How to turn your marriage back to success

Psychologist John Gottman says there are four characteristics which, if present in a relationship, are signs that it will not last long; criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling.

If you have analyzed your relationship and you find that these things (which Gottman refers to as the four horsemen) are pretty much how you and your partner roll, you will probably right about now be frantically looking for a way to fight them.

Of course, with every problem lies the flip side; the solution. Because relationships are not like the math we remember from school, most of the times the solutions are complex and require work - hard work.

You must be willing to change and be changed. I am saying this because women will often go to great lengths to save or fix the relationships when in truth, the real everything they can do is also let the guy do his bit.

BUILD YOUR LOVE MAP

The first thing is that you need to know your partner and he needs to know you inside out. This is called building love maps. It involves being intimately acquainted with the internal psychological world of your partner which most people do not do. It takes time and patience.

Most of us in relationships focus on the “prize” of that relationship, which is a mixed up priority. By looking at the wrong things, we are enhancing the frame rather than focusing on the picture. A masterpiece in a cheap frame is still a masterpiece.

A worthless picture on an ornate frame is just a well-dressed eye sore. Perhaps then, the obvious should be restated which is get to know who you give your heart to.

RESPOND WHEN HE REACHES OUT

Secondly, respond positively to bids. Bids for connection, eye contact, a fleeting touch, a call to talk through a major problem and so on. Poorer relationships tend to have bids returned 33 per cent of the time while long tern stable relationships had 86 per cent returned bids.

I can’t say for sure where Gottman did his observation of couples, but I know that it has involved 30,000 couples from most parts of the world and is just as valid with same sex couples as it is with heterosexual couples, whether the couple is a love marriage or an arranged marriage and so on.

The point here is to reassure my reader that whatever is being said can be generalized to all manner of humans. It’s a fairly accurate template. Because at the end of it we are pretty much ALL involved in the same kinds of journeys when we embark on coupling.

Couples with high scores when it comes to returning bids build relationship fairness and are better able to repair problems. They’re able to laugh and smile even when arguing and most of us would agree that humor is often great at diffusing tension.

SHOW HIM HE'S WORTH IT

The third point is to show admiration. People who do relationships well tend to see their partners better than they are. People in disastrous relationships tend to see their partners as worse than they are. I suspect the latter have an internal idea of their partners that they think is realistic.

Well, if this is the case then it seems that reality in a relationship is a form of a brick wall where one can go no further. This wall can prove too hard to get over for the two resulting in the loss of that relationship.

Somewhere in the timeline of relationships, there develops what I can call “the story of us” where the two have a history. Successful couples have one where they describe their relationships in positive glowing terms.

They minimize the normal faults we all have in favour of cherishing the positive qualities of their partners. In this way, they avoid a vicious cycle and create a self-perpetrating virtuous cycle.

Here’s hoping that in this article this is one of many valid attempts to unpack the strange madness that is love....