The Science of Happily Ever After: What Really Matters in the Quest for Enduring Love by Tashiro Ty

Author:Tashiro, Ty [Tashiro, Ty]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2014-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 6.1

Differences between couples’ evaluations of their relationships and friends’/family evaluations of their relationships.

The seeds of a relationship’s deterioration and partners’ resentment are not seriously considered by most couples during their early years of dating, even though just about everyone around the couple can see the looming conflict and the instability with great clarity. There are multiple lines of converging evidence to suggest that people can anticipate the fate of a romantic relationship with a great deal of accuracy before a couple ever marries.

John Gottman and his colleagues from the University of Washington and the Gottman Institute have conducted a series of studies that are focused on predicting divorce based on brief observations of newlyweds interacting. In the typical Gottman study, couples come to the laboratory and are asked to talk to each other for fifteen minutes about a “continuing disagreement” or the “events of the day.” Researchers, who have never met the couples they are observing on video, code the interactions for key behaviors, such as instances of defensiveness or resentment and problem-solving strategies. Numerous studies suggest that these small glimpses into couples’ lives, lasting only fifteen minutes and entailing conversational subjects as mundane as “events of the day,” allow researchers to predict whether those couples will divorce fourteen years later with about 90 percent accuracy. So total strangers armed with a coding system and fifteen minutes of video can predict with a fair degree of accuracy whether you will be divorced or will still be married to your partner years later.

Although the predictive power exhibited in these studies is stunning, who has the time to be trained in complex coding systems that require expertise in the coding of facial expressions, the interpretation of physiological data and a host of other skills often learned during years of doctoral training? Robert Waldinger and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School and Judge Baker Children’s Center conducted a clever study asking a simple question, “Could psychology undergraduates with no formal training somehow pick up on couples’ behaviors accurately enough to predict divorce?” They were very able. In fact, untrained undergraduates observed couples interact for ten minutes on video, and their observations were used to predict which couples would divorce five years later with 81 percent accuracy. Thus, even total strangers with no formal training can make more accurate predictions of divorce probability than partners who have spent thousands of hours with each other. What is it that other people notice about couples’ relationships that the couples themselves can’t see?

There are dozens of other studies demonstrating that partners in relationships are relatively poor judges when it comes to predicting big relationship outcomes for themselves, such as whether they have found “the one” who will bring them long-term relationship satisfaction and stability. Underlying this inaccuracy is the fact that, as in diagnosing complex diseases or determining whether a war can be won, judging whether complex romantic relationships will be stable is a “yes or no” decision about a complex outcome.

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