It’s surprising that John Gottman isn’t more famous. For there probably isn’t anyone who has more interesting or valid things to say about our true national pastime—the high-impact sport of love and romance. Gottman is a well-regarded researcher of relationship dynamics. He and his wife, Julie Schwartz Gottman, are the co-founders of The Love Lab and the Relationship Research Institute. They are also the co-authors of the bestseller “Ten Lessons To Transform Your Marriage,” and their new book, “And Baby Makes Three: The Six-Step Plan For Preserving Marital Intimacy And Rekindling Romance After Baby Arrives.”%uFFFD After studying over 300 couples for 13 years, they applied their knowledge of how a baby affects a relationship into a very successful workshop called Bringing Home Baby. The new book is born of their experiences in the workshop along with Gottman’s 35 years of studying couples.
Do most couples talk about their expectations before a baby enters the picture? Do people have any clue?
John: We actually studied that by creating an oral history during pregnancy where we basically asked people so what does this mean? How’s it going to change things? Then we’d interview them later on about what the reality was and I can tell you nobody is prepared. Even the most educated people are completely unprepared for what’s going to happen.
Can people be prepared? Or better prepared? Or do you have to be in the middle of it to have a real sense of what you’re dealing with? And in this context, when do you think people should%uFFFD read a book like yours: before their baby arrives, or at some later point?
John: I’ve wondered about when was the best time because we don’t really see the decline in real satisfaction right away. It happens at around six months. It seems like that’s when reality sets in: that the no sex is not going to be temporary, and the no conversation is not going to be temporary. Suddenly, there’s a realization that life has become a long to-do list. So I think that might be the ideal time for a book like ours, around six months.%uFFFD But, in truth, reading it any point would be helpful. We found that the program [Bringing Baby Home] works when you do it in the last trimester or at any point throughout the first year.%uFFFD%uFFFD
In addition to feelings of supreme love and all the other good stuff, it seems almost inevitable that the arrival of a baby is also going to bring out the fault lines in any relationship, even in a fundamentally good relationship. Or is that just me?
John: You’re right. It turns up the volume on the troubles and the doubts in a relationship. But that’s not the only challenge:%uFFFD because there isn’t that much time or energy left to spend on romance, it becomes much more difficult to remember the beautiful parts of the relationship, the wonderful connection, the great conversations, the fun. In a very real way, the positive qualities of the relation can get lost, forgotten.%uFFFD%uFFFD%uFFFD
The subtitle of your book uses the phrases “Preserving Marital Intimacy” and “Rekindling Romance.”%uFFFD Those sound like code words for having sex.%uFFFD Is that good marketing, or is this book mostly about sex?
Julie: I think the role of the book is to gives couples some very simple nuts-and-bolts methods of coping with the stress of having a baby.%uFFFD These methods can help them deepen their relationship on every level, including sexuality.
John: It’s hard to change marriages. If you take a distressed marriage and try to make changes, like in marital therapy, you usually get very small effects and they don’t usually last. This book is a kind of intervention before you get to that point, and it can have very large effects. The book, in a way, is about prevention. Also, if there’s news in the book, the news is that men really have changed, and this is true across every social class, every racial group, and every ethnic group. Men today really want to be better fathers in a very significant way—and better partners. And so what I think our book offers are the tools for making a loving environment so that everybody’s life is enhanced—including the baby’s. For if you can improve the responsiveness of parents, the baby’s life is empowered tremendously.%uFFFD%uFFFD
A big theme in the book is establishing what you refer to as a culture of appreciation. That sounds healthy.
Julie:%uFFFD What we found in John’s early research was that the demise of a relationship%uFFFD could be predicted by the presence of what we call The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. And those are criticism, contempt, defensiveness%uFFFD and stonewalling…So we talk a lot about the culture of appreciation as a method of helping couples learn to scan the relationship for what their partner is doing right and then saying something about that in appreciation. It’s very simple concept in a way: if you reinforce a behavior, the person is going to do it more.%uFFFD
John: I’d like to share an image that came to me only recently—but it explains a lot of our observational data. Imagine a salt shaker that, instead of being filled with salt, is filled with the word yes, and all the ways of saying yes—like, good idea, oh yeah that makes sense, thank you, I’m so proud of you, etc. And you just sprinkle that across the whole interaction stretched out over time. That’s basically what a good relationship is. Now of course there is criticism sometimes, and of course there is hostility sometimes, but there’s a lot of yes sprinkled in there. So then the key question becomes: what do you have to do to have a salt shaker filled with yes?%uFFFD%uFFFD
Speaking of getting to yes, what about your book’s promise to improve martial intimacy?%uFFFD That sounds like a lot to ask of tired parents. Isn’t it enough to watch HBO together, or Grey’s Anatomy?%uFFFD%uFFFD
Julie: Is that on tonight?%uFFFD
John:%uFFFD I know.%uFFFD Everyone is worried about McDreamy. You know, we were the 17th longitudinal study of transition to parenthood. The 17th! But what we realized is that nobody had asked these couples about sex. So we asked.%uFFFD%uFFFD%uFFFD
And what did we learn?
John: First of all everybody’s sex life declines.%uFFFD About three years after the baby is born, men are wanting sex about 3 or 4 times a week, and women are still about once a week.%uFFFD So that’s a big difference. And it wasn’t there before. The baby’s had a major impact on women’s libido and it doesn’t bounce back at 9 weeks after having a baby.%uFFFD Babies change that forever.%uFFFD If you look at couples where they didn’t have a baby and they’ve been married as long, that hasn’t happened.%uFFFD And then we also found that, within that general decline for everyone, there are two types of groups: couples that basically said that “yes, the sex could be better, yes, I want it more, but it’s really pretty good and it’s gotten a lot better since the baby was born.” And another group of couples that said, “It’s just been a downhill slide.”%uFFFD
Julie: Now it’s also important to keep in mind that from John’s prior research we saw%uFFFD a very clear connection between the quality of friendship and the quality of romance, passion and good sex.%uFFFD So you could look at the fact that nearly 70 percent of all couples experience a serious decline in their overall satisfaction with the relationship after the baby arrives, and then look at the decline in sex and ask, what’s causing what here?%uFFFD And, of course, they’re intimately linked. If partners don’t feel appreciated by one another, if the friendship has eroded, if they don’t have the skills to deal with the stresses and changes in their lives since having a baby, the sex life is going to be the first thing to go—and it’s the hardest thing to bring back, because sex takes vulnerability, both for men and women and for women especially it takes some kind of emotional connection.
John: Julie is totally right about the continuum between friendship and affection and admiration and appreciation and sexuality. But the group that had better sex lives not only felt like they were better friends but they were also doing things differently in the bedroom and I think that’s very interesting and important. Those couples were doing a wide variety of sexual things–they were doing oral sex, they were masturbating to orgasm together, they were talking about their sexual fantasies, they were talking about sex, what they like—so they were pretty different from the couples who were having less sex.%uFFFD
You two obviously spend a lot of time together. Umm—are you able to apply your theories to your own relationship?
Julie: We have a wonderful time with that.%uFFFD When we make all the same mistakes that we see couples in our research make—there we are standing in our kitchen making them—we get to say things like, “And you call yourself an expert on marriage! You gotta be kidding!”%uFFFD%uFFFD
John: During the second day of our couples workshop, we process a fight that almost always is like a real fight that we recently had and Julie will cry and I’ll get defensive and act like an asshole, and then people will vote on who’s right and who’s wrong. She usually wins.
