The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work

by John Gottman, Ph. D.

  Ideal:

  Yard and garden work

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  Lawn, tree, and shrubbery maintenance

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  Errands to the bank

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  Houseplant care

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  Straightening and rearranging closets

  Now:

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  Getting house ready for guests

  Now:

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  Party preparations

  Now:

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  Buying children gifts

  Now:

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  Taking children to school

  Now:

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  Picking children up from school

  Now:

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  Child care after school

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  Child meals and lunches

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  Pediatrician

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  Child homework

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  Child baths

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  Child discipline

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  Bedtime with kids

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  Dealing with a sick child

  Now:

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  Handling child crises

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  Dealing with a child’s emotions

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  Teacher conferences

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  Dealing with the schools

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  Special children’s events

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  Child birthday and other parties

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  Child’s lessons

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  Child’s play dates

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  Shopping for children’s stuff

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  Buying presents

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  Keeping in touch with kin

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  Preparing for holidays

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  Planning vacations

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  Planning getaways

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  Planning romantic dates

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  Planning quiet evenings at home

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  Planning weekends

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  Initiating lovemaking

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  Planning dinner out

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  Family outings, drives, picnics

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  Financial planning

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  Major purchases (cars, etc.)

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  Managing investments

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  Talking about the relationship

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  Get-togethers with friends

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  Keeping in touch with friends

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  Doing the taxes

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  Legal matters (e.g., wills)

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  Coordinating family’s medical care

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  Drugs and other health areas

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  Exercise and fitness

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  Recreational outings

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  Now you should have a clear sense of which tasks you currently share and which fall into each partner’s domain. Depending on what you consider ideal, it may be time to redivide domestic tasks so that the load is more equitable. Remember, the quantity of the husband’s housework is not necessarily a determining factor in the housework = sex equation. But two other variables are. The first is whether the husband does his chores without his wife having to ask (nag). A husband who does this earns enormous points in the emotional bank account. The other factor is whether he is flexible in his duties in response to her needs. For example, if he sees that she’s especially tired one night, does he volunteer to wash the dishes even though it’s her turn? This conveys that all-important honor and respect for her. Helping his wife in this way will turn her on more than any “adults only” video.

  BECOMING PARENTS

  The task: Expanding your sense of “we-ness” to include your children.

  “A child is a grenade. When you have a baby, you set off an explosion in your marriage, and when the dust settles, your marriage is different from what it was. Not better, necessarily; not worse, necessarily; but different.” So wrote Nora Ephron in Heartburn, her roman à clef about the breakup of her previous marriage. Virtually every study that has looked at how people make the transition from couplehood to parenthood confirms her view. A baby sets off seismic changes in a marriage. Unfortunately, most of the time those changes are for the worse. In the year after the first baby arrives, 70 percent of wives experience a precipitous plummet in their marital satisfaction. (For the husband, the dissatisfaction usually kicks in later, as a reaction to his wife’s unhappiness.) There are wide-ranging reasons for this deep disgruntlement—lack of sleep, feeling overwhelmed and unappreciated, the awesome responsibility of caring for such a helpless little creature, juggling mothering with a job, economic stress, and lack of time to oneself, among other things.

  The big mystery is not why 67 percent of new mothers feel so miserable, but why the other 33 percent just seem to sail through the transition to motherhood unscathed. (In fact, some of these mothers say their marriage has never been better.) Thanks to the 130 couples we’ve followed from their newlywed stage to as long as eight years afterward, I now know the secret to keeping a marriage happy and stable even after the “grenade” explodes. What separates these blissful mothers from the rest has nothing to do with whether their baby is colicky or a good sleeper, whether they are nursing or bottle-feeding, working or staying home. Rather, it has everything to do with whether the husband experiences the transformation to parenthood along with his wife or gets left behind.

