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More than a century ago, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote, Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
The words have become immortalized, and the unhappy story of Anna Karenina is considered one of the greatest novels ever written. Recently, however, psychologists and sociologists are starting to question the observation.
I think Tolstoy was totally wrong, said John Gottman, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle. Unhappy families are really similar to one another - there's much more variability among happy families.
Gottman and others are trying to understand why as many as one in two marriages end in divorce, and why so many couples seem to fall out of love and break apart.
Some of the most revealing answers, it turns out, come from the couples who stay together.
While conventional wisdom holds that conflicts in a relationship slowly erode the bonds that hold partners together, couples who are happy in the long term turn out to have plenty of conflicts, too. Fights and disagreements are apparently intrinsic to all relationships--couples who stay together over the long haul are those who don't let the fighting contaminate the other parts of the relationship, experts say.
Why do people get married in the first place? asked Thomas Bradbury, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles. To have someone to listen to--to have a friend, to share life's ups and downs. We want to try to draw attention to what's valuable in their relationship.
Researchers are finding that it is those other parts of relationships--the positive factors--that are potent predictors of whether couples feel committed to relationships, and whether they weather storms and stick together. As long as those factors are intact, conflicts don't drive people apart.
What we've discovered is surprising and contrary to what most people think, said Gottman, the author of The Mathematics of Marriage. Most books say it's important for couples to fight fair - but 69 percent of all marital conflicts never get resolved because they are about personality differences between couples. What's critical is not whether they resolve conflicts but whether they can cope with them.
Every couple has irreconcilable differences, agreed Diane Sollee, the founder of www.smartmarriages.com , a Web site devoted to teaching couples the skills to improve their relationships. She explained that such differences ought to be managed, instead of being grounds for separations, split-ups and divorce.
Almost 90 percent of Americans marry at some point in their lives. An overwhelming number of those who get divorced marry a second time, meaning that although they may have lost faith in a partner, they have not lost faith in the promise of the institution. At the same time, changing social mores and expectations have placed stresses on long-term relationships. Two-income couples juggle demanding jobs, and professional advancement can sometimes detract from family and intimate relationships.
Simultaneously, the rising number of women in the work force has given women the economic security to leave unhappy relationships, the sexual revolution has made sex before and outside marriage common, and the destigmatization of divorce has contributed to the phenomenon of serial monogamy.
Despite these pressures and temptations, most Americans still seek lifelong soul mates--and expectations from love and marriages have never been higher.
The juxtaposition of high expectations with the stress and cycles of relationships appears to be an important reason why many relationships don't work, said Ted Huston, a professor of human ecology and psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, who tracked 168 couples over 13 and a half years
Huston found that changes in the first two years of marriage often predicted the outcome of relationships. Almost half of divorces occur within the first seven years of marriage, according to national census data, and many of these early exiters report a decline in bliss right after marriage.
When you look at them as newly-weds, they look like they are mutually enchanted and deeply in love and a prototype of your perfectly wed couple--they hug, kiss, say 'I love you' all the time, he said. Two years later - they've lost a lot of that romance. They think, 'We once had this great romance, and now we don't.'
People have this fairly unrealistic idea: 'I have got to have bliss and it's got to stay or this is not going to work,' he said. at some level, you don't need the bliss. The Hollywood romance may not be the prelude to a long-term happy marriage.
Couples who were happy over the long term reported being content at the start of relationships and still content two years later. Some of these couples told Huston, 'I wasn't sure I was in love because I didn't have the tingly feelings you are supposed to have,' he said. They worried their feelings were positive but not intense.
