Books on relationships - 7 principles that make marriage work
What You’ll Learn: That fighting is natural. That not all issues need to be resolved. That the silent treatment is often as bad (or worse) than screaming your throat out. Basically, this book is a great primer on what actually makes a relationship work.
Why It’s Good: Gottman is like the Marco Polo of relationship research. He set off into territories unknown and brought quantifiable metrics and scientific rigor to an exotic academic subject: relationships. Before Gottman, all we had was grandma wisdom and the fucked up shit that Freud said. But Gottman trail-blazed his way to some of our first solid academic answers about what makes a relationship work and what causes them to break.
Gottman is most famous for studying conflict in relationships and developing a system where he could predict whether a couple would last another five years with something like 90% accuracy. Along the way, he’s uncovered all sorts of counterintuitive findings about what makes a relationship work in the long-term. He’s great.
Gottman’s written a bunch of books but I found this to be the most accessible and best-written. It’s also his most popular. Whereas Hold Me Tight is about how to fix things once they’re broken, 7 Principles That Make Marriage Work explains how to avoid breaking things in the first place.
What Kind of Break Up It Will Prevent: A really dramatic episode involving broken dishes and dented soup cans. If it ends, you’ll know it ended for the best.
Nice one