I'm going to teach you the five signs that a marriage is almost certain to end in divorce.

One of the keys to a fulfilling and satisfying life is a happy marriage or relationship.

It turns out, of course, that something like half of all marriages end in divorce.

It would really be useful if we could learn some skills that could help us stay married.

I, myself, have been divorced and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. It's a miserable thing for yourself and your family and your children, and it should be avoided at all costs.

But how do we avoid it?

Is there any way of predicting whether the marriage that you're in is headed for divorce, in enough time where you might be able to save it?

5 Factors That Predict Divorce

As I have posted about, there's a psychologist and marital therapist named John Gottman, who is able to watch a couple argue for just 5 minutes and predict with 90% accuracy whether they are going to get divorced. I'm going to teach you what the five signs are that predict subsequent divorce.

Interestingly, one of the things that doesn't predict divorce is the presence or absence of active listening. Now, you can look at some of my previous posts, I talk a lot about active listening. Active listening is especially important in individual therapy. The idea of active listening was really born from the therapist, Carl Rogers. It can be important when comforting friends and family members, but it doesn't turn out to be critical to making marriages succeed. A lot of marriages succeed in spite of the absence of active listening.

So what are these five factors that do predict divorce? I'm going to list them.

1. A harsh start-up.

2. The four horsemen of the marital apocalypse

3. Flooding, or feeling overwhelmed.

4. The physiological response to flooding

5. Failed repair attempts

It would take a long time to explain all of these in detail. Here, I'm just going to briefly define each of these ideas so you get a general idea of what they are. If you want to, you can go check out John Gottman's book, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.

1. A Harsh Start-Up

Gottman was looking at an argument or a disagreement discussion between a married couple. He would invite married couples into this apartment that he had, and this apartment was filled with cameras and microphones. The couple would agree to talk about a common subject of disagreement, and Gottman would record these conversations and look for these five signs in the way they argued.

The first was a harsh start-up, which is just what it sounds like. It's starting a disagreement, normally with criticism, or contempt, or ridicule, or mockery, or sarcasm, or in some other really, really negative way.

Instead of trying to gently and cooperatively bring up a topic, you bring it up by being critical, mocking, cynical, or sarcastic about the topic that you want to talk about. That's a harsh start-up. What Gottman finds is that when a disagreement begins with a harsh start-up, it has essentially no chance of leading to an amicable resolution, even if there are a lot of other attempts in the middle to try to make nice and fix things

2. The Four Horsemen of the Marital Apocalypse

The second sign is actually a set of signs, what he calls the Four Horsemen of the Marital Apocalypse. These are four particularly damaging communication behaviors that, if present, are extremely bad signs for a marriage. The four horsemen are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. I'll say a brief definition of each of them.

1. Criticism

Criticism is exactly what it sounds like. Gottman also distinguishes between a criticism and a complaint. Anytime you live with anyone for a long period of time at close quarters, there's going to be things that they do that annoy you, things that you need to or want to criticize them for. You don't like the way they chew their food. You don't like the way they leave their dishes around. You don't like the way they make the bed or fail to make the bed. There's something about the way they live that you don't like. And so there's a basis for complaining about them, because we drive each other crazy when we live at close quarters with one another.

But Gottman distinguishes between criticism and a complaint. A complaint is really a description of a behavior that bothers you that you want to change. So if it's that someone doesn't put their dishes away, or doesn't put the dishes into the dishwasher, it might be something like, "Honey, I wish you would put your dishes into the dishwasher." Or, "It drives me crazy when you don't put your dishes into the dishwasher." Or, "Would you please put your dishes in the dishwasher?" Those are all complaints about someone who doesn't put their dishes in the dishwasher. A criticism is, "You're so lazy when you don't put your dishes in the dishwasher. How hard is it to put your dishes in the dishwasher? Are you incapable of such a simple thing?"

A criticism takes a complaint and then adds what Gottman says, like, "What's wrong with you?" He says you can turn any complaint into a criticism by adding, "What's wrong with you?" So, "I wish you could put your dishes in the dishwasher after eating. What's wrong with you?" You turn a complaint about a specific behavior, which may just be a pet peeve for you, into something that's wrong with their character. Instead of being about their behavior, it becomes about them as a person and about the flaws in their character. That turns a complaint into a criticism.

