The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work

Uncover hidden signs and game-changing principles to double the harmony in your marriage

Good afternoon, friends! Welcome to the ReadVault Club. I'm Tom Niklas, a seasoned writer and book reviewer. Please subscribe to me and join us in reading 52 books a year together.

Our ReadVault publication has a section called “Parenting and Family”. But when you open this series, you'll find that almost all the books we've covered before are about parenting. For example, "Positive Discipline," "Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain," "Raising a Thinking Child," "The Go-To Mom's Parents' Guide to Emotion Coaching Young Children," and so on. We've talked a lot about how to raise kids, but there's another half in a family, your spouse, right?

Book reviews are related to parenting.

Positive Discipline

Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

Raising a Thinking Child

The Go-To Mom's Parents' Guide to Emotion Coaching Young Children

We rarely discuss books on handling spousal relationships, so I should apologize for that. Even I tend to view the parent-child relationship as more important in a family. But in reality, you'll find that the spousal relationship is way more crucial than the parent-child one. When there's a conflict between the two, you must stand firmly on the side of your spousal relationship without letting the parent-child relationship ruin your marriage. Get it?

So today, we will talk about a bestselling book called "The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work." After reading it, I feel it'll be a huge help in improving my relationship with my wife.

The author, John Gottman, is the Marriage Pope in the US. Do you know his superpower? He can predict whether a couple will divorce just by watching them interact for five minutes, with a stunning 91% accuracy rate!

Within those five minutes, even if the couple isn't fighting, he can tell if they're in danger of splitting up just through their normal conversation. There are telltale signs, you see. It's not necessarily the fighting couples who'll divorce; the polite ones don't always make it either.

Gottman's approach to studying marriage isn't about the skills or communication techniques we usually associate with relationships. The communication methods we learned in leadership training may not be effective with your wife. Because a family isn't a company, right?

Gottman uses a statistical, scientific method. He built many apartments and had volunteer couples stay there for a weekend or a holiday. Their conversations, heart rates, and pulses were all monitored. The couples knew they were being observed, but after a while, they'd settle back into their normal routines.

After tracking numerous couples for 16 years, analyzing massive amounts of physiological data like blood pressure, heart rate, pulse rate, and their marital status, he finally developed a comprehensive set of methods for solving marital problems. In this book, he gives us seven principles. Just by practicing these seven simple methods, condensed down to just five hours a week. It is not much, right? You can significantly improve the quality of your marriage.

What are the benefits of improving your marriage?

Here's a number for you, in the US, the divorce rate within the first 40 years of marriage is 67%. The divorce rate is extremely high within that timeframe.

Divorce can bring about some serious issues, you know? The biggest problem is that it can shorten your lifespan. Yep, divorced people live an average of four years less than those in healthy marriages. No amount of time at the gym can make up for those four years!

So if you put in the effort to improve your marriage, it'll not only strengthen your relationship but also make your life healthier. Isn't that worth learning? Plus, it tanks your quality of life constantly to be on the outs with your spouse, doesn't it?

The second major issue is that an unhappy marriage harms the kids. A lot of children's negative behaviors and psychological trauma stem from an unhappy home life, right? So we definitely need to learn how to make our marriages better.

Key indicators of impending divorce

You're probably all wondering, how can you tell if a couple is headed for divorce. What are the telltale signs? Well, there are a few key indicators.

The first one is when conversations start with harsh criticism.

What does that mean? It's when you open your mouth and start attacking the other person. Stuff like "I know, there's no point telling you, I've said it a million times, it's no use. This is just how you are, I get it." When we talk to our spouse with sarcasm and put-downs right off the bat, that's a bad sign.