by John Gottman
Don’t be surprised if you encounter resistance to change. That’s human nature. Older children and young adults in particular may balk at changes, particularly if such changes threaten to impinge on their sense of freedom. One way to soften resistance is to suggest instituting whatever change you have in mind on a trial basis. (“Let’s turn the television off during dinner for the next week and see how that feels.” Or, “Let’s skip the gift exchange this year and give the money to charity instead. If we like the way that feels, we can do it again. If not, we’ll go back to the way we’ve always done it.”)
Exercise: Examining Your Rituals
On the following pages you’ll find a list of various activities around which people commonly create rituals. You’ll also find a list of questions to ask yourself about those activities. Using your Emotion Log to capture your ideas, brainstorm new rituals as well as new ways to handle your current rituals. In chapter 8 you’ll find descriptions of many rituals that help to strengthen various types of relationships.
You can also do this exercise with the people with whom you share these activities. Take turns answering the questions and listening carefully to one another’s responses.
Types of Rituals
• Waking up, waking one another up
• Breakfast
• Lunch
• Dinner
• Snacks
• Bedtime
• Leaving one another
• Reuniting
• Handling finances
• Hosting others in your home
• Special days (birthdays, anniversaries, miscellaneous celebrations)
• Taking care of one another when sick
• Renewing your spirit
• Taking vacations or getaways
• Traveling
• Recreations, games, and play
• Dates or romantic evenings
• Attending sports events
• Participating in sports events
• Watching television
• Attending movies
• Attending concerts, plays, and other cultural events
• Religious festivals and holidays
• Regular religious services
• Rituals of transition (funerals, weddings, bar mitzvahs, etc.)
• Attending another’s performance or sports event
• Doing hobbies
• Creating art
• Running errands
• Doing household chores
• Participating in community events or politics
• Doing charity work
• Doing schoolwork
• Soothing other people’s feelings
• Apologizing or repairing feelings after an argument
• Arriving at your job
• Doing your job
• Leaving your job
Questions to Consider
• What was this activity like in your family or with your friends when you were growing up?
• Did you have rituals surrounding it?
• What were those rituals like?
• What did you enjoy about this ritual?
• What did you dislike about it?
• What would have made it better?
• What’s this activity like in your life today?
• Do you have rituals surrounding it?
• What are those rituals like?
• If you have rituals surrounding this activity, how satisfied are you with them?
• What does this ritual mean or symbolize for you?
• Does this ritual help you to feel more connected or less connected to the important people in your life?
• Does this ritual foster positive feelings or negative feelings toward others?
• What could be done to make this ritual a more positive experience for you? For others?
Marriage counselors, labor negotiators, and kindergarten teachers have known it all along: Whenever two or more people get together to accomplish anything, sooner or later there’s bound to be a conflict. Building better emotional connections doesn’t change this, but it can help you to maintain happy, stable relationships as you discover ways to live with your differences.
In this final chapter, we’ll revisit the five steps to making your relationships work, exploring examples and exercises for applying them in specific types of relationships—those between spouses, parents and their children, friends, adult siblings, and coworkers.
Building Better Emotional Connections in Marriage
Step 1. Look at Your Bids for Connection with Your Spouse
My research clearly shows that if you want to improve your marriage, you should work on improving that fundamental unit of emotional connection, the bid. Remember: Happily married couples extend bids and respond to one another’s bids for emotional connection at a much higher rate than unhappily married couples do. They make a habit of constantly turning toward one another’s attempts to connect. They avoid turning away or turning against each other. This habit has a remarkable payoff: It allows spouses to be affectionate to one another and maintain their interest and sense of humor, even when they’re in conflict.
Exercise: Look for Opportunities to Turn Toward Your Spouse
Husbands and wives who live mindfully together find a seemingly infinite number of ways to turn toward each other and connect emotionally. Mostly, this is a matter of noticing and responding to their partners’ bids for connection. But husbands and wives can also be proactive, creating increased opportunities in their shared lives for turning toward one another. On the next few pages you’ll find a list of concrete, action-oriented opportunities for connecting.
There are two parts to the list: things you can do for your partner and things you can do with your partner. You can do these activities sporadically or you can build them into recurrent rituals. If you ritualize the opportunities, you can ensure that you’ll make the connection, without having to remember just when and how to do it.
First, read the list to see how many of these activities you did in the past week. Are there items on the list you’d like to do more often? Are there things you’d like to make a regular part of life together? Circle three of those items and then decide together how and when you can make them happen in the week ahead. When the week is over, evaluate how you did. Were you successful at incorporating the new activity? If so, what difference did it make in your relationship? Did it change your feelings toward your partner in any way? Did you feel a shift in the emotional climate of your home?