2. Contempt

Contempt is an attitude that you bring to a discussion, involving sarcasm, or cynicism, or ridicule, or mockery. If you’re being really, really sarcastic in an argument with your husband or wife, or you're really cynical like they're never going to solve the problem, or you're mocking and teasing and ridiculing them, this is one of the four horsemen and it predicts very bad outcomes for your marriage.

3. Defensiveness

The third of the four horsemen is defensiveness, when your partner has accused you or made a criticism or complaint about you, and you turn it around. I'm defensive when I get into arguments sometimes. And it's not a very effective behavior because defensiveness is actually a little bit aggressive because, as Gottman says, what you're really doing when you're getting defensive is you're saying, "The problem isn't me. It's you." You're trying to turn it around on them.

4. Stonewalling

The fourth is stonewalling. What happens in an intense marital disagreement that's characterized by the harsh start-up and criticism and contempt and so on, is that eventually you just get overwhelmed, or as Gottman says, you get flooded. When you get flooded, you kind of shut down. You just want it to stop. And so you stonewall.

This is particularly common in men. Gottman actually observes that stonewalling is much more common among men than it is among women. He says there are physiological reasons for this, that men are more easily physiologically overwhelmed or reactive by this kind of argument than women, possibly for evolutionary reasons.

But in any case, when you get overwhelmed and flooded, you just withdraw. You clam up, stop talking, maybe go into another room, or look at your phone, or a book, or play a video game. You just withdraw from the interaction. That's stonewalling and it's the fourth horseman of the apocalypse.

3. Flooding

It gets a little confusing, but the Four Horsemen is the second sign that your marriage is in big trouble. The third sign is flooding, as I described before. Flooding describes this feeling of being overwhelmed or  shell-shocked by the negativity that's in the interaction, and just thinking, "This is too much." I think that you probably know what I'm talking about. If you're married, if you've been in a relationship, you know what it's like to feel flooded. It's a terrible feeling. It's a feeling of, "I can't take this anymore. It's just too much." So flooding is a very, very bad sign.

4. Physiological Response to Flooding

Flooding is related to the fourth sign that your marriage is in trouble, which is the physiological response to flooding. Gottman calls this body language in the book. I think that's kind of a bad description because what he really talks about in that section of the book is your heart rate. One of the things he does in this marriage lab is he hooks people up with monitors that can monitor their heart rate. He can see when people get flooded, they have this fight or flight reaction, which means there's a lot of adrenaline released. It's as if they're being hunted by a bear, or that their life is in danger. So they get the fight or flight hormones and their heart rate goes up dramatically.

Gottman says that he's measured heart rates in marital arguments up to 165 beats per minute, which is about as fast as my heart beats when I'm at the absolute peak of physical exertion. It's also more than double what a normal resting heart rate would be. So the fourth sign that your marriage is in big trouble is if you have this profound, physiological reaction, this fight or flight reaction, to being flooded.

5. Failed Repair Attempts

The fifth and final sign that allows John Gottman to predict the end of a marriage with 91% accuracy is what he calls failed repair attempts. You can watch my video or read my blog post about repair attempts. There, I gave multiple examples of things you could say that can turn things around. It's like metaphorically reaching out to your partner and reminding them that you love them, reminding them that you care about them, you like them, and you want to cooperate and make the marriage work. So that's a repair attempt. When things are going south, you offer an olive branch and the person accepts it.

But the fifth sign that your marriage is not likely going to succeed is that these repair attempts continually fail. That is, you or your partner offer these olive branches and the other partner refuses them. Repair attempts are offered but not accepted, or they fail for other reasons.

Summary

That's it. Five signs that your marriage is in big trouble. A harsh start-up, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, flooding, physiological response to flooding, and finally, failed repair attempts.

Now, if you have these signs, it's extremely concerning for the status of your marriage. Your marriage is likely to be in significant trouble. And if you have these five signs in your marriage, you probably already know that your marriage is in trouble.

But the rest of Gottman's book talks about what you can do to try and save your marriage. And it's more than just active listening, talking about each other's feelings. It's actually building a foundation of friendship for your marriage by getting to know one another. You can buy it using my affiliate link under the “Relationships“ tab on the Recommended Readings page. Thanks so much.