Researchers aim to help couples communicate

In 2009, researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles put cameras and microphones into the homes of 30 couples to track their interactions.

The finding: The couples talked for a mere 35 minutes a week.

“It was mostly about errands,” said John Gottman, who in 1996 founded — along with his wife, Julie — the groundbreaking Gottman Institute, a relationship-research lab.

“This long, infinite to-do list and not encountering each other. They spend much of the evening in the same room. That’s what is happening in American marriages.”

The advent of texting has only worsened matters.

“A lot of couples refer to texting or email to discuss difficult things,” Julie Gottman said. “If they have a fight, they text their apologies or defenses. If they are feeling distance, they text love notes. You lose so much communication through black-andwhite words on the screen.”

In the hope of turning things around, the Gottmans have just released “Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love,” which guides new and noncommunicative couples through a series of themed dates, with accompanying, open-ended questions aimed at digging deeper and helping couples grow closer.

The Gottmans call this book — their fourth written together — “a tested program of eight fun, conversationbased dates that will result in a lifetime of understanding and commitment, whether a couple is newly in love or has been together for decades.”

The book’s chapters • “Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love” (Workman, 224 pages, $24.95) by John Gottman and Julie Schwartz Gottman

are themed, as are the dates. They start with trust and commitment and move through conflict, sex and intimacy, work and money, family, fun and adventure, growth and spirituality, and dreams.

Each chapter has conversation topics, preparation and suggestions on where to have the dates, what to wear and what to take.

To write the book, the Gottmans enlisted 300 couples who had attended their Love Lab to record their dates. Thirty-seven percent were new couples trying to determine whether this person was The One, and the rest had known each other for a long time.

The questions lack boundaries on purpose, Julie Gottman said: They are an invitation to dialogue, for couples to plunge deeper into themselves, their history and their experience, and to share that with an individual.”

When people are newly dating, she continued, they are in a mode of “image management,” but it’s superficial.

“When you go deep, it becomes a whole different level of conversation that transcends image and goes into the substance of who you really are. And that’s how folks can connect with each other and know that this is someone they can respect and care about and maybe trust later and commit to, despite their differences.”

The Gottmans hugely respect psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who died in 1997. Frankl, author of “Man’s Search for Meaning,” saw humans as “meaning makers.”

While imprisoned in a concentration camp, Frankl saw that people survived more if they had a sense of purpose and meaning that mandated they stay alive.

“We believe that as well — that every single person is a philosopher, has some kind of belief system,” Julie Gottman said. “And if they dig deep enough, they will see it and be able to articulate it in time.

So the questions in the book, she said, “are designed to take people into that realm.”

Here is the inevitable question, though: How are things in the Gottman marriage?

“They are so incredibly wonderful,” Julie Gottman said. “It’s been about 32 years, and every day we love each other more.”

But they didn’t enter the marriage as marriage gurus, she quickly added. The Gottmans learned a lot from the couples who participated in their research.

“They have been our teachers,” she said. “So we have gained wisdom from them and applied it to ourselves.”

They’ve also gained an inability to ignore couples they see bickering at a store or sitting in a restaurant in stony silence.

“I will want to race over and hand them one of our booklets,” Julie Gottman said. “John has to hold me back.”

“It’s an occupational hazard,” he said.

The Gottmans said they take an annual honeymoon, renting the same room at the same bed-and-breakfast.

During that week, they ask each other three questions: What sucked about last year? What was good about last year? What do you want next year to be like?