I recently had the chance to interview Gottman and his wife, Julie, also a psychologist, in New York City. For the past four decades, he has studied thousands of couples in a quest to figure out what makes relationships work. The psychologist John Gottman was one of those researchers. Was each unhappy family unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy claimed, or did the miserable marriages all share something toxic in common? Worried about the impact these divorces would have on the children of the broken marriages, psychologists decided to cast their scientific net on couples, bringing them into the lab to observe them and determine what the ingredients of a healthy, lasting relationship were. Social scientists first started studying marriages by observing them in action in the 1970s in response to a crisis: Married couples were divorcing at unprecedented rates. Of all the people who get married, only three in 10 marriages remain healthy and happy, as the psychologist Ty Tashiro points out in his book The Science of Happily Ever After, which was published earlier this year. The majority of marriages fail, either ending in divorce and separation or devolving into bitterness and dysfunction. Sign up for it here.Įvery day in June, the most popular wedding month of the year, about 13,000 American couples will say “I do,” committing to a lifelong relationship that will be full of friendship, joy, and love that will carry them forward to their final days on this earth.Įxcept, of course, it doesn’t work out that way for most people. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday.
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