Relationship Advice, Couples Counseling to Avoid Divorce

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Nearly half of all marriages in the U.S. will end in divorce. Focusing on that statistic can be demoralizing to couples embarking on what they hope to be a lifelong, happily-ever-after, successful relationship. While the marriage failure rate is disturbing, the fact remains that half of all marriages remain intact.

What relationship advice is available in pre-marriage couples' counseling for those intent on building a successful relationship? Psychology researcher Dr. John Gottman, head of the Relationship Research Institute, has studied hundreds of couples searching for the predictors and processes of successful marriages.

Three Principles of Successful Marriages

Laura L.C. Johnson's article, "Inside the Love Lab: Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work," (Positive Psychology Today online, October 24, 2009), identified Gottman's processes underlying successful relationships.

Keeping in Touch: Gottman's first principle, which he calls Enhance Your Love Maps, may more simply be termed keeping in touch: knowing what's happening in your spouse's world, what's important, and the significant events of your spouse's past. In a similar vein, Dr. Mark Goulston, writing on Psychology Today online ("10 Habits of Happy Couples," November 14, 2009, viewed September 10, 2010), suggests a daily call to your partner, checking on how his day is going.

Nurture Fondness and Admiration: Johnson calls this a critical function of successful relationships. After the "honeymoon" phase in which partners see perfection in each other, reality sets in and each partner's human flaws and weaknesses surface. It's important to confirm love and respect for the whole person, accepting your spouse's human flaws. Goulston suggests focusing more on what your spouse does right than what he does wrong.

Turn Toward Each Other: When your spouse seeks attention or comforting, it's important to honor that need and provide it. Willingly providing what your partner requires demonstrates your commitment and the importance of the relationship. Gottman finds that rejection—especially with contempt—is a strong predictor of relationship failure.

Four More Principles of Successful Relationships

Let Your Partner Influence You: It's important to share power, decisions, and responsibility in the relationship, taking over as well as relinquishing when appropriate. Liberty Kovacs, Ph.D, describes this process a couple traverses as the third stage of marriage, the Power Struggle Control phase. Kovacs indicates this critical phase is inherent in marriage and must be successfully traversed to avoid relationship problems and divorce. Kovac's seven stages of marriage are discussed in Couple Counseling, Successful Relationship Value Personal Growth.

Solve Your Solvable Problems: This process is one of constructive problem solving. Most marriage and relationship experts agree on the importance of communication skills in preserving strong relationships. Constructive problem solving is a critical skill for couples intent on maintaining a successful marriage.

This skill is so important that Howard Markman, Ph.D., professor of psychology and head of the Center for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver, offers a pre-marriage couples counseling program (PERP) to teach constructive problem solving techniques. His statistics indicate couples learning this technique have half the divorce rate of others.

Overcome Gridlock: Some issues may arise during a relationship because each person holds strong opposing views on the topic. Discussion of this topic typically escalates to argument, finally ending in gridlock—the inability to make progress. What often follows next is one partner stalking away while the relationship falls into a frigid period characterized by lack of normal communications.

The principle here is to reach an understanding of each person's perspective, respecting your partner's right to hold an opposing view, and agreeing that this is an area of respectful, mutual disagreement.

Create Shared Meaning: Work to reach agreement on some fundamental values of the relationship and of life. Understand your partner's dreams and hopes while accepting that each other's dreams, while not always shared, are always respected.

Couples Counseling and Relationship Advice

Despite the disheartening statistics of failing marriages, nearly half of all U.S. marriages succeed. Researchers studying the characteristics of successful marriages offer these seven principles of strong and successful relationships.

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