Talks on Love Playlist (2/5): Even healthy couples fight — the difference is how | Julie and John Gottman

0:00Julie Gottman: June is LGBTQ Pride Month for many around the world. It's a time to celebrate the fight for rights and the many forms love and relationships can take. In honor of this, today we're dropping five of our favorite TED Talks from the archive on love and relationships. Happy listening.

0:20Julie Gottman: you're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day I'm your host Elise Hugh I'll be honest I don't get starstruck very easily I do live in Los Angeles after all but at TED 2024 there were two speakers who I just had to go say hello to when I saw them John and Julie Gottman see there's John and Julie can I just say I'm so starstruck seeing you all Big fan. You're responsible for so many of our relationships staying intact. Or getting better. So thank you both. See you later. So fangirl. I gotta ask you to take a picture. Doctors John and Julie Gottman are world-renowned psychologists and experts on healthy relationships and how to have healthy conflict.

1:08Julie Gottman: I find their work fascinating and insightful. And other testers shared my feelings. You saw Dr. Gottman already? walking by. Yeah, I was starstruck. Yeah, I know. We'll dive into this talk right after the break.

1:26Julie Gottman: This episode is brought to you by Walmart Business. The best leaders might tell you the work that moves an organization forward doesn't happen in spreadsheets or supply chain emails. It happens when you have the space to think big. That's the idea behind Walmart Business. It's built to take the friction out of running an organization so your team isn't losing hours to procurement logistics when they could just be focused on the problems that actually matter. With an ever-expanding business assortment, everyday low prices, and fast, reliable shipping, Walmart Business keeps your operations running smoothly.

2:00Julie Gottman: Shop online, in-store, or through the Walmart Business app. However works best for you. Simpler operations, smarter spending. It's Walmart built for your business. Sign up for a free Walmart business account at business.walmart.com. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn. Running a small business means every hire matters. A bad hire can cost you time, money, and momentum. A good hire, they can help grow your business. But finding great talent isn't easy, especially when you don't have the time or resources to sift through piles of resumes to find the right fit. That's why LinkedIn built Hiring Pro.

2:38Julie Gottman: your new hiring partner that screens candidates for you. So instead of sorting through applications, you spend your time talking to candidates who are actually a good fit. With Hiring Pro, you can hire with confidence, knowing you're getting the best talent for your business. In fact, according to LinkedIn, those hiring with LinkedIn are 24 % less likely to need to reopen a role within 12 months compared to the leading competitor. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash TED Talk. Terms and conditions. apply. Here's something we've all experienced and somehow still accept as normal.

3:15Julie Gottman: Sitting on hold, repeating yourself, explaining the same problem to the fifth person who picks up. This episode is brought to you by Parloa, the AI platform built to make that a thing of the past.

3:27John Gottman: Parloa's AI agents work 24-7 across voice, chat, and email in any language and with zero wait time. They remember every customer interaction so no one ever has to start over.

3:39Julie Gottman: The result? Service that doesn't feel like a transaction. It feels like being known. The world's biggest brands already trust Parloa to deliver customer experiences at enterprise scale because when loyalty is on the line, good enough simply isn't.

3:53John Gottman: See Parloa's AI agents in action at parloa.com. That's P-A-R-L-O-A dot com.

4:05Julie Gottman: Without further ado, John and Julie Gottman.

4:09John Gottman: So most of us think that fighting is bad for romantic relationships, right? How many people do you know who say, hey, I had a great fight the other day. Oh, yeah, my partner and I fight all the time and we're super happy.

4:29Julie Gottman: 52 years ago, we put love under the microscope. Julie and I are the founders of the Gottman Institute and the Love Lab. And we've made this study of relationships our life's work. And our research tells us that fighting is good for relationships, not bad.

4:47John Gottman: In our lab, we saw that almost all couples fight. in fact, how they fight in the first three minutes predicts with 96 % accuracy not only how the rest of the conversation will go, but how the rest of the relationship will go six years down the road. My God, I know. It's terrifying, isn't it? So it's not if we fight that determines relationship success. It's how we fight.

5:25Julie Gottman: In fact, our research has revealed that some fighting actually increases connection and even improves our sex life. So how do we fight right?

5:35John Gottman: Early on, John and his colleague Robert Levinson, in their lab, simply watched couples interacting. Sounds simple, but nobody had ever done that before.

