Mathematician-turned-psychologist John Gottman videotaped ordinary couples in their most ordinary moments. He followed some of the couples for more than two decades, recording who got divorced, who established parallel lives, and who stayed together more or less happily.

In the course of studying more than 3,000 couples, Gottman discovered that most of them fought, and that even the most happily married couples never resolved 69 percent of their conflicts. When they returned to his lab at four-year intervals, the issues and even the phrases were essentially the same. Only their clothing and hairstyles changed.

What was crucial, Gottman learned, wasn’t whether a couple fought, but how. Among those couples whose marriages survived well, whom Gottman and his colleagues came to call the masters of marriage, wives raised issues gently, and brought them up sooner rather than later. Neither husbands nor wives regularly became so upset with each other that their heart rates rose above 95 beats a minute. They broke rising tension with jokes, reassurance, and distractions. They didn’t escalate their arguments.

Faced with a request or complaint from their wives (and 80 percent of the complaints did come from wives), the successful husbands didn’t play king or cross their arms like rebellious teenagers. Instead they changed their behavior – doing more dishes, working fewer hours, giving more than lip service to their wives dreams, or taking an older child to the park to give an exhausted new mother a breather.

Perhaps most notable, the master couples made at least 5 positive remarks or gestures toward each other for every zinger during a fight; in calmer times, their positive-to-negative ratio was an astounding 20 to 1.

The masters of disaster in Gottman’s study group those who eventually divorced fought differently. Wives raised issues harshly especially when their husbands ignored them or put them down. (He named the wives openers harsh start-ups.) The husbands got upset more easily during arguments like these and had a harder time calming themselves down. And 94 percent of the time, conflicts that opened harshly didn’t get any better as they went along.

Rather than complaining about specifics, the wives frequently globalized their criticisms, using phrases like you never and rhetorical questions like What’s wrong with you? The husbands, for their part, frequently shut down, playing emotional possum or becoming as blank as a cement wall. The reverberation between them was so toxic that Gottman named criticism and stonewalling as two of his Four Horsemen of Marital Apocalypse. (The other two are defensiveness and contempt.) The presence of the Four Horsemen alone, he found, combined with pulse rates that rose above 95 beats per minute during a disagreement, were highly reliable predictors of divorce.

In both happy and unhappy couples, partners made plenty of subtle bids for attention, closeness, or reassurance. But the partners headed for divorce responded to each others bids only 33 percent of the time, while the happy couples response rate was 86 percent.

Finally, Gottman’s research showed him that it wasn’t only how the couple fought that mattered, but how they made up afterward what he called a repair, echoing the language of engineering. In a longitudinal study of 130 newlywed couples published in 1998, Gottman found that 83 percent of marriages initially exhibiting the Four Horsemen became stable over time, as long as the couple learned to reconcile successfully after a fight.

The workshops goal is to help us learn to imitate Gottman’s long-married master couples. The bedrock of their successful relationships, its explained, is marital friendship, built granule upon granule, through tiny rituals of courtesy, kindness, humor, and appreciation. Successful couples, have large cognitive maps of each others worlds. They’re curious about each others inner lives, and they don’t stint on expressing their appreciation for each other. When one of them makes a subtle bid for attention something as simple as “look at the pretty boats” the other one usually responds positively.

This system of mutual stroking, according to the Gottman’s model, produces positive sentiment override an emotional tipping point that allows spouses to think, in tense moments, My sweetie must be having a hard day rather than What a jerk! or He doesn’t love me. And that makes it easier to disagree without being disagreeable.

[John and Julie Gottman suggest] that instead of tackling our most upsetting issues head-on, we start obliquely, building a culture of appreciation for each other.

During the weekend, the Gottman’s explain, [we] will be taught how to put deposits in our joint emotional bank account and engender positive sentiment override. We’ll learn to soothe each other and ourselves. And finally we’ll develop ways to manage the conflicts we can’t resolve, honor each others dreams, and create a life of shared meaning.

The binder tells us there is no absolute reality in a disagreement but rather two subjective realities. We are to practice softened start-up and making I-statements.