The Four Behaviors That Will Ruin Your Relationship

When your relationship is struggling, you don’t always know why. You feel trapped in arguments with your partner, arguments that never seem to resolve or end. You want to fix things, but you don’t know where to start.

Relationships seem like the kind of touchy-feely thing science wouldn’t be able to help you out with, but that’s not the case. John Gottman and his wife, Julie Gottman, have been researching what makes marriages work for nearly 40 years. They have conducted all kinds of studies to isolate what separates the happily married from the unhappily married and divorced. Their research organization, The Gottman Institute, have done the regular couples and marital therapy and comprehensive questionnaires, but they have also done much more — they have designed an entire apartment they call the “Love Lab” to be a research environment. While conducting studies, they monitor the heart rates, blood pressure, and other biometric markers of couples while working with them.

All that studying has paid off. When a couple works with a Gottman Institute certified clinician, that clinician is able to use the Gottman Institute methodologies to predict the likelihood of that couple’s separation within 10 years to 92% accuracy. That means if John Gottman says you’re going to be divorced within 10 years, it’s probably true.

The best part of Gottman’s research is that we know why it’s true. Gottman has isolated the four behaviors which lead couples down the road to separation and described them in painstaking detail. He says that if couples learn to neutralize these behaviors, they can right the ship of their relationship and get back to being a happy couple.

These four behaviors — what Gottman calls the “four horsemen of the apocalypse” — predict divorce in all cases. They predict divorce for heterosexual couples and homosexual couples, for mixed-race couples, for couples with different religious backgrounds, and couples facing all kinds of challenges. The Gottman Institute designed their studies with these factors in mind, and their findings are solid.

Without further ado, here are the four behaviors that will ruin your relationship:

Criticism

Criticism is the act of pointing out something that’s wrong with your partner. When someone is criticizing their partner, they are drawing their partner’s attention to their flaws. Criticisms typically start with “you” statements:

• “You never do the dishes!”
• “You always interrupt me!”
• “You’re so stupid!”
• “You shouldn’t feel that way!”

It may be difficult to believe, but when people criticize, they typically have good intentions. The woman who tells her husband “you never do the dishes” is trying to get him to see that she’s overworked and needs his help. The man who tells his wife “you always interrupt me” is trying to get her to see he needs to feel respected by her, and interruptions don’t make him feel respected. Even the woman who calls her husband stupid is trying, in her own broken way, to help her husband lead a better life.

The problem is this technique doesn’t work. When you’re criticizing someone, you’re telling them what’s wrong with them. But when’s the last time you wanted anyone to tell you what’s wrong with you? Nobody likes having their flaws pointed out, especially in such a callous manner. This one minute YouTube video explains it best:

The Antidote:

The antidote to criticism is to focus on what you need from your partner, instead of what you think your partner lacks. Formulate your complaint using the following structure: “I feel [this feeling] about [the external problem]. I need you to [do something about the problem].”

You don’t have to use that exact wording, of course. The important part is to use an “I” statement. Make it about you and what you need, not the other person and what they lack.

The one thing that really helped me understand this antidote was this three-minute video of Dr. Julie Gottman explaining this concept:

Let’s take a look at how the examples above could be rephrased as “I” statements:

• “You never do the dishes!” = “I’m upset you never do the dishes. I feel overworked and need some help around the house. Could you do the dishes more often?
• “You always interrupt me!” = “I feel unimportant when you interrupt me. I want to feel respected, and when you interrupt me, I don’t feel respected. When you interrupt me, I don’t feel important to you. Can you stop interrupting me?”
• “You’re so stupid!” = “I feel scared when you do things like spend our savings on a new motorcycle. I want to feel secure. Can you consult me before making major financial decisions?”
• “You shouldn’t feel that way!” = “When you tell me I hurt your feelings, I feel guilty. I also feel annoyed, because I don’t think what I did was hurtful. Can we talk about why you feel that way?”

Notice that when a statement is transformed from a “you” statement to an “I” statement, communication becomes much more open. We learn not only what the first partner was upset about, but why they were upset about it, and how their partner can help them. With “you” statements, all their partner can do is say “I am not like that!” With “I” statements, however, their partner can easily fix the problem.

Contempt

Contempt is an expression of superiority over your partner. You are expressing contempt when you say or do something that implicitly communicates you are better than your partner. Symptoms of contempt include:

• Sarcasm
• Cynicism
• Name-calling
• Eye rolling
• Sneering
• Mockery
• Hostile humor

If you catch yourself doing these things, you are showing your partner contempt.

My least favorite kind of contempt is the kind of humorous contempt people express about their partners to friends. When a man refers to his wife as “the old lady” or “my ball and chain,” or when a woman refers to her husband as “another one of my children,” they are expressing contempt for their partner. This behavior says a lot more about them than it does about their partner.

Of all four of the horsemen, contempt is the greatest predictor of divorce. The Gottman Institute tells us couples who are contemptuous of each other are basically guaranteed to divorce within ten years.

