The Spiritual Ordeal of Marriage
October 3, 2015 6:45 PM Subscribe
National Magazine Award Finalist Katy Butler describes a heartfelt experience attending the Art and Science of Love, a Gottman workshop, with her "almost husband". "I remember the cautionary words of Wendell Berry in an essay on marriage...'Some wishes cannot succeed. . . . Because the condition of marriage is worldly and it's meaning communal, no one party to it can be solely in charge. What you alone think it ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. . . . When you unite yourself with another, you unite yourselves with the unknown.'" John Gottman's well-known research on successful marriages.
Well, he made no such prediction on Wendell's marriage...
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:29 PM on October 3, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:29 PM on October 3, 2015 [4 favorites]
That's a nice description of how a workshop like that could be really helpful. I've run into some of these techniques before, and it's funny how simple they seem but how they're effective in opening conversations that can end up being surprising, or just easing bad patterns. Thanks for posting this.
posted by LobsterMitten at 9:31 PM on October 3, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by LobsterMitten at 9:31 PM on October 3, 2015 [2 favorites]
That was a lovely article, thanks for posting it. I'm going to pass it on to a friend of mine who's getting married in the spring, I think she'll really appreciate it.
Also,
posted by a car full of lions at 10:09 PM on October 3, 2015
Also,
Some wishes cannot succeed.Not All Dreams Can Come True
posted by a car full of lions at 10:09 PM on October 3, 2015
The man wrote a whole book on the mathematics of marriage (here) without knowing what cross-validation is, and is basically one of the ultimate progenitors of the Losada bullcrap in nonlinear dynamics, because he pushed nonlinear dynamics so hard. I still think he's a great clinician and a wise man, just a shit mathematician.
posted by curuinor at 10:10 PM on October 3, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by curuinor at 10:10 PM on October 3, 2015 [1 favorite]
Here's the fight about cross-validation in the accuracy statistic that I damn well knew was in the article before reading it (and lo- there it is, 91 percent accuracy and all)
posted by curuinor at 10:11 PM on October 3, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by curuinor at 10:11 PM on October 3, 2015 [4 favorites]
M Losada also notably actually cited Gottman (I thought it was just an inspiration, but no, actual cites) in his non-justifications for the absolute shit math he did in the critical positivity ratio work (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_positivity_ratio). I love dynamical systems, but I really can't say that it's useful for psychology in its current state, because inference/learning is really frigging hard, there are intractible inverse problems, you break a lot of assumptions that nearly all methods you've been using make in the destruction of ergodicity and differentiability and stuff: you have to solve these general problems, just like Rumelhart and those folks had to solve the inference problems on the multilayer perceptron before McClelland did his seminal work on past tense stuff (and started the endless fight about it).
You can do agentic stuff like Vallacher recommends a bit, and talk about stories, I guess?
This may be a derail.
posted by curuinor at 10:19 PM on October 3, 2015 [4 favorites]
You can do agentic stuff like Vallacher recommends a bit, and talk about stories, I guess?
This may be a derail.
posted by curuinor at 10:19 PM on October 3, 2015 [4 favorites]
Great piece thanks for posting.
posted by smoke at 11:38 PM on October 3, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by smoke at 11:38 PM on October 3, 2015 [1 favorite]
Losada & cross-validation fights aside, the advice Gotttman gave in his weekend seminar in Seattle that my wife and I went to 10 years ago (we're still married) was helpful. It's really common-sense advice: be kind; be responsive to your partner's attempts to be kind to you. That's really all there is to it. And he gave that advice very early in the weekend.
The rest of the seminar was concrete examples of how to follow that advice, and actual forced practice at doing it. Even small things like having a hand gesture or some kind of other non-verbal way to communicate that you are feeling stressed and cannot listen at the moment helped.
It's good to be reminded of the seminar every once in a while. I find that it really is a habit of mind, to be receptive to affection, and it's one I find it easy to fall out of.
posted by Fraxas at 2:46 AM on October 4, 2015 [12 favorites]
The rest of the seminar was concrete examples of how to follow that advice, and actual forced practice at doing it. Even small things like having a hand gesture or some kind of other non-verbal way to communicate that you are feeling stressed and cannot listen at the moment helped.
