Some New Math for the Happy Marriage

There was a time when I believed marriage was a mystery--a magical, inevitable union between two halves looking to be whole.

That was my romantic phase.

Then I learned about family systems theory, in which members of a clan play out their unconsciously assigned, but inevitable roles, and I began to regard marriage as a match between people who own sets of interlocking neuroses.

That was my cynical phase.

Now I am in my realistic phase: Marriage is about magic and neurosis. It’s also about conscious hard work, plenty of fights about who did the dishes last night and a big emotional payoff.

Never, though, have I thought of marriage as a quantifiable entity, one in which the attitudes and responses of partners at a given time could accurately predict the success or failure of the union.

But I was wrong.

Social scientists have just announced that they can indeed predict divorce, with an astonishing 94% rate of accuracy.

The question is: Do we really want to know this?

Using straightforward interviewing techniques, psychologists John Gottman, Kim Buehlman and Lynn Katz at the University of Washington in Seattle found that they were able to predict which of 56 couples would be divorced three years down the road. All had identified themselves at the outset of the study as happily married. The researchers predicted the demise of 10 marriages and were correct in seven cases. Results were published in the Journal of Family Psychology.

Researchers evaluated the couples on a number of criteria including:

* Fondness and affection, or how much a couple seems to be in love;

* Negativity toward a spouse, which included disagreements during the interview as well as the extent to which spouses were vague about what attracted them to each other in the first place;

* Expansiveness versus withdrawal, a measure of how expressive spouses are about the marriage;

* We-ness versus separateness, or the degree to which spouses see themselves as part of a couple;

* Whether a couple adheres to gender stereotypes;

* Volatility, a measure of intensity of feeling that can be both positive and negative;

* Chaos, or how much control a couple feels it has over hardships;

* Glorifying the struggle, or the sense that hard times have brought a couple closer together and that their marriage is the most important thing in the world;

* Marital disappointment and disillusionment, or which couples have given up on or feel defeated by the marriage.

Couples who divorced were low in fondness, high in negativity, low in we-ness, high in chaos, low in glorifying the struggle and high in marital disappointment.

Because it is written in arduously academic language, the study is sometimes hard to follow. But one small piece of information leaped at me: The way a husband handles problem solving--notably whether or not he withdraws during an argument--is the most important predictor of divorce.

This issue, I dare say, goes to the very heart of most marriages.

There are so many “intolerable” things you learn to live with in the giant compromise called marriage. I, for the most part, have learned to live with the globs of toothpaste he leaves on the sink, with the antiques he cannot bear to part with. (And I thank him profusely for what he has learned to tolerate in me.)

But I find it difficult to live with a man who walks out in the middle of a fight.

It happens to us occasionally--the culmination of a universal dynamic: husband begins to withdraw as wife heats up, wife demands that husband remain engaged in conflict, husband wants to avoid conflict and walks away, wife follows husband from room to room verbalizing her anger, husband finally departs with the slam of a door. The end.

I know a few couples where this pattern is reversed--where the sullen wife withdraws from the nagging husband, but I think this is probably not the norm. (My husband reminds me I’m a world-class door slammer myself.)

Still, no matter who is withdrawing and who is engaging, it might be helpful for a couple to recognize a pattern that, according to these researchers, could lead to trouble later.

Fighting, on the other hand, is not necessarily indicative of a bad marriage, according to Gottman. How spouses talk about each other is more telling than how often they argue.

“Whether they welcome conflict or avoid it,” Gottman told one interviewer, “in couples that stay together, there are about five times more positive things said to and about one another than negative ones. But in couples that divorce, there are about 1 1/2 times more negative things said than positive ones.”

Reducing marriage to a mathematically predictable phenomenon is a true leap forward for social science. Yet if Gottman et al . offered to predict the future of my marriage, I’d run screaming.

Deep down, I guess, I’m still attached to the idea that I’m half of a mystical, magical whole--even if we do slam doors now and then.