10 Lessons to Transform Your Marriage America's Love Lab Experts Share Their Strategies for Strengthening Your Relationship

Introduction From Predicting Divorce to Preventing It: An Introductory Message from John and Julie Gottman It's been more than a decade since John and his colleagues at the University of Washington (UW) first announced their discovery: Through the power of careful observation and mathematical analysis, the team had learned to predict with more than 90 percent accuracy whether a married couple would stay together or eventually divorce. This discovery captured the imagination of many. If research psychologists could now pinpoint specific behaviors that lead to divorce, then perhaps people in troubled relationships could change those behaviors and save their marriages.But as any weatherman can tell you, the ability to predict trouble is not the same as the ability to prevent it. It's one thing to detect a storm brewing on radar; it's quite another to make those storm clouds disappear. And yet that's the kind of work we at the Gottman Institute have been doing. Since 1994 we've been developing tools to help couples identify problems that are proven to destroy relationshipsand to turn those problems around. By experimenting with various forms of therapy, we've been learning how to help husbands and wives improve their marriages and prevent divorce. Through our workshops, therapy sessions, and books, couples are gaining the tools they need to build stronger friendships and manage their conflicts. As a result, they are learning to work through a whole host of problems common to marriageproblems such as these: the stress of caring for a new baby exhaustion from working too hard loss of interest in sex and romance health problems recovering from an extramarital affair struggles with depression arguments over housework and finances changes that come with retirement the loss of a job, an identity, or a lifelong dream And once again we're achieving some exciting results. Our studies show that 86 percent of people who complete our marriage workshops say they make significant progress on conflicts that once felt "gridlocked." And after one year, 75 percent of husbands and 56 percent of wives who attend our workshops and therapy sessions feel their marriages move from a broken state to a functional one. Even simply reading our books can make a difference. One study showed that 63 percent of husbands and wives who read John's 1999 bestseller, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, reported that their marriages had changed for the better and were still improved a year later. These numbers are a big improvement over other forms of marital intervention. For example, acclaimed marriage researcher Neil Jacobson conducted an evaluation of one of the most highly regarded therapy methods and showed that only 35 percent of couples using it improved their marriages. What's behind our success? We believe it's the science. The tools we've developedand that you'll see real couples using in this bookaren't based on our beliefs or whims about marriage. They are grounded in decades of work John and his colleagues have been doing at the Family Research Laboratory, originally located at UW and now part of our Relationship Research Institute in Seattle. The Love Labas we've come to call itis a research facility where husbands and wives are screened, interviewed, and observed interacting with each other. Researchers use video cameras, heart monitors, and other biofeedback equipment to determine people's stress levels during conversations withGottman, John M. is the author of '10 Lessons to Transform Your Marriage America's Love Lab Experts Share Their Strategies for Strengthening Your Relationship', published 2006 under ISBN 9781400050185 and ISBN 1400050189.