This changes everything.
Generosity, nurture, kindness, compassion, respect, mercy -- these are not the names of feelings! These things are actions. Habits. The work of marriage. The very heartbeat of marriage about which we'd expect no less of ourselves.
Especially when we're hopping mad!
Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Clear View Counseling Wellness Center in Las Vegas and the author of "Human Matters: Wise and Witty Counsel on Relationships, Parenting, Grief and Doing the Right Thing" (Stephens Press). His columns appear on Sundays. Contact him at skalas@reviewjournal.com.