  Having a baby almost inevitably causes a metamorphosis in the new mother. She has never felt a love as deep and selfless as the one she feels for her child. Almost always a new mother experiences nothing less than a profound reorientation of meaning in her life. She discovers she is willing to make enormous sacrifices for her child. She feels awe and wonder at the intensity of her feelings for this fragile little being. The experience is so life-altering that if her husband doesn’t go through it with her, it is understandable that distance would develop between them. While the wife is embracing a new sense of “we-ness” that includes their child, the husband may still be pining for the old “us.” So he can’t help but resent how little time she seems to have for him now, how tired she always is, how often she’s preoccupied with feeding the baby. He resents that they can’t ride their bikes to the beach anymore because the baby is too small to sit up in a back carrier. He loves his child, but he wants his wife back. What’s a husband to do?

  The answer to his dilemma is simple: He can’t get his wife back—he has to follow her into the new realm she has entered. Only then can their marriage continue to grow. In marriages where the husband is able to do this, he doesn’t resent his child. He n
o longer feels like only a husband, but like a father, too. He feels pride, tenderness, and protectiveness toward his offspring.

  How can a couple ensure that the husband is transformed along with his wife? First, the couple need to ignore some popular bad advice. Many well-meaning experts recommend that you consider marriage and family a balancing act, as if your lives are a seesaw with the baby on one end and your marriage on the other. Couples are counseled to spend some time away from the baby and focus on their marriage and outside interests: talk about your relationship, your job, her job, the weather, anything but the baby at home. But marriage and family are not diametrically opposed. Rather, they are of one cloth. Yes, the couple should spend time away from the baby occasionally. But if they are making this transition well together, they will find that they can’t stop talking about the baby, nor do they want to. They might not even get through that first meal without calling home—at least twice. Too often, such couples are made to feel as if they have done something wrong because they have made their own relationship seemingly secondary to their new roles as parents. The result is that they feel all the more stressed and confused. But in fact, they have done something very right. The important thing here is that they are in it together. To the extent that both husband and wife make this philosophical shift, the parent-child relationship and the marriage thrive.

  Here are some more tips to help couples stay connected as they evolve into parents.

  Focus on your marital friendship. Before the baby comes, make sure that you really know each other and your respective worlds intimately. The more of a team you are now, the easier the transition will be. If a husband knows his wife, he will be in better tune with her as she begins her journey to motherhood.

  Don’t exclude Dad from baby care. Sometimes, in her exuberance, a new mother comes off as a know-it-all to her husband. While she pays lip service to the idea that they should share the baby’s care, she casts herself into a supervisory role, constantly directing—if not ordering—the new father and even chastising him if he doesn’t do things exactly her way: “Don’t hold her like that,” “You didn’t burp him enough,” “The bath water’s too cold.” In the face of this barrage, some husbands are more than happy to withdraw, to cede the role of expert to their wives (after all, their own fathers never knew anything about babies, either) and accept their own incompetence. The sad result is that they do less and less and therefore become less and less accomplished and confident in caring for their own child. Inevitably, they begin to feel more excluded.

  The solution is simple. The new mother needs to back off. She needs to realize that there’s more than one way to burp a baby. If she doesn’t like her husband’s way, she should remember that the baby is his child too and will benefit from experiencing more than one parenting style. A few baths in tepid water are a small price for an infant—and a marriage—to pay for the father’s ongoing commitment to his family. If the mother feels her husband’s approach is really unsafe, she should direct him to their pediatrician, Dr. Spock’s tome, or some other edifying baby-care guide. Some small, well-timed doses of gentle advice-giving are fine (don’t forget to use a softened startup), but lectures and criticism will backfire.

