they need to do for themselves to grow emotionally is most often the very thing that the partner needs from them,” Ayala Malach Pines writes in Falling in Love. “Instead of turning into a rejected little girl that needed to pound on doors to be heard, she needed to learn to stay an adult and ask for what she wanted in a way that would increase the likelihood of getting it.”
In the end, people in an enduring marriage achieve metis. That’s the Greek word for a kind of practical wisdom, an intuitive awareness of how things are, how things go together, and how things will never go together.
A teacher with metis can feel when the classroom is just beginning to get out of control. A mechanic with metis has a feel for what’s wrong with the engine based on some semi-consciously heard rumble or sound. A marriage partner with metis knows when to give space and when to intrude, when to offer the surprise gift and when not to tell the teasing joke. The university of marriage, at its best, teaches this form of emotional awareness, which can’t be reduced to rules or communicated in books, and which emerges as a sort of loving nimbleness.
COMMUNICATION
Words are the fuel of marriage. “Everything else is transitory,” Nietzsche writes, “but most of the time you are together will be devoted to conversation.”
The quality of the conversation is the quality of the marriage. Good conversation creates warmth and peace, and bad conversation creates frigidity and stasis. Conversation is how marriage partners rub off on each other.
Most of the conversation, of course, is mundane—about dinner, paint colors, or the baby’s digestive system. There was a time when the whole idea of manners went out of style, when politeness came to seem hopelessly bourgeois. But manners are the morality of everyday life. As Edmund Burke put it, “Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and color to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.”
A well-mannered conversation is shaped by what John Gottman calls the pattern of bids and volleys. Let’s say you are reading the paper at the dining room table and your partner comes up and says, “Look at the beautiful blue jay on the tree outside the window.” That’s a conversational bid. You might look up and exclaim, “Wow, that is beautiful. Thanks for pointing it out.” That’s a “toward bid.” With your remark, you are moving toward your partner. Or you could respond, “I was reading the paper; would you please let me finish?” That would be an “against bid.” Or you could just grunt and ignore the remark or change the subject with a non sequitur. The would be a “turning-away bid.”
In marriages that succeed, Gottman has found, the couple experiences five toward bids for every one against or turning-away bid. The people Gottman calls “relationship masters” go out of their way to store up chits in their emotional bank account. “There’s a habit of mind that the masters have, which is this: they are scanning the social environment for things they can appreciate and say thank you for….Disasters are scanning the social environment for partners’ mistakes,” Gottman said in an interview with Emily Esfahani Smith for The Atlantic.
Divorce doesn’t generally happen when the number of conflicts increases; it happens when the number of positive things decreases. Julie Gottman, John’s wife, points out that masters of relationship are on alert for what their partner is doing right, and they are quick to compliment. According to the Gottmans, there are four kinds of unkindness that drive couples apart: contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling. The rule of their research is pretty simple: If you’re tired and your partner makes a bid, turn toward in kindness. If you’re distracted, turn toward in kindness. If you’re stressed, turn toward in kindness.
Relationship masters also learn how to communicate well in times of triumph and conflict. Moments of triumph would seem to be the easy part of a relationship. But Shelly Gable, a psychologist at UC Santa Barbara, found that those are the moments that often drive people apart. One spouse comes home reporting some promotion at work, but the other person can’t simply join in the happiness because he is too focused on self, so he