It gets worse. In relationships where contempt is present, the victim of the concept is more likely to suffer infectious disease. The Gottman Institute worked with physicians to research the health of people who receive contempt, and they found that contempt raises the victim’s chance of suffering infectious disease in the next four years. So if you are contemptuous of your partner, you are literally weakening their ability to fight off diseases — diseases like COVID-19.

The Antidote:

Appreciation. Instead of putting your partner down, lift them up. When they do something you like or respect, acknowledge what they’ve done and how happy it makes you feel. Take stock of the things you like about your partner, instead of focusing on what you don’t.

If you have a gratitude practice already, you can work appreciation into your gratitude practice. Reflect on what you like about your partner. What qualities initially attracted you to them?

If you’re in the middle of an argument, you can defuse that argument by expressing appreciation. You can say something as simple as “thank you for taking the time to listen to me,” or “thank you for taking the time to work out this problem with me.”

My favorite example of appreciation comes from a Medium article I recently read about sleep hacking by Chris Davidson. In the article, Davidson admits that since he and his wife have three children, they do not have a “rampant sex life”. But the way he does it is so appreciative of his wife:

It may not surprise you to know that a 41 year old married man with 3 kids does not have a rampant sex life, despite my wife being super-hot.

He’s writing an article about sleep hacking. He could have simply stuck to the facts; shared only that on nights he had sex his sleep was 20% more restorative. But he didn’t. He took the opportunity to both be funny and compliment his wife publicly on the internet. That’s appreciation.

Defensiveness

Defensiveness is a refusal to accept responsibility for an argument. Someone in an argument is being defensive if they are insisting an argument is not their fault. Sometimes the defensive partner will express righteous indignation, or they will play the victim. In reality, though, what they are really doing is blaming their partner. After all, if it’s not their fault, then whose fault is it, hm?

People are defensive as a form of self-protection. They are scared of what it will mean if they are wrong, so they insist that they are right in order to protect themselves.

The problem is, no self-protection is necessary. It is okay to be wrong and it is okay to admit you are wrong, especially when you are. Refusing to accept responsibility when the responsibility is yours leaves your partner feeling betrayed, because they can’t trust you to be their partner in conflict, and it leaves them feeling abandoned, like they have to solve the problem all on their own.

The Antidote:

The antidote to defensiveness is to accept responsibility for your part in the argument. Identify what you did wrong and apologize for it. Once you accept responsibility, your partner’s defensive walls will lower and communication will come much more easily.

Sometimes this can be difficult to put into practice. When you feel you are completely innocent and your partner is completely in the wrong, apologizing feels ridiculous. When this happens, what you need to recognize is you are not perfect. You contributed to the argument in some way, no matter how small. Unless you’re the Dalai Llama, there was a way for you to behave with more calm, kindness, and compassion. You can always take responsibility for that.

Stonewalling

The Gottman Institute says stonewalling is withdrawing from a conflict without resolving anything. What it really is is the silent treatment.

Wife: “I mean, really, can’t you just cook dinner one or two nights a week?”
Husband: (watches tv, says nothing)
Wife: “I’m not asking that much!”
Husband: (watches tv, says nothing)
Wife: “Are you even listening?”
Husband: (watches tv, says nothing)
Wife: “Hello?”

Sometimes when one partner is stonewalling, the other gives up hope. What ends up happening is both partners sit there in miserable silence.

The Gottman Institute tells us people stonewall as an emotional last line of defense. The person who’s stonewalling feels hopeless; they think there’s nothing they’ll be able to do to solve the problem. Therefore, the best they can hope for is to “weather the storm.” But of course, they are wrong.

Stonewalling is my least favorite of the four horsemen because being on the receiving end of it hurts. Science has shown being on the receiving end of the silent treatment is physically painful. Being ignored or excluded activates the same area of the brain that is activated by physical pain. I would imagine being ignored by the one you love the most would activate that area of the brain the most. It certainly feels like it.

If these behaviors are the four horsemen of divorce, stonewalling is death. Stonewalling appears when the other three horsemen have been present for some time, and it’s a sign the death of the relationship is near.

The Antidote:

Take a timed break. When you see an argument is headed toward stonewalling, or you’re feeling the urge to stonewall, call a timeout. Take twenty to thirty minutes, go to separate rooms in the house, and take some time to privately reflect on your behavior during the argument. When you reconvene, you’ll find that both of you are much more calm and ready to approach the problem.

Bonus: One thing my partner and I do is when we reconvene, we both start with an apology, the antidote to defensiveness. We both take responsibility for some part of the prior conflict, no matter how small. It is a great way to start because it strengthens our feeling of partnership with each other, and lets the other know we are here to solve the problem, not to tear the other down.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that we will all do some of these things at one time or another. Even people in happy marriages display these behaviors some of the time, if not very often. But they are still damaging, no matter how infrequent they are. If you want your relationship to succeed, cleansing it of the four horsemen is a great way to start.

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Sources

These are sources I used that were not cited in the body of the article:

• [Book] The Seven Principles For Making Marriage Work by John Gottman and Nan Silver
• [YouTube Video] Four Negative Patterns That Predict Divorce (Parts 1 & 2) by Anderson
• [YouTube Video] Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by The Gottman Institute