The 7 Principles of Making Marriage Work

The Lab That Could Predict Your Divorce

Imagine sitting in a small apartment with your spouse for a weekend. You cook together, watch TV, argue about whose turn it is to do the dishes. You think you're just on a strange little getaway. What you don't know is that every word, every glance, every shift in your heart rate is being recorded. A team of researchers is watching you fight, watching you make up, watching you ignore each other across the breakfast table. And by Sunday evening, they can tell you, with about ninety-one percent accuracy, whether your marriage will end in divorce within the next six years.

That apartment exists. It sits on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle, and John Gottman calls it the Love Lab. For more than two decades, he and his colleagues have wired up hundreds of couples, tracked their pulses and stress hormones, coded their facial expressions frame by frame, and followed them across the years to see who stayed together and who fell apart. What came out of that work is one of the few honest answers we have to a question almost everyone asks at some point: what actually makes a marriage work?

The answer, Gottman argues in this book, is not what you've been told. It is not great communication skills. It is not active listening. It is not learning to fight fair, or finding the right person, or having the right amount of sex, or sharing the right hobbies. Plenty of miserable couples are excellent communicators. Plenty of happy couples bicker, sulk, and roll their eyes at each other. The thing that separates the marriages that thrive from the ones that quietly rot is something simpler and, in some ways, harder. It's friendship. Deep, ordinary, daily friendship, expressed through dozens of tiny choices every day. Choices anyone can learn to make.