Four Pillars for a Lasting Marriage

How do you keep the song in your relationship? It seems as if most couples drift apart over time. They get married, build careers, raise the children and then wake up one morning and wonder who the other is. While each person in a marriage is an individual, once you are married you become a team. How you keep the team together is everything. Marriage expert, John Gottman puts it this way:

Marriage isn’t just about raising kids, splitting chores, and making love. It can also have a spiritual dimension that has to do with creating an inner life together--a culture rich with symbols and rituals, and an appreciation for your roles and goals that link you and that lead you to understand who you are as a family (p. 261)

This is Gottman’s seventh principle. He calls it Create Shared Meaning. Before we look at the last of the seven principles, let’s remember the first six with a brief paraphrase in parentheses:

1. Enhance Your Love Maps (never stop getting to know each other)

2. Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration (stay positive)

3. Turn Toward Each Other Instead of Away (seek re-connection)

4. Let Your Partner Influence You (appreciate one another’s strengths)

5. Solve Your Solvable Problems (fix what you can fix)

6. Overcome Gridlock (learn to live with lifelong differences)

Create Shared Meaning

In this seventh principle, Gottman is moving in the direction of a deeper spiritual foundation that all marriages need to thrive. Marriage can’t just be limited to two human beings forming a deep friendship. As important as that is, there must be something transcendent. Something bigger than the marriage that gives it meaning outside of the relationship. He calls this the “Four Pillars of Shared Meaning.”

Pillar One: Rituals of Connection

Gottman says that “creating rituals in your marriage (and with your children) can be a powerful antidote to the tendency to disconnect” (p. 263). What does he mean by ritual?

A ritual is a structured event or routine that you each enjoy and depend on and that both reflects and reinforces your sense of togetherness. Most of us are familiar with rituals from childhood, whether going to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, lighting Kwanzaa candles or the menorah, sharing pumpkin pie at Grandma’s Thanksgiving, attending family reunions, etc. However, it’s common for people not to discuss what these traditions symbolize to them. In his book The Intentional Family, sociologist William Doherty highlighted the importance of couples creating rituals that are intentional and meaningful. By recognizing the ongoing value and significance of the rituals you each bring to your relationship, and the new ones you create together, you further your identity as a family. (p. 264)

Pillar Two: Support For Each Other’s Roles

The more a couple shares a similar vision of the role they play in the marriage, the deeper the connection. This is not only connected to how husband and wife view their roles with each other, it also is connected to what they value in terms of parenting and what they want to pass along to their children. Gottman is clear to say that this does not mean complete agreement on every matter. Instead, he emphasizes that there should be enough cohesion between husband and wife that they work alongside one another as a team.

Pillar Three: Shared Goals

A common vision for accomplishing deep and meaningful goals creates a deep bond between husband and wife. Raising children with specific beliefs and convictions, giving generously of time and money to special projects that serve the community, or caring for extended family as they age are all examples of significant shared goals.

Pillar Four: Shared Values and Symbols

These values and symbols are often associated with fundamental beliefs that arise out of one’s religious beliefs and commitments.

Values and beliefs form the final pillar of shared meaning in a marriage. These are philosophical tenets that guide how you wish to conduct your lives. For some people, values are deeply rooted in religious conviction. (p. 270)

In his book, Gottman provides helpful questions for a couple to determine where they need to grow according to each of these four pillars. What is most helpful is how practical the questions and exercises are. Most couples can grasp the big concepts, it's knowing how to specifically implement them that is the challenge.

Gottman and The Gospel

In this final section, Gottman is attempting to tether couples to something transcendent; something bigger than their own marriage. I find this immensely important because this is exactly what Scripture does with much greater clarity. The Apostle Paul connects the covenant of marriage to the bigger covenant relationship that each spouse has with the true and living God. He also says that marriage is a picture of Christ’s relationship with his people. Hear Paul’s familiar words in Ephesians 5:31-33:

“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery--but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

Notice how Paul goes back and forth between the marriage between spouses and God’s relationship to his people. Paul understands the priorities of the vertical and horizontal dimensions in a lasting marriage.

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

By Gottman PhD, John, Silver, Nan

Buy on Amazon

The overall strength of John Gottman’s work is the insight he has gained through hours of observation, research and reflection. He has picked up on the contours for what makes relationships work. The micro-moments of interaction between spouses is critical to the health and well-being of a marriage. This insight alone is worth pondering and acting upon.

This is where we can most learn from Gottman. It may be tempting to casually dismiss his findings and argue that the Bible has already captured what Gottman has observed. But what I have found in my own marriage and in those whom I have helped, is how easy it is to overlook the obvious. We can articulate the grand themes of Scripture and talk about a I Corinthians 13 kind of love, but most of us don’t know what that looks like in our daily interactions.

Any thoughtful Christian can see where the good news of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection intersect and add beautiful and substantive depth to what Gottman observes and offers at the level of attitudes, emotions and behaviors. We can also thank God for John Gottman for his research, insights and commitment to marriage.

