| Relationship Remedies
Conflict resolution studies find more straight talk in gay couples
Sandy Nelson; The News Tribune, Tacoma, Washington
July 11, 2001
John Gottman thinks straight couples have a thing or two to learn from gay men and lesbians when it comes to building healthy, happy relationships.
Sharing what he's learned about successful relationships is the reason Gottman and his wife, clinical psychologist Julie Schwartz Gottman, started the Seattle Marital and Family Institute five years ago. And it's why the renamed Gottman Institute sponsored what it called the first research-based couples education program for lesbian couples in mid-June.
"Gay and lesbian relationships are the vanguard of how heterosexual relationships may be in 200 years once we get past the (crap) about male power and entitlement," Gottman said by phone from a hotel in Portland, where he was promoting his latest book, "The Relationship Cure"(co-authored by Joan DeClaire). "Heterosexuals have an enormous amount to learn ... about what relationships should be."
Gottman, a psychology professor at the University of Washington, reached these conclusions after 12 years of research into same-sex relationships with research partner Robert Levenson of the University of California at Berkeley and 28 years studying straight couples.
Gottman's techniques are more objective than most in the social sciences; he supplements subjective styles such as self-reporting with meticulously coded observations and physiological monitoring of interacting couples in his "marriage lab." And he's so confident of the results that Gottman claims he can predict with 94 percent accuracy which couples will divorce.
Gottman and Levenson knew that gay men and lesbians pair off for many of the same reasons straight people do - for romance, companionship, child-rearing. And they knew many couples face additional external pressures: rejection from homophobic friends and relatives, job discrimination and prohibitions against same-sex marriage.
What they didn't expect to find were the positive coping skills employed by gay men and lesbians. Specifically, Gottman and Levenson found that:
* Gay and lesbian couples are more positive in the face of conflict, using more affection and humor when discussing touchy topics.
* Gay and lesbian couples use fewer controlling and hostile emotional tactics. They are less belligerent, domineering and fear-mongering than straight couples. "The difference on these 'control'-related emotions suggests that fairness and power-sharing between the partners is more important and more common in gay and lesbian relationships thanin straight ones," Gottman said.
* When same-sex couples fight, they take it less personally than straight couples do. "This trend suggests that gay and lesbian partners have a tendency to accept some degree of negativity without taking it personally," Gottman said.
* Another difference between gay and straight couples was the level of physiological arousal or agitation - the elevated heartbeat and surge of adrenaline common in heated arguments. Straight couples tend to stay worked up after a conflict, said Gottman, while gay and lesbian partners were better able to calm down, soothe each other and reconnect.
* Gottman also noticed that when two women are together, "femaleness" and "female" attributes are magnified. When two men are together, male traits predominate.
In relationships, women - gay and straight - show more anger, humor, excitement and interest during a fight than gay or straight men do, he said. And women of any sexual orientation are more likely than men of any orientation to turn down the heat when a fight gets too negative.
Some of those differences were evident at the two-day workshop in mid-June, where trainers affiliated with the Gottman Institute taught more than 50 lesbian couples the principles of a successful relationship.
While the workshop was structured for couples to practice one-on-one the relationship skills they learned in large-group sessions, it wasn't long before participants started looking for help from others in the room. Such networking may be instinctive for lesbians, but it never happens in workshops geared for straight couples, Gottman said.
A show of hands revealed that half the workshop participants had been together more than 10 years and several for more than 20 years. Many were raising children together and wanted to meet with other parents to compare notes.
None of this distracted from the time couples spent together building – or rebuilding – what Gottman calls the "seven stories of a sound relationship house" and learning how to avoid "the four perilous poisons" that sabotage intimacy.
"We'll be looking for ways to improve friendship and the fondness and admiration system,"workshop presenter Cynthia Orr promised at the beginning. "Because the two things that predict separation are poor friendship and the inability to handle conflict well."
Couples warmed up by drawing "love maps" of their partners to see how much they knew and didn't know about each other's lives. Later they picked five admirable traits from a list of 75 and explained their choices to their mates.
Presenters offered ideas of how couples could open a joint "emotional bank account" to draw on in tough times. They were encouraged to create or maintain rituals to stay connected amid the demands and irritations of daily life. The tough part of any relationship is how to deal with the problems that can never be resolved, according to presenter Maureen Sawyer. Irreconcilable differences represent about 70 percent of the conflicts couples experience, Sawyer said, and knowing this "cuts down on the shame and blame."
The trick is for couples to learn how to talk about perpetual problems and avoid the gridlock that leads to frustration, entrenchment and disengagement, Sawyer said.
Not an easy task, as couples discovered on Day Two.
Even after warming up by tackling a nonvolatile problem, many couples seemed to struggle through discussion of a gridlocked issue. Some called on Orr, Sawyer or other roving counselors for help, while others tried applying what they'd just learned about de-escalating a fight, repairing damage and self-soothing.
Participants reconnected by writing mission statements and sharing them with their partners. At the end, they went home with a workbook of exercises to do.
Orr urged couples to view the workshop as "the beginning of a journey" and to trust in the maps drawn up by relationship-scientists like Gottman as they take small steps toward the new world they want their partnership to be.
By: sandy.nelson@mail.tribnet.com.
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