There is exciting relationship research coming from the Family Formation Project at the University of Washington in Seattle. John Gottman, Ph.D., an award winning psychologist and author of  The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, has conducted a twenty-six-year study on what makes love last. Dr. Gottman claims that there is no evidence that the theory of conventional counseling works. With up to 67% of marriages failing, and 50% of those couples who enter counseling still ending in divorce, one would expect the odds to be better if today’s conventional counseling really was effective.

Dr. Gottman says, "Those who come to a therapist with an ailing marriage today can be like people going to a class to learn how to swim so they won’t drown. But the instructors are armed only with a training program that teaches people how to do a triple flip off the high diving board or how to swim the English Channel." Not only doesn’t today’s therapy work, it’s like going to a doctor for an illness and having him give you a treatment that makes your illness fatal.

What Dr. Gottman and his colleagues found is that couples who maintain a ratio of five positive moments (interactions) to each negative moment have relationships that last. Marriages that fall below a one to one ratio (.8) usually fail.

2. A routine that is emotionally inexpressive.

3. A marriage in which the partners fight seldom or frequently.

What is causing ripples in the counseling community is the fact that Dr. Gottman has discovered that volatile and conflict-avoiding marriages can be as stable as the marriages of traditional validating couples. The stability of these styles is determined by how each couple handles conflict.

Validating couples "compromise often, and calmly work out their problems to mutual satisfaction as they arise." They are viewed by counselors and friends as having the ideal marriage. Most counseling is directed toward getting couples to validate each other. The validating couple is like two therapists talking shop.

Volatile couples argue at the drop of the hat. They have emotional explosions and passionately romantic make-ups.

Conflict-avoiding couples will go to great lengths to keep the peace. They will minimize conflict by letting many problems go unresolved.

It is important to have the "ONE" in the five to one ratio (to produce conflict and negativity). Dr. Gottman is convinced that the one negative experience is just as important as the five positive ones. "What may lead to temporary misery in a marriage, some disagreement and anger, may be healthier in the long run." Conflict can do good things. It can clear the air when pressures in the relationship get pent up. It has functions of renewal and it also balances the relationship. There are four negative acts that are more corrosive than others. They can predict failure. Dr. Gottman calls these "equestrians" the four horsemen of the apocalypse. They can take a marriage to hopelessness, despair and divorce. The four horsemen are criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling.

The lead horseman is criticism. Gottman says, "The difference between complaint and criticism is that criticism has blaming in it. It’s attacking someone’s personality or character, instead of being specific about a complaint."

The second horseman is defensiveness. Criticism is more likely to create defensiveness in someone. It becomes more personal. It’s perceived as more of an attack. A person will try to defend himself or herself by denying responsibility and dishing back calculated insults. A couple can drop right into defensiveness without passing "go" by being too sensitive to legitimate complaints.

The third horseman is contempt. Dr. Gottman says, "What separates contempt from criticism is the intent to insult and psychologically abuse your partner. Contempt is the acid in the relationship." Putting down your partner with insulting jokes, critical comments, facial expressions and verbal abuse can destroy any chance of intimacy. Men who are negative and contemptuous can make women physically ill.

All hope is abandoned when the last horseman, stonewalling, is saddled up and sent from the starting gate. Stonewallers withdraw from interacting emotionally in the marriage. They just stop communicating, even if an insulting situation occurs. Eighty-five percent of stonewallers are men. This might be an evolutionary survival technique.

All of the four horsemen occasionally ride through most relationships. Breaking the corrosive cycles by repair intervention prevents the marriage from falling into what Gottman calls "the distance and isolation cascade." This cascading usually propels negative thoughts and situations that lead to separation and divorce. At this stage people believe they can’t work out their problems. They separate themselves from each other in living and all activities, electing to solve their problems outside the relationship. There is a dramatic change in perception on how they see the positive and negative behavior of the other partner.

They feel low and have crummy thoughts. Once this threshold has been crossed, it’s hard to make the transition back. The body takes on a change in how it now perceives what is going on in the relationship. This can involve a situation called flooding.

Dr. Gottman refers to flooding as when "you feel overwhelmed and disorganized by the way your partner expresses negativity. Couples can feel flooded by one another by the ways they express complaints. They get hypervigilant about negative things. The body of someone who feels flooded is a confused jumble of signals. It may be hard to breathe. Muscles tense and stay tensed. The heart beats fast and seems to beat harder."

Once the heart rate reaches 95-l00 beats per minute, the adrenal glands go into action delivering adrenalin. This excited state interferes with the listening and other understanding skills needed to do the necessary repair work in the relationship.

Dr. Gottman believes there are four simple keys to creating happier relationships:

1. Learn how to calm down. Little or no effective communication or counseling is going to be heard once "flooding" takes place. Once a couple can start calming down, both partners will have a chance to work on the other three keys.

2. Learn to listen and speak nondefensively. Being able to rechannel the destructive habit of defensiveness is one of the most valuable transitions you can make. Replacing defensiveness with listening, and then with speaking without affixing blame can help "reintroduce praise and admiration into your relationship."

3. Validate your partner. We already know from surveys that validation of one another is one of the most important factors in making your partner feel loved. Validation involves "putting yourself in your partner's shoes and imagining his or her emotional state." Listening, accepting and validating your partner's feelings, even if you have to say you are struggling to try to understand, all greatly advance the repairing of a relationship; this is especially true when they are coupled with accepting responsibility, apologizing when one is wrong, and accepting and validating the partner's point of view.