by Holley Gerth

If you want to know how long your love will last, Dr. John Gottman is the person to see. For more than 30 years, he has studied what makes marriages succeed or fail. His team claims they can predict with over 90 percent accuracy whether or not a couple will eventually divorce based on watching them have conflict for just three minutes. This love guru lives and works in Seattle, where he is a professor of psychology at Washington University and founder of the research facility that has been affectionately dubbed “The Love Lab.”

So what separates the “masters” from the “disasters” of marriage, as Gottman refers to them? The answer may not be what you think. For example, many people believe that fighting leads to divorce. But John Gottman said in an article for Psychology Today, “Fighting, when it airs grievances and complaints, can be one of the healthiest things a couple can do for their relationship.” It turns out all couples fight. As he and his team observed couples, they found three primary styles of conflict in couples. They referred to the first type of couples as Validating. These couples have disagreements, but they are good at working them out calmly and in a way in which both people are satisfied. Volatile couples are those who have frequent and passionate disagreements. And finally, Conflict-Avoiding couples tend to stay away from conflict all together when possible. Society has upheld Validating couples as the standard to which we should all aspire. But if your marriage falls into one of the other categories, you can breathe a sigh of relief. Gottman’s research has found that all three styles have equal potential for a long and happy marriage.

Perhaps you are fine with the way you fight, but frustrated because you seem to argue about the same things over and over again. If so, you’re in good company. Most of the “masters” of marriage do the same. In fact, Gottman has found that 69 percent of disagreements in marriage are perpetual. That means they are related to basic differences in personality or preferences. That may worry you, but Gottman says it shouldn’t. Even the best marriages have these “round and round” type of issues. It’s simply inevitable when two unique individuals share a lifetime together.

So if fighting is inevitable and there are many ways to do it well, what makes the difference? After working with more than 3,000 couples, Gottman has found that the key to a long lasting marriage is found not in if you fight or what you fight about, but how you interact with each other both when you’re having conflict and when things are peaceful. Specifically, the ratio of negative to positive interaction in couples is the strongest predictor of marital satisfaction and happiness. Gottman says, “If there is five times as much positive interaction as negative between couples, the marriage is likely to be stable over time.” Positive interaction includes things like playful teasing, laughter, and compliments.

When negative interaction does arise, there are specific actions and attitudes that can make conflict go from normal to nasty in a hurry. Gottman has identified these patterns as the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” and they describe a downward spiral that often ends in divorce.

The first of the horsemen is criticism. To examine the four horsemen, let’s use the example of Jane and Joe. Jane hates it when Joe leaves his dirty clothes on the floor. She’s a neat person, and he’s much more relaxed. It’s fine if Jane asks Joe to pick up his clothes or discusses the issue with him. Gottman describes this as complaining and says, “Expressing anger and disagreement makes the marriage stronger in the long run than suppressing the complaint.” But if Joe just keeps on leaving the clothes in the floor, Jane is likely to be tempted to cross over from complaints to criticism. Suddenly, the situation isn’t about the clothes-it’s about Joe. Jane may tell him that she thinks he’s lazy or irresponsible rather than that she would really appreciate it if he would pick up the clothes. That subtle shift marks the arrival of the first horseman.