It's good to be reminded of the seminar every once in a while. I find that it really is a habit of mind, to be receptive to affection, and it's one I find it easy to fall out of.
posted by Fraxas at 2:46 AM on October 4, 2015 [12 favorites]
I've got the book and it is HARD to do the exercises. Like, putting it off for months and months hard
posted by rebent at 7:00 AM on October 4, 2015
posted by rebent at 7:00 AM on October 4, 2015
Interestingly, a friend of mine and her husband were not only participants in Gottman's Love Lab, but their relationship was used, with slight alterations, as a case study in one of his books. Their marriage was never easy or trouble-free--they were hugely different types of people, and I think a lot of people might have looked at it from the outside and wondered how they managed to stay together. They did manage to stay together for something like 20 years, until he suffered a fatal heart attack last year (perhaps because of his horrible meat-and-potatoes diet? which was one of their HUGE lifestyle differences where they wound up just agreeing to disagree!)
However, I am not sure she would have ever described the marriage as truly good, and they went through several "on the brink" phases (including the initial one that led them to Gottman in the first place). TBH I think the main reason they stayed together is that she made an effort to make the relationship work when she was able, and tried not to care when she wasn't.
posted by drlith at 8:12 AM on October 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
However, I am not sure she would have ever described the marriage as truly good, and they went through several "on the brink" phases (including the initial one that led them to Gottman in the first place). TBH I think the main reason they stayed together is that she made an effort to make the relationship work when she was able, and tried not to care when she wasn't.
posted by drlith at 8:12 AM on October 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
TBH I think the main reason they stayed together is that she made an effort to make the relationship work when she was able, and tried not to care when she wasn't.
SHE made the effort and SHE tried not to care. In other words, the marriage survived because the woman put in all the emotional labor and effort.
AAARRRGGGHHHH.
I think this is the case for many (most?) marriages, and I wish that it weren't so.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 11:10 AM on October 4, 2015 [18 favorites]
SHE made the effort and SHE tried not to care. In other words, the marriage survived because the woman put in all the emotional labor and effort.
AAARRRGGGHHHH.
I think this is the case for many (most?) marriages, and I wish that it weren't so.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 11:10 AM on October 4, 2015 [18 favorites]
> the condition of marriage is worldly and it's meaning communal, no one party to it can be solely in charge.
Anyone who goes into a marriage hoping to be totally in charge is too young to be married.
posted by jfuller at 1:59 PM on October 4, 2015
Anyone who goes into a marriage hoping to be totally in charge is too young to be married.
posted by jfuller at 1:59 PM on October 4, 2015
SHE made the effort and SHE tried not to care. In other words, the marriage survived because the woman put in all the emotional labor and effort.
Yeah, that's a depressing statistic brought up in the article too:
- women raise 80 percent of the issues in relationships
- "[...] Gottman's research on the importance of men's taking influence from their wives"
And regarding men (nature vs. nurture makes one wonder):
Yeah, that's a depressing statistic brought up in the article too:
- women raise 80 percent of the issues in relationships
- "[...] Gottman's research on the importance of men's taking influence from their wives"
And regarding men (nature vs. nurture makes one wonder):
Men respond more intensely than women to a stressor, like a gunshot; they're more likely to sustain angry thoughts after a fight; and their hearts take much more time to slow down again. Through the years, this recurrent neurological cascade can damage men's immune and cardiovascular systems. This gender difference may help explain why women often are more wiling to engage in emotionally upsetting conversations than are men.posted by fraula at 3:32 PM on October 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
Curuinor: This may be a derail.
Not at all, thanks for bringing that up! Can you explain what the flaw in the math is, in layman's terms? I'm keen to understand it.
posted by storybored at 7:57 PM on October 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
Not at all, thanks for bringing that up! Can you explain what the flaw in the math is, in layman's terms? I'm keen to understand it.
posted by storybored at 7:57 PM on October 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
It is a little weird that the predict-chance-of-divorce numbers are post-hoc. He's been doing this for a couple of decades now; you'd think he'd have done some double-blind tests with real predictions by now.
(Or has he, and I just missed it?)
posted by clawsoon at 8:40 AM on October 5, 2015
(Or has he, and I just missed it?)
posted by clawsoon at 8:40 AM on October 5, 2015
There is a temptation, when you develop a model you want to use to predict things, to test your model against the same set of days you used to develop it. Especially when the data is difficult to collect (like, involves watching hundreds of hours of video of couples arguing).
Unfortunately, this leads to models that are VERY GOOD for the data they were trained on, and much less good for other data - like, say, the real world.
