Repair Attempts

How do you treat your spouse? How do you treat your friends? These two questions are probably both based on the reflection of the question. How does your spouse treat you? How do your friends treat you? Based on John M. Gottman’s, PH.D. book, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, friendship with your spouse is essential to a positive marriage.

            When you have built a good sound solid relationship with your spouse the dreaded arguments, fights, battles, and conflicts even become less threatening and more helpful than harmful. Gottman explains, “Rediscovering or reinvigorating friendship doesn’t prevent couples from arguing, but it does give them a secret weapon that ensures their quarrels don’t get out of hand,” (Gottman, 2015).

            One thing Gottman describes that married couples with deep friendship have is a repair attempt. Or I guess it should be said that married couples with deep friendship accept, understand or have created their own repair attempt. A repair attempt is something in which one spouse does to negate the argument from getting out of control. 

This attempt can be verbal, physical, serious or just plain silly. In Gottman’s book, the two repair attempts that he describes are both spouses just begin laughing or one sticks their tongue out at the other, both silly interpretations of repair attempts. It is important to know that with most couples there will be a repair attempt but often times the attempt is ignored by the other spouse. Gottman states, “The success or failure of a couple’s repair attempts is one of the primary factors in whether their marriage is likely to flourish or flounder. And again, what determines the success of their repair attempts is the strength of their marital friendship,” (Gottman, 2015).

            It is never too late to forge a friendship or stronger friendship with your spouse. According to Gottman who focuses his studies on what goes right in good marriages, rather than what goes wrong in bad marriages, “Bolstering your friendship is so critical in large part because it fuels the romance, passion, and great sex that we all hope marriage will provide,” (Gottman, 2015).

This is my husband and I having a little crazy fun for my birthday. Sometimes I can talk him into being pretty silly with me. It's times like this when careers, parenting, budgeting, and life is put away for a brief moment that hats come off and our friendship has the most room for development.

References

Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (2015). The seven principles for making marriage work: a practical guide from the country's foremost relationship expert. New York: Harmony Books.