If you were not able to incorporate the activity into your week, what obstacles got in the way? Are there ways to eliminate those obstacles?
Review the list again and repeat the exercise on a weekly basis.
You can read and contemplate this list on your own, but it makes a lot more sense to do it with your spouse. That way, each of you has the chance to state your personal needs and desires, enhancing your potential for connection.
As you do this exercise:
• Don’t set high standards for your spouse’s turning. Accept whatever effort you see. Just trust in this basic rule of nature: Successful turning toward leads to more turning toward. When a person improves in this area, that improvement builds on itself.
• Don’t interpret your spouse’s request for turning toward as an accusation that you’ve done something wrong in the past. Just take it as a compliment that your partner wants to see more of you.
• Don’t make turning toward a competition; that would be counterproductive. Instead, think of the way that one kind act leads to another.
And what if you don’t see an immediate improvement in your relationship? That’s not unusual, either. In fact, just discussing some of the items on this list may stir up conflict. Nevertheless, try to stay engaged in the process of finding ways to connect emotionally. If both partners are committed to improvement, your efforts will pay off.
Things to Do for Your Spouse
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�� Fix coffee, a snack, or a meal for your partner.
• Wait on your partner when he or she is ill.
• Compliment your partner’s accomplishments, efforts, and looks.
• Ask your partner about his or her day.
• Praise his or her efforts around the house.
• Say “thank you.”
• Listen. Listen. Listen.
• Run errands for your partner.
• Put a loving note in your partner’s lunch or briefcase.
• Call or send e-mail during the workday.
• Do one of your partner’s chores.
• Do something kind for your partner’s friends and family.
• Buy a silly card or gift.
• Write a poem or song for your partner.
• Make a drawing, painting, or craft for your partner.
• Give flowers or balloons.
• Write a love letter.
• Offer your partner a massage or back rub.
• Ask about your partner’s important childhood memories. Listen.
• Ask about your partner’s fears. Listen.
• Ask about your partner’s dreams, goals, visions. Listen.
• Ask your partner the Bugs Bunny question: “Eh, what’s up, doc?” It’s a way to say, “How are you?” or “Tell me all about what’s going on inside you these days.” Then listen and even take notes.
Things to Do Together
• Hug.
• Kiss.
• Hold hands.
• Wrestle.
• Cuddle.
• Have a snowball fight.
• Sit down to breakfast on a weekday.
• Eat breakfast and read in bed on weekends.
• Read the paper.
• Kiss upon parting. Make it at least a six-second kiss.
• Kiss upon reuniting.
• Meet for lunch during the workday.
• Reunite at the end of the day and talk about how it went.
• Cook meals.
• Bake.
• Clean house.
• Fold laundry.
• Make a grocery list.
• Go grocery shopping.
• Plan a getaway or trip somewhere.
• Go shopping for clothes, housewares, or gifts.
• Help with school projects.
• Plan and host holiday celebrations.
• Learn a new language together (and plan a trip to the place where that language is spoken).
• Bathe the kids together, and help them get ready for bed.
• Take the kids on outings (museums, movies, the zoo).
• Attend school events together (PTA meetings, teacher conferences).
• Plan and host the kids’ birthday parties.
• Attend your child’s sports events and performances.
• Keep in touch with and/or visit with extended family.
• Exercise; go to a fitness club.
• Take a class (like ballroom dancing).
• Do yard work or gardening.
• Do home repairs.
• Maintain the car.
• Pay bills; manage the finances.
• Help care for sick or aging relatives.
• Commute.
• Walk the dog; care for a pet.
• Run errands.
• Do volunteer community work.
• Go on a picnic or a hike, or go camping.
• Take a vacation.
• Go out to brunch, dinner, or your favorite pub.
• Stay overnight at a romantic getaway.
• Plan and host a dinner party.
• Plan and take a vacation.
• Watch TV or videos. Talk to each other about them.
• Go to plays, concerts, or readings. Talk about them.
• Go to movies. Talk about them.
• Go to sports events. Talk about them.
• Go to art galleries or museums. Talk about them.
• Share a favorite recreational activity (bowling, skating, fishing, skiing, etc.).
• Read silently. Talk about what you’re reading.
• Play a board game or a card game.
• Play computer games, surf the Internet.
• Reminisce.
• Make and maintain a family photo album.
• Build a fire in the fireplace and read or talk.
• Gossip, not in a mean way, but to try to understand another person.
• Philosophize.
• Remodel or redecorate your home.
