long. They’re still in the glowy phase. But the fact is that she’s
completely inflexible. They are arguing about dogs, but it’s
really about how whenever they have a disagreement, she’s
completely inflexible. It’s one of those things that could cause a
lot of long-term harm. I wonder if they’ll hit the seven-year
wall. Is there enough positive emotion there? Because what
seems positive isn’t actually positive at all.”
What was Tabares looking for in the couple? On a technical
level, she was measuring the amount of positive and negative
emotion, because one of Gottman’s findings is that for a
marriage to survive, the ratio of positive to negative emotion in
a given encounter has to be at least five to one. On a simpler
level, though, what Tabares was looking for in that short
discussion was a pattern in Bill and Sue’s marriage, because a
central argument in Gottman’s work is that all marriages have a
distinctive pattern, a kind of marital DNA, that surfaces in any
kind of meaningful interaction. This is why Gottman asks
couples to tell the story of how they met, because he has found
that when a husband and wife recount the most important
episode in their relationship, that pattern shows up right away.
“It’s so easy to tell,” Gottman says. “I just looked at this
tape yesterday. The woman says, ‘We met at a ski weekend,