John Gottman's List of Potential Marital Warning Signs

John Gottman is a PhD in Seattle who studies relationships and marriages. Let me get this clear from the absolute beginning: he is no Dr. Phil and you will probably never see him on Oprah, although he was mentioned in the book “Blink”.  His main area of study has been how to predict early on if a marriage is going to succeed or fail and in fact his rather unironically named book “Why Marriages Succeed or Fail....and How You Can Make Yours Last” discusses that very topic.

John Gottman’s idea is that he can thin-slice a marriage by taking a brief conversational sample via tape-recording and use that to predict the success of a marriage. He says the key to the possibility of a marriage’s success is a magic ratio of 5:1. 5 positive exchanges versus 1 negative experience.

If you think your marriage is in trouble, here is his list of warning signs:

1.Criticism: This is when one or both partners places more blame than complaint on a particular situation and “involves attacking the person rather than the action”.
Example: “The dishes are still dirty.”  versus the increasingly worse, “You are never thorough when you do the dishes.”

2. Contempt: No respect. This is when the criticism escalates from blame to a specific intent to attack the other person. This can also include sharper dark humor, body language, and mockery.
Example: “I never realized I married such a loser.”

3. Defensiveness: If you are unable to take responsibility for your own actions, this creates a defensive attitude, which does little to stop the progression of an argument. He breaks down the types of defensiveness into several categories, which include whining (my personal favorite), excuse-making, and again, body-language. The body-language of defensiveness involves arms folded across the chest.

4. Stonewalling: This is basically the failure to communicate anything at all to your partner, whether you are in a fight or not. According to Gottman, the Stonewaller typically will remove himself (or herself) from the conversation.
As you may have expected, the stonewalling, or what I like to call the silent treatment, has been seen by Gottmann and his researchers more in men than in women.

I’m no marriage expert, but I think what is key here is the ratio of positive communication to negative communication. The Gottman Institute’s web page offers a quiz for those concerned about their own relationships to find out what’s what.