Amy and Nick. Just
another couple? I don’t think so. If you get Gillian Flynn's book "Gone Girl" into your hands, just read it. Then you will know what I mean.
Gillian Flynn poses a
question millions of people ask themselves. Can marriage be a real killer? The
only difference is that in the case of Nick and Amy, Gillian Flynn’s
protagonists, this isn’t meant only metaphorically.
After being hit, like so many others,
by the financial crisis of 2008, the couple moves out from New York to North
Cartage, Missouri, which happens to be Nick’s hometown. Their perfect world, or
this was what everyone else thought about them (isn’t it always so, until we
learn the truth that lurked behind the hermetically shut doors?), is shuttered
one warm summer morning, when Amy is gone missing. Signs of a struggle, an evasive husband and a plethora
of clues drive the police closer to Nick.
There’s yet another question that emerges naturally when you finish ‘Gone Girl’. How
well do you know the person you’re married to? And perhaps another one: How
well do you know yourself?
You should not despair. Gillian Flynn
(whom I’m wondering why she couldn’t fit somehow into the cinematic rendition
of her book, since she’s got the looks, with the shot below being the evidence for
that)
has a remarkable ingenuity in
drawing articulate profiles of disturbed characters, more than often to the
extreme. Not everyone is like that. The majority, to be precise, is in the
boundaries of what we call normal.
Fortunately, there’s John Gottman,
a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Washington, renowed for his breakthrough
insights on relationships.
There are thousands of articles and hundreds of
books out there on relations. However, Gottman was the first to launch a
project in his Family Research Lab, aka ‘Love Lab’, where he observed more than
650 couples over a 14-year span before writing his book ‘The seven principles for making marriage work’. Thus, the advice gleaned from it does not reside on mere
generalities but on concrete data collected from filming and recording
conversations, arguments, and body language of couples living together.
So what does professor Gottman have to say?
First off, what are the signs that you’re on the bumpy road heading for a
divorce (and Gottman’s hit rate for correctly assessing such an outcome is more
than 90%)? The kernel of Gottman’s approach is that it is not the argument per
se that leads to a divorce, but the way the couples argue. The don’ts list
includes:
- Criticism (there’s a difference between a complaint and a personal
criticism), - Contempt (expressed with sneering, eye-rolling, name-calling,
mockery and belligerence),
- Defensiveness (‘’it’s not my fault, it’s yours’’),
- Stonewalling (in 85% of marriages the man ‘’tunes out’’ refusing to
continue with the argument),
Professor Gottman refers
to these first four as the ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’ (you can imagine
how bad they are for a relationship). Next are:
- Flooding (an avalanche of verbal attacks that leads to emotional
disengagement)
- Failure of repair attempts (happy couples have the ability to say ‘Wait, I have to
stop here and calm down’, whereas unhappy ones won’t stop a heated argument
from escalating) and
- Harsh startups (‘what
begins badly, ends badly’).
If Amy and Nick had read ‘The seven
principles for making marriage work’, or had paid a visit to Gottman’s
Institute, life would be easier for them. On the downside, we probably wouldn’t
be reading about them.
All in all, I suggest you read first Gillian Flynn’s ‘Gone
Girl’ and then John Gottman’s seven principles book to find out what went wrong
with them and get an interesting insight into relationships from both the
narratives of a novelist and a psychologist.
