The Relationship Cure: A 5 Step Guide to Strengthening Your Marriage, Family, and Friendships

by John Gottman

  So it is in relationships between spouses, friends, relatives, and coworkers. If both parties are willing to hang in there, pay attention, and change direction when they make mistakes, chances are they can improve the relationship. Having to apologize, make adjustments, or “patch things up” is not necessarily the sign of a bad fit. It’s a sign that people value one another and are willing to work through the rough spots to stick together. It’s by weathering conflicts that marriages, families, friendships, and work teams grow strong.

  In the next chapter you’ll get an in-depth look at the first step toward mastering emotional connection: analyzing the way you bid and the way you respond to others’ bids. You’ll see what typically happens when people turn toward, turn away, or turn against each other. In addition, you’ll also have a chance to evaluate how well you and others in your life send and receive bids.

  Chapter 3, Six Bid Busters and How to Avoid Them, shows you how to steer clear of some of the most common obstacles to emotional connection.

  Chapters 4 through 6 cover the next three steps—each of which addresses a key factor that affects an individual’s ability to successfully make and respond to bids for emotional connection. These factors are your brain’s unique emotional command systems, your emotional heritage, and your emotional communication skills. You’ll learn about the way those factors influence your own style of bidding, as well as the styles of those around you. You can then use those insights to become better at bidding and connecting with others.

  Chapter 7 covers the final step: finding shared meaning through the exploration of one another’s dreams and visions, as well as shared rituals.

  Chapter 8 will help you apply all we’ve learned to improve relationships with spouses, children, friends, adult siblings, and coworkers.

  Building better emotional connections is like any other valuable life goal, in that it requires attention and sustained effort. But I’m certain that few other endeavors can promise a reward as rich as connecting does. Through it, we learn to know, express, and understand the shared meaning we find in one another’s experience.

  One of the biggest surprises of my career came shortly after my colleagues and I opened our apartment lab at the University of Washington in 1990. For years I had been pursuing the question, What makes marriages succeed or fail? Many psychologists at the time agreed with theorist Sydney Jourard that the key to good relationships was self-disclosure—a person’s willingness to reveal his or her most guarded, personal thoughts and experiences to another person. Now that I could spend hours observing our study couples from behind one-way mirrors in this natural, homelike setting, surely I would see many profound examples of this behavior. I’d be able to analyze couples’ conversations, shedding light on how people achieve this intense, intimate level of connection.

  Boy, was I wrong. After collecting and viewing hundreds of hours of videotape, I found very few examples of self-disclosure. There were few heart-to-heart exchanges about broken dreams, hidden fears, or unfulfilled sexual desires. Instead, I had endless hours of people engaged in exchanges like these:

  “Get me a cup of coffee, will you, honey?”

  “Sure. As soon as I turn these pancakes.”

  “Did you call your sister? She seemed real down last time.”

  “No, I haven’t. What do you suppose is wrong with her?”

  “Here’s a funny comic strip…”

  “Will you please be quiet? I’m trying to read.”

  “Wow! Did you see that double play?”

  “Yeah, that was incredible!”

  “Listen to this one. A guy goes to a psychiatrist with a duck on his head…”

  “Yeah, okay. So then what?”

  Even couples who scored high on surveys of marital satisfaction spent most of their time talking about such scintillating topics as breakfast cereals, mortgage rates, or the baseball game.

  “What a waste of time,” I thought to myself. “Here we’ve gone to all this effort, and all we’re collecting is junk.”

  But after many months of watching these tapes with my students, it dawned on me. Maybe it’s not the depth of intimacy in conversations that matters. Maybe it doesn’t even matter whether couples agree or disagree. Maybe the important thing is how these people pay attention to each other, no matter what they’re talking about or doing.

  I asked my graduate student, Jani Driver, to take a closer look at the videotapes with this idea in mind. And sure enough, she saw couples facing a certain set of choices at every turn.

  The wife reads a funny tidbit from a magazine to her husband. Will he look up and smile? Will he ignore her? Or will he snap at her to be quiet?

  The husband points to an ad in the paper for stereo equipment. Will she acknowledge his interest? Will she look past it to the ad for women’s shoes? Or will she frown in disapproval?

  The wife tells her husband he put too much dressing on the salad she just made. Will he wink playfully and say she made the salad too small? Will he sulk in silence? Or will he tell her it was a lousy salad anyway?

  The topic of conversation hardly mattered in these couples’ willingness to connect. Some seemed determined to ignore their spouses, no matter how riveting or mundane the subject at hand. For example, we watched one wife completely ignore her husband as he tried to tell her about the harrowing military coup he had witnessed in Spain. In contrast, another couple seemed utterly entranced by one another’s descriptions of how their mothers made bread.

