of different couples talking. Half the couples, I was told, split
up at some point in the fifteen years after their discussion was
filmed. Half were still together. Could I guess which was
which? I was pretty confident I could. But I was wrong. I was
terrible at it. I answered five correctly, which is to say that I
would have done just as well by flipping a coin.
My difficulty arose from the fact that the clips were utterly
overwhelming. The husband would say something guarded. The
wife would respond quietly. Some fleeting emotion would flash
across her face. He would start to say something and then stop.
She would scowl. He would laugh. Someone would mutter
something. Someone would frown. I would rewind the tape and
look at it again, and I would get still more information. I’d see a
little trace of a smile, or I’d pick up on a slight change in tone.
It was all too much. In my head, I was frantically trying to
determine the ratios of positive emotion to negative emotion.
But what counted as positive, and what counted as negative? I
knew from Susan and Bill that a lot of what looked positive was
actually negative. And I also knew that there were no fewer
than twenty separate emotional states on the SPAFF chart. Have
you ever tried to keep track of twenty different emotions
simultaneously? Now, granted, I’m not a marriage counselor.