7. How You Talk About Your Relationship

In 1992, Gottman and other researchers at the University of Washington asked couples to talk about different aspects of their relationship, in a procedure they called the “oral history interview”. By looking at the way the spouses tended to talk about their relationship, they were able to predict which couples were close to getting a divorce.

Another study published in 2000 in the Journal of Family Psychology by Gottman and his colleagues used the same oral history interview on 95 newlyweds. They used certain indicators to measure the strength or weakness of a couple’s marriage. These indicators were:

• How much they “liked” one another,
• How much unity was present in the marriage; how often they referred to themselves as “we”,
• Expansiveness: How much each partner is able to understand and elaborate on the words of the other,
• Negativity,
• Disappointment in the marriage,
• The level of chaos the couple thinks is present in their marriage.