Beginner's Guide to Marriage

Video Transcript

CAROLYN MCINTYRE: My name is Carolyn McIntyre. I'm a licensed clinical social worker, a certified employee assistance professional and I have training in life coaching. In this clip, we're going to cover beginner's guide to marriage. Couples often feel and wonder is there a guide on how to approach marriage and often want guidance in terms of how to keep it alive, how to keep it happy and wonder how do we handle conflict. There actually is research out there and information available to you to build on a successful marriage. Some of that research is based on information from years of videotaping and studying couples. For instance, John Gottman is a psychologist who actually videotaped couples fighting and interviewed them and asked them what they were thinking. And some of the points that he has in his research and is published in some of his books are very helpful to couples in trying to figure how do I approach a marriage and how can I make it successful now and 10 years from now and 20 years from now. One of the key points in a successful marriage is nourishing the marriage and being able to focus on nourishing the marriage on a daily basis, and what that means is that John Gottman found that couples need five positive interactions for every negative. A lot of couples just take for granted on a daily basis that things that they do for each other don't need to be pointed out or appreciated. John Gottman found that when you focus on appreciating everything that your couple does or things that you do on a daily basis, that builds what we call positive chips in the love bank, and when you have a fight, it feels like a withdrawal from that love bank. So it's important to keep in mind to build positive interactions on a daily basis. Another thing that the research found is that preventing arguments from escalating is the key to couples being able to talk through difficult issues, and what that means is that couples need ways to calm themselves and they need ways to calm their partner. So an innocent discussion that can end up in name calling, blaming, yelling, stopping out, couples need ways to calm themselves and to self-soothe and that's very important in keeping arguments from escalating. Another thing that the research points to is a couple works best when each partner works as a team in the relationship where one person is not necessarily dominating the other but both of them work together on tackling problems and talking through issues. And the other point that's really important is to keep in mind that you can't change your partner and picking at their weaknesses or focusing on their weaknesses is not going to help the couple get traction. So the thing to keep in mind in a successful marriage is to build on the strengths, build on their talents and the best things that your partner has to offer instead of picking at their weaknesses. So the five key points to remember in building a successful marriage are: focusing on positives and building on positive interactions, nourish the marriage so that it can grow, prevent arguments from escalating and instead of trying to change each other's weaknesses, focus on each other's strengths and building on the strengths.