  Feeding time can be especially difficult for the new dad. Penis envy may well be a Freudian myth, but breast envy is alive and well in almost every home where the wife is nursing an infant. Fathers can’t help but feel jealous when they see that beautiful bond developing between their wife and baby. It’s as if the two have formed a charmed circle that he just can’t enter. In response to this need, some baby-care catalogs actually offer devices that allow men a close approximation of the nursing experience. There is, for example, an attachment that you can strap onto your chest that delivers warm milk to the baby through plastic breasts! But most couples don’t need to resort to extra equipment to help the man feel included. Instead, they can find a role for the husband in the ritual of breastfeeding. For example, it can be the husband’s job to carry the baby to the mother at feeding time. He can also be the official “burper.” He could also make it his custom to sit quietly with his wife and child during feeding times, gently stroking the baby’s head, for example, or singing to his baby.

  Let Dad be baby’s playmate. Some men have admitted to me that they don’t feel much connection with their baby until the child gets older and can walk, talk, and play. Unfortunately, by then their distance from family life has created fissures in their marriage. The reason men may take longer to “bond” with their children is that, as countless studies have confirmed, women tend to be more nurturing toward children while men are more playful. And since most men assume you can’t really play with a helpless baby, they don’t feel engaged by their child for much of the crucial first year.

  But dads who spend time with their young babies will discover that they are not “blobs” who do nothing but cry, nurse, poop, and sleep. Even newborns can be great playmates. Babies begin to smile at a mere three weeks. Even earlier than that they can track movements with their eyes. Soon they are chortling, kicking their legs in delight. In short, the father who gets to know his babies by bathing, diapering, and feeding them will inevitably find that they love to play with him and that he has a special role in their lives.

  Carve out time for the two of you. Part of the transition to parenthood entails placing a priority (albeit usually second place) on the marriage itself. So you should use a baby-sitter, a relative, or friend to get some time alone with each other. But remember, you haven’t failed if you end up spending a lot of your “dates” discussing the baby—you’ve succeeded. As the baby grows into a toddler and then becomes school-aged, you’ll find that your conversations when you’re alone together won’t always gravitate toward your child and your role as parents.

  Be sensitive to Dad’s needs. Even if he is a good team player and is making the philosophical shift toward parenthood along with his wife, the man is still going to feel somewhat deprived by the baby’s overwhelming and seemingly endless need for her. Even if, intellectually, he understands that the baby’s needs supplant his own in priority, he’s going to miss his wife. The more his wife acknowledges what he has given up and lets him know how central he still is to her life, the more understanding and supportive he will be able to be. If she never has any time for just the marriage, he will have a tendency to withdraw from the relationship.

  Give Mom a break. For all the daily wonders a mother experiences during the newborn stage, she is also likely to be exhausted. It will help their marriage if her husband will modify his work hours so he can come home earlier and on the weekends take over for her now and then so that she can get a needed break to sleep, see a friend, or a movie, or do whatever else she needs to feel part of the world again.

  Couples who follow this advice will discover that parenthood doesn’t drag down their relationship but elevates it to a new level of closeness, understanding, and love for each other.

  In this chapter I’ve tried to give you practical advice to help you solve some common marital problems. But sometimes, no matter how diligently you try to end a conflict, it just can’t be done. If that’s the case, you are dealing with a perpetual problem. Avoiding or breaking out of gridlock over such a problem is one of the chief challenges all couples face. My next principle will show you just how to save—or protect—your marriage from your irreconcilable differences.

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  Principle 6:

  Overcome Gridlock

  You want to have children, he doesn’t. She wants you to attend church with her, you’re an atheist. He’s a homebody, you’re ready for a party every night. If you feel hopelessly gridlocked over a problem that just can’t be solved, it can be cold comfort to know that other couples handle similar conflicts with aplomb, treating them the way they would a bad back or allergies. When you’re gridlocked, trying to view your differences as a kind of psychological trick knee that you can learn to cope with may seem impossible. But you can do it.


  The goal in ending gridlock is not to solve the problem, but rather to move from gridlock to dialogue. The gridlocked conflict will probably always be a perpetual issue in your marriage, but one day you will be able to talk about it without hurting each other. You will learn to live with the problem.