5:48Julie Gottman: Over time, 3 ,000 couples came to the lab. As they were being videotaped, they wore monitors that measured such things as respiration, heart rate, and stress hormones. And then they had a conflict discussion, and they talked about the events of their day.

6:04John Gottman: Afterwards, they rated how they felt during each conversation before returning home. they would return to the lab every year or two and repeat the same procedure. And some were followed for as long as 20 years.

6:25Julie Gottman: Videotapes were synchronized to the physiological data, and then in a split-screen video, second by second, we measured the couple's words, emotions, facial expressions, and physiology year after year.

6:40John Gottman: Over time, we saw that some couples separated or divorced, some remained together unhappily, while others stayed together happily. What made the difference between the couples who were successful and the couples who were unsuccessful, or as we call them, the masters and the disasters? The couples in our studies were all ages, sexual orientations, and ethnically diverse. After a while, just by watching a couple, we could predict what would happen with over 90 % accuracy, see what would happen in their relationship six years later, which meant we never got invited to dinner anymore.

7:37Julie Gottman: We found that there were three major styles of fighting. Conflict avoiders, who just agree to disagree and would rather wash the dishes than argue a point. I'm a conflict avoider.

7:53John Gottman: He is, believe me. Conflict validators would bring up an issue by expressing their feelings calmly and then jumping immediately into problem-solving. So think of your most patient kindergarten teacher. Then there were the conflict volatiles. They would express their feelings intensely and very passionately. Notice I say, just fine, not bad. and then they would leap into trying to prove that they were right and their partners were wrong. Okay, so think of a very expressive basketball coach on the sidelines, or me, I'm a volatile.

8:44Julie Gottman: And some partners had different styles of fighting from one another. But the good news is we discovered that whether you have those three styles of fighting or you're mismatched, You can have a successful relationship as long as the ratio of positive to negative responses during the conflict discussion, it was at least five to one. And examples of positive responses were head nods, affection, interest, shared humor, and words like, fair enough.

9:17John Gottman: Okay, so what about the negatives? Were all the negatives equally negative? No. There were four big predictors of relationship demise that we called the four horsemen of the apocalypse. All right. The first one was criticism. And criticism means blaming a problem on a personality flaw of your partner. For example, if you walked into a messy kitchen and you wanted to be critical, you would say, oh my God, this place is such a mess. Why are you such a slob? How do you answer that?

10:03Julie Gottman: The second horseman is contempt. Contempt is like criticism, but it has a dash of superiority. So with contempt, you include scorn, disgust, sarcasm, and nasty insults. Like, you're such a loser, why did I ever marry you?

10:24John Gottman: The third horseman is defensiveness. That's the most common one. And that's when we act like an innocent victim. I did too pay the bills. Or we counterattack. Oh, yeah, well, you didn't pay the bills on time.

10:42Julie Gottman: The fourth horseman is stonewalling. When we shut down completely, and we don't even give the speaker any signs that we're listening, In stonewalling, we really wall ourselves off from our partner. Hmm. Hmm. The fourth is a bad one,

11:03John Gottman: but here's another one that may be related to it. It's called flooding, or fight, flight, or freeze. So a partner in the middle of a conversation may be sitting there and looking totally calm on the outside, But inside, their heart rates are rocketing up above 100 beats a minute.

11:28Julie Gottman: They feel like they're being attacked by a tiger. But it's only our partner. And when we're flooded, we can't think straight, we can't listen very well, and we certainly can't creatively problem solve.

11:43John Gottman: If you get flooded, here's what's crucial. You stop immediately and call for a break. Then say when you'll come back to continue the conversation. That's really important. And during the break, do not think about the fight. Instead, simply self-soothe and then come back at the designated time. When you're physiologically calm, you look like a totally different person, and it's much easier to be reasonable and to listen well. Now, what do couples do who fight right versus fight wrong? The couples who are really struggling and distressed may bring up an issue in that first three minutes of the conversation with something we call harsh startup, which almost always includes criticism or contempt.

12:50John Gottman: The couples who fight right will bring up the issue with what we call softened startup. So what's softened startup?

12:59Julie Gottman: Softened startup consists of a bunch of I statements that describe you and not your partner at all. You start with what you feel, then you describe the situation at hand, and then what you do need from your partner to make things better, rather than what you resent. And here's an example of harsh versus softened startup.