  Once Jani started coding these interactions and comparing them with other tests of marital satisfaction we had collected, it was clear that these were definitive moments in the couples’ marriages. By choosing to turn toward, turn away, or turn against each other’s bids for connection—no matter how ordinary or small—they established a foundation that could determine the future success or failure of their relationships.

  We also discovered the importance of playfulness in people’s bids. For years I have wondered why some couples are able to make jokes and express affection for each other—even in the midst of an argument. It’s an important question because our research shows that such emotional “repair tools” lead to the development of happier, stronger relationships. But I couldn’t figure out how some pairs were able to melt each other’s hearts with a playful gesture or an apologetic smile, while others didn’t even try.

  Once we started studying bids and responses to bids, however, the answer was clear: People who make playful bids and turn toward one another’s bids enthusiastically during everyday conversations have more access to humor later on, when they get into an argument. In other words, responding with good humor has become such a habit in their relationships that it’s always at the top of their bag of tricks. So when disagreements arise—as they do in all relationships—these playful bidders have a full supply of goodwill and affection handy. And when they apply it to the argument at hand, it helps to soothe hurt feelings, leading to better problem solving and a more harmonious relationship.

  In this chapter you’ll get a closer look at the anatomy of this very fundamental unit of emotional communication—the bid and the response to the bid. You’ll see how the bid is used in a variety of situations, including marriage, friendship, parent-child, sibling, and coworker relationships. You’ll learn how making and responding to bids successfully contributes to the development of strong, healthy bonds. You’ll see how it can be used as a way to immunize relationships against the kind of aggressive negative interactions that can harm them. You’ll also have a chance to evaluate how you and the important people in your life bid and respond to bids. Then you can apply all of these lessons to your own relationships, discovering better ways to connect with others.

  How Bids Work

  People make bids because of their natural desire to feel connected with other people. Such needs can be quite fleeting—like the impulse to exchange pleasantries with a friendly grocery clerk. Or they can be quite profound—like the longing to share comfort with
a close friend when a mutual loved one dies.

  Everybody experiences emotional needs in his or her own way. The kind of relationships that are most important to you may not matter as much to somebody else. And the needs that are most important to you today may not be so significant several years from now. But regardless of how much you value certain types of relationships over others, you probably have some hierarchy of needs in your mind. Here’s an example of how one man might rate his various needs for emotional connection on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most important:

  1. My need to feel respected by the sales clerk when I’m out shopping

  2. My need for friendly conversation with neighbors at my bus stop

  3. My need to fit in with the other guys playing basketball at the gym

  4. My need for recognition from my coworkers when I do my best work

  5. My need to feel accepted by the members of my church

  6. My need to feel appreciated by my sister when I call her on holidays

  7. My need for affection from my kids when I tuck them into bed at night

  8. My need for empathy from my best friend after a bad experience at work

  9. My need for sexual intimacy with my spouse

  10. My need to feel forgiven by my spouse after I apologize for losing my temper

  As you can see from this list, this man looks to the people who are closest to him—his spouse, his best friend—for the needs that are the most important. His expectations of relationships with neighbors and sales clerks aren’t nearly as high. That’s typical with bids for connection. The closer we feel to others, the more intense, frequent, or demanding our bids for emotional connection with them may be. (You’ll want to keep this hierarchy in mind as you read about ways to enhance your own bidding process. For example, exercises that require high degrees of intimacy and trust may be appropriate to do with your spouse or close friend, but not with your new coworker.)

  People also tend to follow a certain hierarchy when they make bids within a particular close relationship, such as friendship or marriage. Although they may not be aware of it, they typically ask first for help with matters that require the least time, attention, risk, or intimacy. Then, once their initial bids are fulfilled, they may up the ante, asking for more in terms of the intensity of their demands. A typical ladder of needs within a friendship might look like this:

  1. Light conversation or “small talk”

  2. Humor

  3. Friendly gossip

  4. Affection

  5. Support

  6. Problem solving

  7. Connection around heartfelt subjects like future goals, worries, values, meaning

  Using such ladders allows you to establish a base of connection with low-risk bids before moving up the hierarchy of needs. In other words, you can test the waters to decide whether the climate is right before you bid for more intense needs.

  What Do Bids Look Like?

  Imagine if people made all their bids for connection in the form of standard written invitations. All our expectations and feelings would be spelled out in vivid detail. Nothing would be left to speculation. You’d never have to grapple with questions like, Is this person flirting with me or not? Am I going to get work from this client again? When will my spouse get over the argument we had last night? All the answers would be spelled out in engraved letters before you. There’d be no more tension, no more guesswork.

