Blink, Part I - The Science of Marriage

So I am one-third of the way into Blink, the book I mentioned earlier today, and already it has me thinking.

The author, Gladwell, is discussing the work of a man named John Gottman. Gottman wrote a 500 page treatise called The Mathematics of Divorce which attempts to show that marriage has a kind of morse code to it. He has made a coding system with 20 categories for every conceivable emotion that a married couple may express while talking. Disgust, contempt, anger, sadness, whining, stonewalling, neutral... all of these are given numbers. Gottman and his staff get a couple to sit in a room for 15 minutes and ask them to discuss a topic from their marriage that has become a "point of contention." There are electrodes clipped to their fingers and ears, their heart rate is measured, and they even have a "jiggle-o-meter" to record how much they move around in their seat.

If Gottman analyzed an hour of husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95% accuracy whether or not they will still be married in 15 years. If he watches them for 15 minutes, he can predict with 90% accuracy.

Gladwell says that he watched some of Gottman's tapes and tried to predict the state of the marriage himself; he only had about 50% accuracy. Gottman and his staff really analyze every movement, gesture, split second of eye rolling, etc. in a way that the untrained eye just couldn't do.

It's kind of scary to think that your whole marriage can be dissected in just 15 minutes. Gottman is so well trained at this that he says he can even get a good sense of whether a marriage may end in divorce while eavesdropping at a restaurant! Also, within the 20 marriage codes he has distinguished an even more focused grouping of those categories which he calls the "Four Horsemen:" defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. If one or both partners in a marriage is showing contempt toward the other - it's trouble city.

Although I think my boyfriend and I treat one another amazingly well, reading this of course makes you wonder what kind of morse code you're giving off. How we treat each other is so important. It's off-putting to think that an entire marriage can be judged in 15 minutes, but maybe it's true. Maybe a couple's little scrappy moments can turn into huge shitty moments, and Gottman is tuned in to what some couples are probably trying desperately to cover up.