The Love Lab as a way to help your marriage

Item from the Smart Marriages Archive, reproduced in the Divorce Statistics Collectio n

KEEPING IT TOGETHER

By Shirley Barnes Special to the Tribune August 2, 1998 SEATTLE --

Most couples bent on beating the divorce odds have never heard of John
Gottman.

His nine-page list of accomplishments, tracking his weighty impact on the
growing marriage education field, tells some of the story.

So does an article in Psychology Today, which stacked Gottman's academic
credentials up against those of John Gray, the oft-quoted author of "Men
are from Mars, Women are from Venus." Gottman has formally studied 760
couples, some for as long as 20 years, Gray none. Gottman has written
109 articles in marriage and family journals, Gray none.

A visit to Gottman's "love lab" on the University of Washington campus,
where he's professor of psychology, sheds even more light on why he's
worth knowing.

Forget the X rating. The love lab is a small, dark room with a pair of
high-backed, upholstered chairs about eight feet apart, a video camera
trained on
each. Here volunteer couples, hooked up to a rack of sensors registering
everything from their sweat output to how much their chairs jiggle,
discuss a
hot-button issue in their marriage. A jumble of computers across the hall
collects the data.

The lab is Gottman's pride, the only one of its kind in the country, he
claims.

Gottman and his graduate assistants massage the data, a painstaking
process, and examine the videos for as many as 2,000 facial expressions,
each sending a message. The love lab project is one of scores of
scientific studies he has completed, tracking couples and families for
more than two
decades.

Other researchers, most notably Howard Markman and Scott Stanley of the
University of Denver, deserve equal credit for identifying what makes
good marriages work and bad marriages fail. Their research has exploded
many of the myths. It's not sex, money or how many fights you have that
make for a happy union. Marriage-wise couples aren't afraid to accept
influence from each other. They connect on a daily basis in many small
ways,
think about their partner periodically when they're apart, take time-outs
to soothe tempers, use humor as a coolant in arguments and have softer
start-ups when fighting. Even in conflict, their ratio of positive to
negative actions -- from a simple "mmmmh" or "yeah" to a pat on the arm
-- are 5 to 1
as opposed to 0.8 to 1 for unstable marriages.

The best news is that couples -- from pre-marrieds to over 60s -- can
learn to be happily married by practicing the skills that come naturally
to stable
couples.

The result is a whole new industry: skills-based marriage education
courses. Advocates hope such courses will become as commonplace as
birthing
classes are for prospective parents. They're beginning to make a dent.
The Florida state legislature passed a law in May mandating such courses
for
all 9th and 10th graders, the first state to do so.

Adult adaptations of the divorce prevention courses are designed to help
couples at all stages -- stable or distressed -- including stepfamilies,
newlyweds, new parents, retired or dual-career couples and pairs dealing
with such issues as sexual dysfunction or substance abuse.

Traditional marital therapy is "the culture of nailing people," says
Gottman, whose office blackboard tracks the seminars, clinics and media
appearances he makes around the country.

"People go and get nailed by their therapist. It's a very adversarial
experience. All that has to be turned around," he says, while emphasizing
the
need for continuing research to determine which marriage-education
courses or marriage therapy work the best. He proposes a national $50
million
study to do just that.

"What we have to develop is a culture where the Hell's Angel viper walks
out of marital therapy feeling respected and honored and so does the
accountant and the scientist and the bricklayer and reporter," he says.

"Marriage therapy should be as big an industry as exercise and dieting in
this country, but it isn't," says Gottman, who started a skills-based
"Marriage
Survival Weekend" with his therapist wife, Julie, last year at the
Seattle Marital and Family Institute. He'll have a book out next year
with the same
title.

"We want couples (at the end of the weekend) to walk out holding hands,
talking about having the best lovemaking that night that they've had in 10
years," says Gottman, explaining that one of the purposes of the weekend
is to help pairs realize that they have a lot of strengths in their
relationship.

As to why traditional marriage therapy has failed to curb the divorce
rate, Gottman says: "The psychological community has done a very bad job
of
marketing, especially to men. Men want to see options. They want a very
clear statement of how much it's going to cost and how much time it's
going
to take, sort of like when you bring your car in to a good mechanic. He
says right up front, `I can replace the transmission for $1,200 or
rebuild it for
$800.' That's what guys want to hear.

"Whereas right now marital therapy is kind of like going into a
restaurant where the waiter brings you a menu that says FOOD and there's
no price.
You don't know how much it's going to cost, and you don't know what
you're going to get," says Gottman.

"Most people going through a divorce won't go to a therapist because they
say, `I'm not crazy. I don't need a therapist,' " says Diane Sollee,
founder
of the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education, whose
mission is to spur support among policy makers, educators, judges and the
public for more skills-based marriage education courses.

Sollee explains that couples seeking help typically wait six years from
the time storm clouds surface in their marriage before asking for any
kind of
professional advice. By then it's often too late. Even more likely, they
don't seek help at all, not even from their clergy, according to studies
that show
from 5 to 25 percent of divorcing couples have never had counseling of
any kind.

Marriage-education courses make exercises out of stable couples' typical
behaviors. Even intangibles such as passion and commitment -- what to
do if a good-looking secretary quickens your pulse -- have been broken
down into "skills," says Sollee.

She calls Gottman's research "fundamental" in the field but laments the
fact that too few people have heard about the many marriage education
courses now available. Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program,
Relationship Enhancement and Practical Application of Intimate
Relationship Skills and Couple Communications are among the most widely
known.

Sollee, who has taken the most popular courses to find how they differ,
is heartened that the skills taught "are pretty much the same."

Sollee hopes more people will take notice of research proving that such
courses can save marriages. She and Gottman describe the high costs of
divorve: heart attacks, depression, teen suicides, substance abuse, $9
billion in lost work time.

"Throw out everything about marriage therapy, marriage counseling, group
therapy or premarital counseling you've ever thought of," says Sollee.
"That's not what we're talking about. Marriage education is more like
parenting education."

The skills-based courses are far more affordable than traditional
therapy: from free for courses taught in a church basement to an average
of $350 for
the most populuar courses.

They're most frequently taught in a classroom, a less intimidating
environment than a therapist's couch, says Sollee, who finds teaching the
skills to
individual couples doesn't work as well. "Every example I use, they
assume I've sized them up. Their defenses get in the way. But in a
classroom
with 40 people with all the women laughing at the same point and all the
men grunting at the same point, you don't take it personally. You learn
better," says Sollee. Participants give only their first name, she says,
and are not asked to reveal any relationship horror stories.

"If you're living with someone, sharing everything -- from the bathroom
to the babies to the money to the bank account -- you're going to have
disagreements," she says, pointing out that was one of the most important
discoveries of long-term marriage research. All couples fight. In
marriage-education courses, they're taught to welcome conflict as a
healthy part of love.

"If someone stops disagreeing with you, check their pulse. Or check to
see if they're having an affair. They're disagreeing with their
mistress," warns
Sollee. The core to marriage education is developing effective methods
for resolving conflicts.

Sollee says she'll know her work is done when she can ask a seatmate on a
plane going to her son or daughter's wedding, `Which marriage education
course did they take?' and "She won't look at me as if I were nuts."

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