Even Healthy Couples Fight — The Difference Is How: Julie and John Gottman (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Julie and John Gottman’s talk titled “Even Healthy Couples Fight — The Difference Is How” at TED 2024 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

JULIE GOTTMAN: So most of us think that fighting is bad for romantic relationships, right? How many people do you know who say, “Hey, I had a great fight the other day.” “Oh, yeah. My partner and I fight all the time and we’re super happy.”

JOHN GOTTMAN: Fifty-two years ago, we put love under the microscope. Julie and I are the founders of the Gottman Institute and the Love Lab, and we’ve made the study of relationships our life’s work. And our research tells us that fighting is good for relationships, not bad.

The Importance of How Couples Fight

JULIE GOTTMAN: In our lab, we saw that almost all couples fight. In fact, how they fight in the first three minutes predicts with 96 percent accuracy not only how the rest of the conversation will go, but how the rest of the relationship will go six years down the road. My God, I know, it’s terrifying, isn’t it?

So it’s not if we fight that determines relationship success, it’s how we fight.

JOHN GOTTMAN: In fact, our research has revealed that some fighting actually increases connection, and even improves our sex life. So how do we fight right?

Observing Couples in the Love Lab

JULIE GOTTMAN: Early on, John and his colleague Robert Levinson in their lab simply watched couples interacting. Sounds simple, but nobody had ever done that before.

JOHN GOTTMAN: Over time, 3,000 couples came to the lab. As they were being videotaped, they wore monitors that measured such things as respiration, heart rate and stress hormones. And then they had a conflict discussion and they talked about the events of their day.

JULIE GOTTMAN: Afterwards, they rated how they felt during each conversation before returning home.

They would return to the lab every year or two and repeat the same procedure, and some were followed for as long as 20 years.

JOHN GOTTMAN: Videotapes were synchronized to the physiological data, and then in a split-screen video, second by second, we measured the couples’ words, emotions, facial expressions and physiology year after year.

The Masters and the Disasters

JULIE GOTTMAN: Over time, we saw that some couples separated or divorced. Some remained together unhappily, while others stayed together happily. What made the difference between the couples who were successful and the couples who were unsuccessful, or as we call them, the masters and the disasters?

The couples in our studies were all ages, sexual orientations and ethnically diverse. After a while, just by watching a couple, we could predict what would happen with over 90 percent accuracy, what would happen in their relationship six years later. Which meant we never got invited to dinner anymore.

Three Major Styles of Fighting

JOHN GOTTMAN: We found that there were three major styles of fighting. Conflict avoiders who just agree to disagree and would rather wash the dishes than argue a point. I’m a conflict avoider.

JULIE GOTTMAN: He is. Believe me. Conflict validators would bring up an issue by expressing their feelings calmly and then jumping immediately into problem solving. So think of your most patient kindergarten teacher.

Then there were the conflict volatiles. They would express their feelings intensely and very passionately. Notice I say, just fine, not bad. And then they would leap into trying to prove that they were right, and their partners were wrong. OK, so think of a very expressive basketball coach on the sidelines. Or me. I’m a volatile.

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JOHN GOTTMAN: And some partners had different styles of fighting from one another. But the good news, we discovered that whether you have those three styles of fighting or you’re mismatched, you can have a successful relationship as long as the ratio of positive to negative responses during the conflict discussion, it was at least five to one. And examples of positive responses were head nods, affection, interest, shared humor and words like “fair enough.”

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

JULIE GOTTMAN: OK, so what about the negatives? Were all the negatives equally negative? No. There were four big predictors of relationship demise that we called the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Alright. The first one was criticism. And criticism means blaming a problem on a personality flaw of your partner. For example, if you walked into a messy kitchen and you wanted to be critical, you would say, “Oh my God, this place is such a mess. Why are you such a slob?” How do you answer that?

JOHN GOTTMAN: The second horseman is contempt. Contempt is like criticism, but it has a dash of superiority. So with contempt, you include scorn, disgust, sarcasm and nasty insults like, “You’re such a loser. Why did I ever marry you?”

JULIE GOTTMAN: The third horseman is defensiveness. That’s the most common one. And that’s when we act like an innocent victim. “I did too pay the bills!” Or we counterattack, “Oh, yeah? Well, you didn’t pay the bills on time.”

JOHN GOTTMAN: The fourth Horseman is stonewalling. When we shut down completely and we don’t even give the speaker any signs that we’re listening. In stonewalling, we really wall ourselves off from our partner. Hmm.

JULIE GOTTMAN: Hmm. The fourth is a bad one, but here’s another one that may be related to it. It’s called flooding, or fight, flight or freeze.

So a partner in the middle of a conversation may be sitting there and looking totally calm on the outside, but inside, their heart rates are rocketing up above 100 beats a minute.

JOHN GOTTMAN: They feel like they’re being attacked by a tiger.

JULIE GOTTMAN: But it’s only our partner. And when we’re flooded, we can’t think straight, we can’t listen very well and we certainly can’t creatively problem-solve.

Calling for a Break During Conflict

JULIE GOTTMAN: If you get flooded, here’s what’s crucial. You stop immediately and call for a break, then say when you’ll come back to continue the conversation. That’s really important.

And during the break, do not think about the fight. Instead, simply self-soothe and then come back at the designated time. When you’re physiologically calm, you look like a totally different person and it’s much easier to be reasonable and to listen well.