• Hunt for a new house or apartment.
• Test-drive new cars.
• Sing or play music.
• Read plays, poetry, or novels aloud to one another or with kids.
• Create art or crafts (e.g., paint, sculpt, do woodwork).
• Listen to music.
• Take a shower or bath.
• Shampoo each other’s hair.
• Make love.
• Talk over drinks (alcohol, coffee, tea).
• Go dancing, or to a nightclub or a comedy club.
• Go to a community event (auction, public forum, political meeting, etc.).
• Plan and celebrate milestones (birthdays, graduations, promotions).
• Help each other develop a self-improvement plan (career, health, fitness, etc.).
• Plan your future; dream.
• Go to a religious service.
• Meditate or pray.
• Other: _____________________________________.
Step 2. Discover How the Brain’s Emotional Command Systems Affect Your Marriage
In chapter 4, you had the opportunity to complete a series of questionnaires that assess your brain’s emotional command systems, the nerve-based circuits that coordinate the emotional, behavioral, and physical responses needed for various life functions. As we learned, people differ in how much they like to have those systems stimulated, and such differences can influence our ability to connect emotionally with others.
By completing those questionnaires, you had a chance to explore your own preferences related to these systems, as well as the preferences of those around you. While the chapter 4 questionnaires allow you to assess possible changes in your own individual life, they can also point to changes a couple might make in their lives together. If you haven’t done the questionnaires yet, you may want to do them now, focusing on how your emotional command systems influence your marriage. You’ll also want to complete the exercise titled Your Emotional Command System Score Card, on this page, which can show how you and your spouse differ in relation to various systems.
Because spouses typically relate to one another in so many different ways, it’s good for couples to find a comfortable balance in all seven emotional command systems described in this book. There are no universal formulas to follow. Every couple needs to find the balance that works best for them in each system. The three that are especially important in marriage are the Nest-Builder, the Commander-in-Chief, and the Sensualist.
The Nest-Builder is significant in marriage because it helps people to regulate issues of autonomy and independence. It’s the area that’s activated when couples answer certain questions: How much intimacy or interdependence will we have in this marriage? How much freedom and autonomy do we each need? Will we allow others to become as close to us as we are to each other? If somebody comes between the two of us in some way, will one of us feel jealous?
When a husband and wife answer these questions differently, it may indicate that they have different levels of comfort within the Nest-Builder system, and such differences can be a major source of conflict. By acknowledging and accepting differences, however, couples can either avoid or begin to resolve conflicts.
Another system that commonly causes concern in marriage is the Commander-in-Chief, which has to do with issues of power and control. When power issues come to the fore, husbands and wives grapple with these questio
ns: Who’s going to have the most influence in this marriage? Which of us is going to take the lead, and for which areas of our relationship? Can we split this up in ways that reflect different interests and talents? Can we share responsibility for important decisions, or divide them in a fair way? Or are we more comfortable with just one of us calling all the shots?
Conflicts can arise around such issues, particularly if husband and wife both have highly activated Commander-in-Chief systems. But again, acknowledging and accepting this similarity helps couples to avoid or to solve problems that have to do with power and control.
Understanding your similarities and differences within the Sensualist system is also important for a happy marriage. Problems often arise when one partner is more interested in sex or sensual pleasure than the other. Knowing that such differences could be based on an individual’s brain circuitry can help. With this understanding, one partner is less likely to feel personally rejected when the other acts uninterested. Rather than judging themselves or each other as “cold” or “rejecting,” “too horny” or “overindulgent,” partners can see their differences in a more objective light and begin to negotiate solutions.
In all relationships, couples have conflicts when partners are relying on totally different emotional command systems in the same situation. For example, the Explorer in one partner thinks the two can ski down unmarked slopes, while the Sentry in the other argues that it’s just too dangerous. The Jester in one partner thinks they should both spend Sunday at a jazz festival, while the Energy Czar in the other thinks it’s time to catch up on sleep.
Understanding how you and your spouse use your emotional command systems can improve your ability to bid and respond to one another. The section titled Bidding Across Emotional Command Systems, starting on this page, may help.
Step 3. Examine How Your Emotional Heritage Affects Your Relationship with Your Spouse
In chapter 5 we explored how a person’s emotional past can impact current relationships. Your emotional heritage includes lessons you learned about feelings in childhood, your family’s philosophy of emotion, and the enduring vulnerabilities you may still carry as a result of painful events. All of those things can affect your ability to connect with your spouse today. Being aware of such aspects of your partner makes all of this public between the two of you; it gives you a language for talking about these things, making it possible to honor and respect your differences.
