Why Relationships Matter

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Most marital issues aren’t solvable—but addressing them with love can deepen intimacy.

Contempt is a weapon of marital destruction. an acid that dissolves the bonds of affection.

Nobody is perfectly trustworthy. Forgiveness and compassion, the opposite of contempt, are essential.

Couples in love have positive illusions. Over time, spouses become more like the way their spouse sees them.

Marriage expert John Gottman describes the magic of love with a quote from the film Sleepless in Seattle: “I knew it the first time I touched her,” Tom Hanks’s character says about his late wife. “It was like coming home, only to no home I’d ever known.”

According to Gottman, who has been researching marriage for more than 50 years, a happy marriage results in greater health, wealth, resilience, and happiness. In contrast, a bad marriage not only makes people unhappy, it can lead to negative mental health outcomes, a compromised immune system, and even a shortened life.

Years ago, Gottman found that he could predict with 90% accuracy whether couples would divorce. One thing that is not among the indicators of a bad marriage, however, is arguing. In fact, marital disagreements not only help to solve problems, but they’re also opportunities for personal growth, increased understanding, and deepened intimacy.

As Gottman and his wife, Julie, describe in a 2024 TED talk, even in good marriages, only about a third of marital problems, on average, are solvable. About two-thirds are perpetual.

What Are You Really Fighting About?

Often, when couples fight, what they’re actually struggling with is not the topic of the argument. Underneath marital conflict, especially in recurring arguments, what people may really be looking for are answers to fundamental questions about freedom, mortality, meaning, belonging, and isolation.

These are what existential psychiatrist Irvin Yalom calls ultimate concerns. They’re questions like: Do you understand me? Can I count on you? Will you take care of me and keep me safe? Do you appreciate and admire me? When things get hard, will you have my back? Do I matter to you? Do we belong together? If I’m committed to you, am I still free?

As we navigate our primary relationship, we’re constantly looking for answers to those questions. But often, we’re unaware of the deeper questions driving our disagreements. So, when marriages end, what people point to aren’t those ultimate concerns. The reasons they give for why their marriages fell apart are more mundane.

When spouses don't feel understood, misinterpretations can multiply, and partners can become emotionally distant; neither meeting the needs of the other, each developing increasing resentment of the other.

Whether a result of a basic mismatch or just a pattern of neglect, without mutual understanding, couples don’t share a fundamental reality. This is clearest in one study of ex-spouses who were separately asked about the reason the marriage failed. The percentage of those divorced pairs who gave the same answer for why the marriage ended was zero.

Given that there’s no way around marital problems, the ways in which spouses think about and interact with one another are key to the health of the relationship.

The late biological anthropologist Helen Fisher found that couples who stay in love are physically connected through both sex (a lot of it) and regular expressions of physical affection, like holding hands. And, she found, they experience novelty together by learning new things, traveling, or having other new encounters.

Why Relationships Matter

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Contempt: The Deadliest Poison

John Gottman found he could predict divorce by the presence of what he calls “the four horsemen of the apocalypse.” These are: criticism (blame as opposed to critical feedback), defensiveness (failing to take responsibility for one’s own role), stonewalling (refusing to communicate), and contempt.

While any one of the four in high enough quantity can be fatal to a relationship, the most lethal is contempt.

When someone feels contempt for a partner, the partner’s negative attributes appear permanent and characterological, while positive qualities seem fleeting and more minimal. A person whose spouse feels contempt for him or her can begin to feel inferior, deficient, and worthless, can develop resentment toward the unappreciative spouse, and can eventually come to feel reciprocal contempt.

Contempt is so devastating to a relationship that it has the power to rewrite history. If you ask someone who loves his partner about how they fell in love, he will smile as he remembers the early days of their relationship. Thinking about a future with his beloved, he feels cherished. Ask someone who feels contempt, on the other hand, and she may struggle to recall that spark and might not even remember having fallen in love. Spending the rest of her life with the object of her contempt is at best a sacrifice she's willing to make.

Contempt feeds on feelings of superiority and hostility. It eliminates respect. It destroys trust, admiration, and love. Contempt is an acid that dissolves the bonds of affection. Eventually, it becomes a weapon of marital destruction.

Compassion, on the other hand, a requirement for good relationships, is the opposite of contempt. It encompasses a desire for the other to be happy and free from suffering, and an understanding of the other person's struggles—even through disagreement.

Forgiveness is another requirement. Everyone fails at being perfectly trustworthy. But it isn’t as difficult to forgive in a flourishing marriage as it is in a failing one, because in good marriages, spouses repair trust and go on playing a game of give-and-take rather than tit-for-tat.

Love Can Predict a Future

Couples in love have what Fisher called mutual “positive illusions”—what the Gottmans call “positive sentiment override.” A mark of this aspect of love is that in each partner’s mind, their beloved’s virtues loom large and faults seem less significant. They can even find one another’s flaws endearing.

But positive illusions are also part of why it can be hard for people to recover from a broken heart. A broken heart activates the same neural circuitry for pain as a broken bone. Heartbreak results from the loss of someone still loved and wanted. So as challenging as divorce can be, it doesn't always involve that kind of pain.

Some therapists advise the lovelorn to repeatedly remind themselves of the ex-partner’s worst qualities and moments. While in the short run, it can make clients feel worse, it works to create the negative sentiment override that can undo positive illusions and help detach the broken-hearted from relationships they want but can't have.

Mutual positive illusions, on the other hand, are a predictor of a relationship’s longevity. Couples whose love for one another keeps them enchanted have relationships that stand the test of time. In these happy marriages, each partner tends to see the spouse as his or her best self. And over time, each spouse who is seen that way can grow into becoming that better self.

In other words, love isn’t blind. It’s farsighted.

Gottman, J. & Gottman J. (2024). Even healthy couples fight — the difference is how. TEDTalk.

Gottman, J. (2018). The Science of Love TEDxVeniceBeach

Fisher, H. (2021) The science of love (video)

Miller, P. J. E., Niehuis, S., & Huston, T. L. (2006). Positive illusions in marital relationships: A 13‐year longitudinal study. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32(12), 1579–1594.

Scott S. B., Rhoades, G. K., Stanley, S. M., Allen, E. S., and Markman, H. J. (2013). Reasons for divorce and recollections of premarital intervention: Implications for improving relationship education. Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice, 2(2), 131–145.

Hawkins, D. N., & Booth, A. (2005). Unhappily ever after: Effects of long-term, low-quality marriages on well-being. Social Forces, 84(1), 451–471.

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