The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country's Foremost Relationship Expert

Even happily married couples can have screaming matches—loud arguments don’t necessarily harm a marriage.

they assume the worst about each other to such a pervasive degree that they become trapped in an absorbing state of negativity that I call the Roach Motel for Lovers. This horrible place is marked by endless conflict and bad feelings. Couples “check in” to it and then discover they can’t get out. When couples become trapped in the Roach Motel, they

Repair attempts are a secret weapon of emotionally intelligent couples—

To this day, the male cardiovascular system remains more reactive than that of the female and slower to recover from stress. For example, if a man and woman suddenly hear a very loud, brief sound, like a blowout, most likely his heart will beat faster than hers and stay accelerated for longer, according to research by Robert Levenson and his studen

Contempt is fueled by long-simmering negative thoughts about the partner. You’re more likely to have such thoughts if your differences are not resolved.

When a marriage goes sour, husband and wife are not the only ones to suffer—the children do, too. In a study I conducted of sixty-three preschoolers, those being raised in homes where there was great marital hostility had chronically elevated levels of stress hormones compared with the other children studied. We don’t know what the long-term reperc

Too often, couples begin to seek help for their marriage after they’ve already hit troubled waters. The warning signs were almost always there early on if they had known what to look for. You can see the seeds of trouble in (1) what partners actually say to each other (the prevalence of harsh start-up, the four horsemen, and the unwillingness to ac

an unhappy marriage can increase your chances of getting sick by roughly 35 percent and even shorten your life by an average of four to eight years. The flip side: people who are happily married live longer, healthier lives than either divorced people or those who are unhappily married.

When we assessed the immune-system responses of the fifty couples who stayed overnight in the Love Lab, we found a striking difference between those who were very satisfied with their marriages and those whose emotional response to each other was neutral or who were unhappy. Specifically, we used blood samples from each subject to test the response