The Love Lab, The real keys to communication

         This week, in class, one of our assignments was to view a video clip about John Gottman's Love Lab. John Gottman is the country's leading expert on marriage and he has come up with some very important points about couple communication, particularly conflict resolution, that I feel are worth trying out in our marriages (current or future). Gottman suggests that communication itself is not the key to marriage as many therapists and experts would suggest, but is comprised a number of different factors. 
         The Love Lab provided "the most extensive and innovative research ever into marriage and divorce." It consisted of a room where the couples would move into for the day and go about their daily routines. The catch was that the whole time they were being monitored in their interactions. This was done not only through observation but sensors attached to the subjects measuring physical activities such as heart rate. At times, Dr Gottman would ask the couple to discuss an issue while in the lab, and he would watch for how they dealt with it and their reactions. Active listening has always been highly recommended among other things by therapists who work with couples but Gottman feels that "even happily married couples can have screaming matches-loud arguments don't necessarily harm a marriage... One of the most startling findings of our research is that most couples who have maintained happy marriages rarely do anything that even partly resembles active when they're upset." For Gottman, it goes far beyond these old-fashioned conventions and reaches into every aspect of a conversation.
        In conflict resolution, Gottman provides six signs that a marriage is going bad. They are 1) Harsh startup 2) The Four Horsemen 3) Flooding 4) Body language 5) Failed repair attempts 6) Bad Memories. One of the biggest out of all of these is the Four Horsemen. I would love to talk about all six of these, but that would be a reaaaallllllyyyy  long blog post. The Four Horsemen include criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling. If your conflict resolution contains any of these, you could be in trouble and should seek to eliminate these from your marriage. These six things that Gottman mentioned are the real keys to communication because the affect every aspect of it, not just your ears or your eye contact but everything. If these things are in your life, you are not building a friendship with your spouse and you are not being emotionally intelligent. Friendship in this sense is "a mutual respect and enjoyment of each other's company" and the more "emotionally intelligent a couple-the better able they are to understand, honor, and respect each other and their marriage. This is the key to a happy marriage.

The information provided here is not from the video clip we watched but from John Gottman's book "The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work," chapter's 1 and 2.
It's a great book that I highly recommend. For even more reading you could read "Couple Communication 1: Collaborative Marriage Skills" by Phyllis Miler et al. This book provides more structured approach to communication that you could compare, contrast and combine with Gottman's theory. It too is a very good book.