Now, what do couples do who fight right versus fight wrong? The couples who are really struggling and distressed may bring up an issue in that first three minutes of the conversation with something we call harsh startup, which almost always includes criticism or contempt. The couples who fight right will bring up the issue with what we call softened startup.

Softened Startup vs. Harsh Startup

JOHN GOTTMAN: So what’s softened startup? Softened startup consists of a bunch of “I” statements that describe you and not your partner at all. You start with what you feel, then you describe the situation at hand, and then what you do need from your partner to make things better, rather than what you resent.

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Now here’s an example of harsh versus softened startup.

JULIE GOTTMAN: Alright, so let’s say you’ve been cooking dinner every single night for the last year. Now you’re a little tired of it.

Alright, so what would a harsh startup sound like? “You’re just too cheap to take me out to dinner!” Ugh!

Alright. A softened startup would sound more like this. “I’m feeling frustrated…” There’s your feeling. “… about needing to cook dinner every night.” That’s the situation. Hear all the “I’s”?

“Would you please take me out to dinner tonight?” That’s your positive need.

JOHN GOTTMAN: At a workshop with 1,200 people, we posed that question to the audience and asked them to come up with a softened startup for that situation. And one guy raised his hand, and he was competent, but very succinct. He said, “I’m feeling hungry. I’m going out to dinner. Would you like to come along?”

JULIE GOTTMAN: Later on, we gave an example about sex. The entire audience went silent and very shy, except for this same guy. So I had to call on him, right?

So he went over the top a little bit, and this is what he said for a softened startup: “Honey, I’m feeling horny. I’m going to go upstairs and have sex. Would you like to come along?”

Perpetual vs. Solvable Problems

JOHN GOTTMAN: One finding that really shocked us in our research was this: 69 percent of all relationship conflict problems are perpetual, which means that they never go away. They never get fully solved. And so we learn that conflict really mostly needs to be managed rather than solved.

JULIE GOTTMAN: In our lab, the couples who came back year after year kept bringing up exactly the same issue, even 20 years later.

JOHN GOTTMAN: Right. So when we think about fighting right, whether talking about a perpetual problem or a solvable problem, what is the biggest mistake that the disasters of relationships make? The answer is that they fight to win, which means somebody has to lose. What do the masters do instead? They fight to understand.

Fighting to Understand

JULIE GOTTMAN: Fighting to understand means taking a conversation about an issue and going much deeper to understand what’s beneath your partner’s position on the issue. That builds the connection.

JOHN GOTTMAN: At the core of fighting to understand is asking one another a set of predesigned questions that are designed to get at people’s thoughts and feelings behind their position on the issue. They don’t interrupt, and then they trade roles.

We call this “the dreams within conflict” conversation, because it really helps people get at their thoughts and feelings behind their position without feeling judged or attacked.

JULIE GOTTMAN: There are six questions in all, and these questions unearth each person’s values, feelings, background history and ideal dream regarding the issue. I’m going to give you an illustration using just two out of the six questions.

So there was a couple who were really fighting over whether or not to get a dog. OK. There was a woman who we will call Jenny, who was adamantly opposed to getting a dog, but her partner, a woman who we will call Alison, was all for it. So they decided to try the dreams within conflict conversation.

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So when Alison asked Jenny, “Do you have some background or childhood history that’s part of your position on this issue,” she said …

JOHN GOTTMAN: “Absolutely. When I was a kid, I got chased and bitten by just about every dog in our neighborhood.”

JULIE GOTTMAN: Wow. But the real understanding came with the dream question. “So what is your ideal dream here regarding this issue?”

JOHN GOTTMAN: “You know, if we don’t have a dog, we’re not tied down. We’re not burdened. We’re free to travel the world together and have adventures together. That’s what I really want.”

Now listen to what Allison said when she was asked about the childhood history question. She said …

JULIE GOTTMAN: “You know, when I was a kid, I was all alone. OK, so my golden retriever was my best friend. He really kept me from feeling totally alone.”

JOHN GOTTMAN: Hmm. And to the dreams question, she said …

JULIE GOTTMAN: “Hmm. You know, I see getting a dog as a practice run for having kids and having a family. I know that dogs and kids are a lot of responsibility, but they both bring so much love with them into the family. That’s what I want.”

JOHN GOTTMAN: So on the surface, this fight was about whether or not to get a dog, but beneath the surface it was about leading a life of adventure and travel versus staying home and raising a family. Without the dreams within conflict conversation, they never would have gotten to this level of understanding of one another.

Breakthroughs in Conflict Resolution

JULIE GOTTMAN: In an unpublished study, we found that 87 percent of 600 couples, many of whom were distressed, made major breakthroughs on gridlock conflicts using tools like this. So now if we look around our world, we see a world that is caught in win-lose battles that are so polarized.

So … the same thing we’re seeing in our couples who are also locked in win-lose standoffs. We’ve never seen such furious, uncompromising fighting before. It’s enough to fill you full of despair.

JOHN GOTTMAN: But … our research has taught us that there are science-based tools that can gentle down a conflict, scrape the escalations off the ceiling and lead people to a mutual understanding of one another’s positions, ending this win-lose mentality and leading a couple to a compromise that honors both people’s dreams.

Building a More Loving and Peaceful World

JULIE GOTTMAN: You all know that relationships are the foundations of our communities, our society and our world. If we can all work on learning how to fight right, even at home, there is hope we can build a more loving and peaceful world, one couple at a time.

JOHN GOTTMAN: Thank you.

JULIE GOTTMAN: Thank you.