¶ … Marriage Work is a New York Times best-selling book by John Gottman, a psychotherapist, researcher, and award-winning author. The book focuses on the stability of marriages, outlining how couples can build lasting, harmonious relationships. Gottman's in-depth research on relationships focuses on the key behavioral predictors of divorce, which he calls "The Four Horsemen": Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling. He notes that relationship counseling often focuses on improved communication, and couples who fair best are those that have strong coping skills such as self-soothing abilities. He also stresses that couples with a "high negative sentiment" in their relationships typically can not build better rapport through communication alone, and should, thus, focus on building positive sentiment, shared experiences, and resolving basic, solvable problems (Gottman, J. And Silver, N., 2000). Overview

As the title suggests, Gottman's book outlines seven key tools to build positive rapport and minimize the negative issues that often place couples at odds. Instead of asking couples to discuss their anger or resentments, Gottman encourages couples to overcome "gridlock" by solving concrete problems and "turning towards each other," to refocus on the aspects that they respect and enjoy in each other. Gottman also urges couples to control "flooding," a term he uses to describe highly emotional conflicts. He makes a very convincing argument that relationships with frequent episodes of "flooding" often leave partners feeling overwhelmed by resentments and discord. The seven key tools presented in Gottman's book include the following:

Enhance Your Love Maps?: Discuss key points in your marriage including accomplishments, shared memories, and future goals.

Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration: A sincere level of respect and admiration can help partners accept and cope with inevitable personal flaws. Focusing on...

Small daily efforts to display affection and humor help solidify positive rapport.
Let Your Partner Influence You: The most fulfilling marriages are those in which partners share equal responsibility and decision-making is a team process.

Solve Your Solvable Problems: Resolving conflict involves five steps: soften how you initiate communication, learn to make and receive "repair attempts," soothe or calm yourself and each other, and compromise and be tolerant of each other's faults.

Overcome Gridlock: Moving past "gridlock" doesn't mean solving the problem, but rather moving from conflict to dialogue.

Create Shared Meaning?: Create dialogue in which you can speak openly and respectfully about your values and dreams (Gottman, J. And Silver, N., 2000).

The book also provides exercises that couples can complete together, giving them more insight on each of these seven points. For example, he offers a lengthy quiz in which couples review their household responsibilities and carefully assess which responsibilities are shared. This offers couples the opportunity to restructure the workload, but it also allows partners to develop more of an appreciation for what each individual is offering in the relationship in terms of day-to-day work and task completion (Gottman, J. And Silver, N., 2000).

Gottman's book offers married couples a guide to work through key issues, starting with a review of the couple's shared history. This process helps couples reflect, offering them an opportunity to revisit important factors that may have brought them together in the first place. Couples can also use the exercises to identify what role Gottman's "Four Horsemen" are playing in their communication patterns. For example, if a…