Gottman, and Losada after him, have made claims about their ability to predict divorce that are probably overstated, because of the way they developed their models.
As noted above, this doesn't make them bad clinicians or bad people; just means they oversold their predictive capability.
posted by Fraxas at 9:08 AM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]
Unfortunately, this leads to models that are VERY GOOD for the data they were trained on, and much less good for other data - like, say, the real world.
Gottman, and Losada after him, have made claims about their ability to predict divorce that are probably overstated, because of the way they developed their models.
As noted above, this doesn't make them bad clinicians or bad people; just means they oversold their predictive capability.
posted by Fraxas at 9:08 AM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]
Partway through the workshop:
posted by clawsoon at 9:46 AM on October 5, 2015
At the time, I wanted just to forge ahead, like the obedient subject in the Stanley Milgram experiment who continued to administer "shocks" to an allegedly helpless fellow subject who appeared to be in pain.Heh.
posted by clawsoon at 9:46 AM on October 5, 2015
Ah, bit late to this one.
1. The Losada ratio is a complete batch of bullshit. Basically, the guy took at bunch of chaotic models that were invented to model atmospheric weather chaos (and only model the chaos of them: bigger diff eq's are typically used to model actual weather: this way, you can publish papers about it), and then said, "because this is chaotic, and we know that human relationships are chaotic, because of reasons, this will be a great model for our chaotic human relations in every detail." ... that's fine except there's an actual formal definition of chaos (positive Lyapunov exponent, sensitive dependence on initial conditions) which are fairly goddamn useless in practice because they're a bitch to measure. He didn't even try. Taking ideas, then, from fluid dynamics and saying that criticality measures something in this domain, therefore, does not follow. At all. This is fiction writing.
2. Cross-validation is a very simple concept to understand. If you have a model of a phenomenon with parameters and data that you adjusted the model's parameters to fit, you can't judge the model by the data you fit the model's parameters on BECAUSE YOU JUST ADJUSTED THE MODEL TO FIT THOSE PARAMETERS.
For example, the early neural network people got a dept. of defense grant once to detect whether a tank was in a picture or not. And they made their model, and the neural network worked fine, and it seemed to detect the tank or not. And then they tried some pictures that they didn't program their neural network on, and it was giving hilariously bad results. They figured out that instead of learning complex features like the presence of a tank or not, the neural network was learning whether the sky was blue or not, because all the tank pictures were taken on a sunny day and all the non-tank pictures were taken on a cloudy day. This phenomenon is called overfitting. The allegation is that Gottman's model is overfitting, and I, looking at the linear-ass parameters on that one, think that this is true.
posted by curuinor at 6:50 PM on October 7, 2015 [2 favorites]
1. The Losada ratio is a complete batch of bullshit. Basically, the guy took at bunch of chaotic models that were invented to model atmospheric weather chaos (and only model the chaos of them: bigger diff eq's are typically used to model actual weather: this way, you can publish papers about it), and then said, "because this is chaotic, and we know that human relationships are chaotic, because of reasons, this will be a great model for our chaotic human relations in every detail." ... that's fine except there's an actual formal definition of chaos (positive Lyapunov exponent, sensitive dependence on initial conditions) which are fairly goddamn useless in practice because they're a bitch to measure. He didn't even try. Taking ideas, then, from fluid dynamics and saying that criticality measures something in this domain, therefore, does not follow. At all. This is fiction writing.
2. Cross-validation is a very simple concept to understand. If you have a model of a phenomenon with parameters and data that you adjusted the model's parameters to fit, you can't judge the model by the data you fit the model's parameters on BECAUSE YOU JUST ADJUSTED THE MODEL TO FIT THOSE PARAMETERS.
For example, the early neural network people got a dept. of defense grant once to detect whether a tank was in a picture or not. And they made their model, and the neural network worked fine, and it seemed to detect the tank or not. And then they tried some pictures that they didn't program their neural network on, and it was giving hilariously bad results. They figured out that instead of learning complex features like the presence of a tank or not, the neural network was learning whether the sky was blue or not, because all the tank pictures were taken on a sunny day and all the non-tank pictures were taken on a cloudy day. This phenomenon is called overfitting. The allegation is that Gottman's model is overfitting, and I, looking at the linear-ass parameters on that one, think that this is true.
posted by curuinor at 6:50 PM on October 7, 2015 [2 favorites]
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