Men, Here Are Magic Words To Long Marriages: Yes, Dear

Husbands, forget all that psychobabble about active listening and validation.

If you want your marriage to last for a long time, the newest advice from psychologists is quite simple: Just do what your wife says. Go ahead, give in to her.

Active listening, in which one partner paraphrases the other partner's concerns - "So what I hear you saying is . . ." - is unnatural and requires too much of people in the midst of emotional conflict, University of Washington psychologist John Gottman says. "Asking that of couples is like requiring emotional gymnastics."

Gottman and his colleagues studied 130 newlywed couples for six years in an effort to find ways to predict both marital success and failure.

Couples who used such techniques were no more likely to stay together than couples who did not, they report today in the Journal of Marriage and the Family, which is published by the National Council on Family Relations.

"We need to convey how shocked and surprised we were by these results for the active-listening model," the team admitted in the article. In fact, Gottman and his colleagues have long recommended active listening to couples seeking counseling and had expected that its use would would be a predictor of success in marriages.

That it was not a predictor, he said, suggests that its widespread use in marital counseling should be abandoned.

The marriages that did work well all had one thing in common - the husband was willing to give in to the wife.

"We found that only those newlywed men who are accepting of influence from their wives are ending up in happy, stable marriages," Gottman said. The autocrats who failed to listen to their wives' complaints, greeting them with stonewalling, contempt and belligerence, were doomed from the beginning, they found.

But the study did not let wives completely off the hook. Women who couched their complaints in a gentle, soothing, perhaps even humorous approach to the husband were more likely to have happy marriages than those who were more belligerent.

Gottman's study was designed to identify the factors that contribute to a successful marriage so those might be brought into play in therapy, thereby making it more successful.

"If you want to change marriages," he said, "you have to talk about the `emotionally intelligent' husband. Some men are really good at accepting a wife's influence, at finding something reasonable in a partner's complaint to agree with."