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The 7 Principles of Making Marriage Work
John Gottman and Nan Silver
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What is The 7 Principles of Making Marriage Work about?
The book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work contains the best insights from John Gottman’s research on healthy relationships and teaches you exactly what you and your spouse need to do to build a happy, healthy, and successful marriage.
Key ideas of The 7 Principles of Making Marriage Work
Friendship Over Communication Skills
Research from the Love Lab shows that deep daily friendship, not better communication techniques, is the core of lasting marriages.
The Four Horsemen Warning Signs
Criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling predict divorce more reliably than the frequency or intensity of conflict.
Solvable vs. Perpetual Conflicts
Sixty-nine percent of marital conflicts are perpetual and rooted in personality differences, so managing them matters more than resolving them.
Read an excerpt from the summary
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.
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Continue in the appWho is it for?
- Anyone who wants research-backed guidance on what actually keeps a marriage together long-term.
- Anyone who has tried couples therapy or communication exercises and found the results did not last.
- Anyone stuck in the same arguments and wondering whether those conflicts can ever really be resolved.
- Anyone in a new or struggling marriage who wants practical, daily habits to build a stronger friendship with their partner.
About the author: John Gottman and Nan Silver
John Gottman is a psychologist and researcher who spent more than two decades studying hundreds of couples at his Love Lab at the University of Washington. His work is grounded in direct observation, measuring physiological responses and behavioral patterns to identify what separates marriages that thrive from those that fall apart.
Nan Silver is a writer and editor who collaborated with Gottman on several books, translating his clinical research into practical, accessible advice for general readers.
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