13:21John Gottman: All right, so let's say you've been cooking dinner every single night for the last year. Yeah, you're a little tired of it. All right, so what would a harsh startup sound like? You're just too cheap to take me out to dinner. Look. All right. A softened startup would sound more like this. I'm feeling frustrated. There's your feeling. About needing to cook dinner every night. That's the situation. Hear all the eyes? Would you please take me out to dinner tonight? That's your positive need.

14:07Julie Gottman: At a workshop with 1 ,200 people, we posed that question to the audience and asked them to come up with a softened startup for that situation. And one guy raised his hand, and he was competent but very succinct. He said, I'm feeling hungry. I'm going out to dinner. Would you like to come along?

14:32John Gottman: later on we gave an example about sex the entire audience went silent and very shy except for this same guy so i had to call on him right so he went over the top a little bit and this is what he said for a softened startup. Honey, I'm feeling horny. I'm going to go upstairs and have sex. Would you like to come along?

15:06Julie Gottman: One finding that really shocked us in our research was this. 69 % of all relationship conflict problems are perpetual, which means that they never go away. They never get fully solved. And so we learn that conflict really mostly needs to be managed rather than solved.

15:29John Gottman: In our lab, the couples who came back year after year kept bringing up exactly the same issue, even 20 years later. Right.

15:40Julie Gottman: So when we think about fighting right, whether talking about a perpetual problem or a solvable problem, what is the biggest mistake that the disasters of relationships make? The answer is that they fight to win, which means somebody has to lose. What do the masters do instead? They fight to understand.

16:04John Gottman: Fighting to understand means taking a conversation about an issue and going much deeper to understand what's beneath your partner's position on the issue. That builds the connection.

16:22Julie Gottman: At the core of fighting to understand is asking one another a set of pre-designed questions that are designed to get at people's thoughts and feelings behind their position on the issue. They don't interrupt, and then they trade roles. We call this the dreams within conflict conversation because it really helps people get at their thoughts and feelings behind their position without feeling judged or attacked.

16:51John Gottman: There are six questions in all. And these questions unearth each person's values, feelings, background history, and ideal dream regarding the issue. I'm going to give you an illustration using just two out of the six questions. So there was a couple who were really fighting over whether or not to get a dog. Okay. There was a woman who we will call Jenny, who was adamantly opposed to getting a dog. But her partner, a woman who we will call Allison, was all for it. So they decided to try the dreams within conflict conversation. So when Allison asked Jenny, do you have some background or childhood history that's part of your position on this issue?

17:51John Gottman: She said,

17:53Julie Gottman: Absolutely. When I was a kid, I got chased and bitten by just about every dog in our neighborhood.

18:00John Gottman: Wow. But the real understanding came with the dream question. So what is your ideal dream here regarding this issue?

18:10Julie Gottman: You know, if we don't have a dog, we're not tied down, we're not burdened. We're free to travel the world together and have adventures together. That's what I really want. Now listen to what Allison said when she was asked about the childhood history question. She said,

18:28John Gottman: You know, when I was a kid, I was all alone. Okay, so my golden retriever was my best friend. He really kept me from feeling totally alone. And to the dreams question, she said? You know, I see getting a dog as a practice run for having kids and having a family. I know that dogs and kids are a lot of responsibility, but they both bring so much love with them into the family. That's what I want.

19:06Julie Gottman: So on the surface, this fight was about whether or not to get a dog. But beneath the surface, it was about leading a life of adventure and travel versus staying home and raising a family. Without the dreams within conflict conversation, they never would have gotten to this level of understanding of one another.

19:27John Gottman: In an unpublished study, we found that 87 % of 600 couples, many of whom were distressed, made major breakthroughs on gridlock conflicts using tools like this. So now, if we look around our world, we see a world that is caught in win-lose battles. that are so polarized. So the same thing we're seeing in our couples who are also locked in win-lose standoffs, we've never seen such furious, uncompromising fighting before. It's enough to fill you full of despair.

20:22Julie Gottman: But our research has taught us that there are science-based tools that can gentle down a conflict, scrape the escalations off the ceiling, and lead people to mutual understanding of one another's positions, ending this win-lose mentality, and leading a couple to a compromise that honors both people's dreams.

20:44John Gottman: You all know that relationships are the foundations of our communities, our society, and our world. If we can all work on learning how to fight right, even at home, there is hope. We can build a more loving and peaceful world. One couple at a time. Thank you. Thank you.

21:44Julie Gottman: Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner, and Tansika Sungmarnivong. Additional support from Daniela Ballarezzo, Christopher Faze-Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Brian Green, and Lainey Lott. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. Thanks for listening.

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