  For better or worse, human communication is much richer and more complicated than that. Bids for connection come in an infinite variety of styles—some that are easy to see and interpret, others that are nearly indecipherable. Bids can be verbal or nonverbal. They can be highly physical or come totally from the intellect. They can be sexual or nonsexual. They can be high- or low-energy, funny or dead serious. Bids may include questions, statements, or comments, the content of which might involve:

  • Thoughts

  • Feelings

  • Observations

  • Opinions

  • Invitations

  Some bids are nonverbal, including:

  • Affectionate touching, such as a back-slap, a handshake, a pat, a squeeze, a kiss, a hug, or a back or shoulder rub

  • Facial expressions, such as a smile, blowing a kiss, rolling your eyes, or sticking out your tongue

  • Playful touching, such as tickling, bopping, wrestling, dancing, or a gentle bump or shove

  • Affiliating gestures, such as opening a door, offering a place to sit, handing over a utensil, or pointing to a shared activity or interest

  • Vocalizing, such as laughing, chuckling, grunting, sighing, or groaning in a way that invites interaction or interest

  When we make our bids clearly and boldly, there’s little doubt what we’re after:

  • “Robert, I want to come work for your company.”

  • “Harvey, I think it’s time you asked me out to dinner.”

  • “Hey, Wendy, want to go with me on a bicycle tour of France?”

  Usually, however, our bids are much subtler, requiring those around us to guess our intentions and pick up their cues:

  RICHARD: So, Wendy, what’s your idea of a great vacation?

  WENDY: I’ve always dreamed of sailing in the Caribbean. Why do you ask?

  RICHARD: Oh, I was just wondering…

  DAVE: I’ve been reading about your company, Robert. What an exciting venture!

  ROBERT: Yeah, it’s been a great year. We can barely keep up with demand.

  DAVE: So you’re hiring in many different areas, I suppose…

  GAIL: Did you want to ask me something, Harvey?

  HARVEY: Yes, but I can’t seem to remember what it was.

  GAIL: Well, try to think hard, Harvey, and maybe you’ll remember.

  What Causes Fuzzy Bidding?

  Why do we dance around issues like this? For many reasons, the most common of which is to avoid emotional risk. Openly bidding for connection can make us feel vulnerable. In career and mating situations especially, our hearts and egos are on the line. We can reduce such feelings of vulnerability by making bids ambiguous or fuzzy. Humor and double entendre are common. (“When she said, ‘I like it spicy,’ was she talking about the spaghetti sauce or what?”) If the other person responds positively to an ambiguous or humorous bid—smiling coyly or offering another pointed pun, for instance—that’s great. But if the intended recipient fails to respond, the bidder loses no pride.

  Such “trial balloons” are common even in long-term love relationships. Imagine, for example, that Mary and Jeff are sitting on opposite ends of the couch, reading. Mary wants to cuddle with Jeff. And if cuddling leads to sex, she wouldn’t mind that, either. But Jeff has been agitated today, and Mary’s afraid that if she moves toward him or says, “Would you hold me for a while?” he’ll push her away. So, rather than making an overt pass, she says, “It feels kind of cold in here, don’t you think?” She’s hoping he’ll say, “Come over here and warm up a bit.” But she also knows he might respond by handing her the sofa blanket behind his back. The downside of Mary’s subtle approach is obvious: Jeff may never get the message that Mary wants cuddling and perhaps sex. But, for the time being, Mary would rather take that chance than to risk that Jeff might blatantly reject her advances.

  Kids often learn to soft-sell their bids as well, especially if they’re raised in an environment where clear expressions of desire are discouraged. “Annie’s mom fixes Annie’s hair in French braids every morning,” a child might say. But what she’d really like to tell her harried mom is, “I wish you’d pay more attention to me in the morning.”

  By the time people reach adulthood, they’ve typically mastered the subtle dynamics of bidding, making all sorts of challenging social situations easier to negotiate. How often, for example, have you heard someone offer a vague invitation like “Let’s get together sometime”? By extending this type of bid, the person receiving the bid can slip out of it gracefully if needed. And the bidder ret
ains his or her dignity regardless of the response received. Here’s an invitation to a business lunch accepted:

  JAY: We should have lunch sometime.

  GARY: That would be great. How about next week?

  JAY: Monday works for me.

  GARY: Monday’s fine. Say about noon?

  And here’s the same one when it’s declined:

  JAY: We should have lunch sometime.

  GARY: That’s a great idea. But you know, I am so swamped these days.

  JAY: I understand completely. Give me a call when your schedule opens up.

  GARY: Great. I’ll do that.

  Because Jay doesn’t try to get a specific commitment from Gary, it’s easy for him to feel comfortable with either of Gary’s responses. There’s a drawback to this approach, however: Jay can’t tell how Gary really feels about his bid. Is Gary really that busy, or is he just saying so as an excuse to avoid having lunch with Jay? Will Gary call him for lunch in the future? Jay’s not certain; only time will tell. Still, he may prefer this outcome to what could happen if he extended a more specific bid:

  JAY: How about getting together for lunch—say next week sometime?

  GARY: Oh, I’m sorry, Jay. I’m busy next week.