Talks on Love Playlist (2/5): Even healthy couples fight — the difference is how | Julie and John Gottman

**Elise Hu** (0:00)
June is LGBTQ Pride Month for many around the world. It's a time to celebrate the fight for rights and the many forms love and relationships can take. In honor of this, today we're dropping five of our favorite TED Talks from the archive on love and relationships. Happy listening.
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. I'll be honest, I don't get starstruck very easily. I do live in Los Angeles after all. But at TED 2024, there were two speakers who I just had to go say hello to when I saw them, John and Julie Gottman.

**John Gottman** (0:40)
There's John and Julie.

**Elise Hu** (0:43)
Can I just say I'm so starstruck seeing you all.

**John Gottman** (0:45)
Oh, right.

**Elise Hu** (0:46)
Big fan. You're responsible for so many of our relationships staying intact, or getting better, so thank you both. See you later.
So fan girl. I got to ask if we'll take a picture. Doctors John and Julie Gottman are world renowned psychologists and experts on healthy relationships and how to have healthy conflict. I find their work fascinating and insightful, and other TEDsters shared my feelings.

**Julie Gottman** (1:13)
We saw Dr. Gottman already walking by.

**Elise Hu** (1:16)
Yeah, I was starstruck.

**Julie Gottman** (1:18)
Yeah, I know.

**Elise Hu** (1:19)
We'll dive into this talk right after the break. Without further ado, John and Julie Gottman.

**Julie Gottman** (1:34)
So most of us think that fighting is bad for romantic relationships, right?
How many people do you know who say, hey, I had a great fight the other day? Oh yeah, my partner and I fight all the time, and we're super happy.

**John Gottman** (1:54)
52 years ago, we put love under the microscope.
Julie and I are the founders of the Gottman Institute and the Love Lab. And we've made this study of relationships our life's work. And our research tells us that fighting is good for relationships, not bad.

**Julie Gottman** (2:12)
In our lab, we saw that almost all couples fight. In fact, how they fight in the first three minutes predicts with 96% accuracy, not only how the rest of the conversation will go, but how the rest of the relationship will go, six years down the road.
My God, I know. It's terrifying, isn't it? So it's not if we fight that determines relationship success, it's how we fight.

**John Gottman** (2:49)
In fact, our researchers revealed that some fighting actually increases connection and even improves our sex life. So how do we fight right?

**Julie Gottman** (3:00)
Early on, John and his colleague, Robert Levinson, in their lab simply watched couples interacting. Sounds simple, but nobody had ever done that before.

**John Gottman** (3:13)
Over time, 3,000 couples came to the lab.
As they were being videotaped, they wore monitors that measured such things as respiration, heart rate and stress hormones. And then they had a conflict discussion, and they talked about the events of their day.

**Julie Gottman** (3:29)
Afterwards, they rated how they felt during each conversation before returning home.
They would return to the lab every year or two and repeat the same procedure. And some were followed for as long as 20 years.

**John Gottman** (3:50)
Videotapes were synchronized to the physiological data. And then in the split-screen video, second by second, we measured the couple's words, emotions, facial expressions and physiology year after year.

**Julie Gottman** (4:05)
Over time, we saw that some couples separated or divorced, some remained together unhappily, while others stayed together happily. What made the difference between the couples who were successful and the couples who were unsuccessful, or as we call them, the masters and the disasters?
The couples in our studies were all ages, sexual orientations, and ethnically diverse. After a while, just by watching a couple, we could predict what would happen with over 90 percent accuracy, what would happen in their relationship six years later, which meant we never got invited to dinner anymore.

**John Gottman** (5:02)
We found that there were three major styles of fighting. Conflict avoiders who just agree to disagree and would rather wash the dishes than argue a point.
I'm a conflict avoider.

**Julie Gottman** (5:18)
He is, believe me.
Conflict validators would bring up an issue by expressing their feelings calmly and then jumping immediately into problem solving. So think of your most patient kindergarten teacher.
Then there were the conflict volatiles. They would express their feelings intensely and very passionately. Notice I say, just fine, not bad. And then they would leap into trying to prove that they were right and their partners were wrong. Okay, so think of a very expressive basketball coach on the sidelines, or me. I'm a volatile.