Copyright © 2016 Timothy S. Lane

Two Things You Need When You Disagree With Your Spouse

Do you and your spouse seem to argue about the same issues that never get resolved? You are not alone. Even good marriages have these kinds of disagreements. In reality, all marriages have challenges. You can’t live in close proximity with another human being and not struggle to love them; and it’s the same with them as they relate to you.

John Gottman has spent a lifetime helping couples grow in their ability to love one another. In his most popular book, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, he focuses on very practical ways we can love our spouses and enjoy our marriages through what he calls Positive Sentiment Override, or PSO. The first three aspects of PSO are:

• Enhance Your Love Maps: never stop learning who your spouse is.

• Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration: make sure you focus on the positive more than the negative.

• Turn Toward Each Other Instead of Away: always try to tune into your spouse.

These first three enable a couple to build a solid friendship. Gottman has found that couples who have more positive than negative interactions and thoughts about their spouses are better able to deal with conflicts when they emerge.

Our research confirms the central role that bids play in a relationship. In our six-year follow-up of newlyweds, we found that couples who remained married had turned toward their partner’s bids an average of 86 percent of the time in the Love Lab, while those who ended up divorced had averaged only 33 percent (p.88)

With that foundation, Gottman says that you will more likely be able to navigate the challenges of marriage. He then proposes four things that are necessary for doing just that. Here are the first two:

Let Your Partner Influence You

In every relationship, there are power issues that must be acknowledged. In Genesis, immediately after the Fall, Adam and Eve entered into what some have described as the battle of the sexes. Genesis 3:16 says, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” This is describing sinful power plays between husband and wife as a result of the fall.

Gottman has observed and sees the importance of each partner sharing strengths and allowing each to influence the other:

In our long-term study of 130 newlywed couples, whom we followed for nine years, we found that, even in the first few months of marriage, men who allowed their wives to influence them had happier relationships and were less likely to eventually divorce than men who resisted their wives’ influence. Statistically speaking, when a man is not willing to share power with his partner there is an 81 percent chance that his marriage will self-destruct (p. 116).

Gottman goes on to say that no matter what your religious views are, mutual respect and learning from each other are necessary for a strong marriage. This is consistent with the appropriately understood meaning of Ephesians 5:22-33, which emphasizes serving one another within the context of marriage. The bottom line is mutual respect and a willingness to learn from one another is critical for a couple to enjoy their relationship.

Tim and Kathy Keller put it this way in their book, The Meaning of Marriage,

Whether we are husband or wife, we are not to live for ourselves but for the other. And that is the hardest yet single most important function of being a husband or a wife in marriage (p.50).

Solve Your Solvable Problems

At this point, he begins to address conflict. This comes on the heels of the first four principles. He isn’t avoiding the issue, he is saying that a couple’s ability to navigate conflict is equal to their friendship. But once he gets here, he spends four chapters providing some of the most practical advice and counsel I have read.

He first distinguishes between two types of conflict in a marriage,

Although you may feel your situation is unique, we have found that all marital conflicts, ranging from mundane annoyances to all-out wars, really fall into one of two categories: either they can be resolved, or they are perpetual, which means they will be a part of your lives forever in some form or another. Once you are able to identify and define your various disagreements, you’ll be able to customize your coping strategies, depending on which of these two types of conflict you’re having (p. 137).

Perpetual problems: make up about 69% of happy couples’ conflict (having kids, sex, money, housework, raising and disciplining kids to name a few). What happy couples are able to do is live with these differences and approach it with a sense of humor. In unstable marriages, these same problems eventually kill the relationship. Gottman calls this “gridlock.”

Solvable problems: make up the remaining 31% of conflict in a marriage. If not addressed in helpful ways, they can have a negative impact on the relationship, creating space for the four horsemen of the apocalypse (criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling). Here are the basic skills all couples need to deal with their solvable problems:

• Distinguishing between perpetual and solvable problems

• Soften your start-up

• Learn to make and receive repair attempts

• Soothe yourself and each other

• Compromise

• Process any grievances so that they don’t linger

In each of these items, you will find some practical skills that are easy to learn. He covers typical problems such as relations with in-laws, money, chores around the house, sex and becoming new parents.

I can’t stress enough how helpful these three chapters are!

Gottman and the Gospel

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

By Gottman PhD, John, Silver, Nan

Buy on Amazon

John Gottman’s research will serve you and your spouse well. If you are a helper/counselor, his material will serve well those you seek to help. I continue to find that true in my own marriage and those I minister to. Scripture confirms Gottman’s research and his astute observations. But the Christian has an additional perspective that is truly humbling, comforting and liberating. We have deeper themes of grace, mercy and forgiveness that are available to us in Christ. While skills are important, building skillful living on the foundation of the Gospel is transformational. While happy marriages are good, happy marriages where each spouse is being conformed into the likeness of Christ is much better.

Copyright © 2016 Timothy S. Lane