Have you ever broken up with someone? Or rather, have you ever contemplated breaking up with someone? If your answer is yes, then you may be familiar with this line of thinking, “I hate the way he … and … and I really can’t stand it when he…. BUT, he is really awesome in so many ways. He is … and … and he makes me … What do I do?!?!?”

If you ask John Gottman, professor of psychology at the University of Washington, he would have given you a pretty good answer without even having had met you or your S.O. Well, let me rephrase. He wouldn’t tell you what you should do, but what is likely to happen, as in whether the two of you will end up staying together in the years to come. After having studied over three thousand couples, Gottman is able to predict with 95% accuracy whether a couple will stay together. The key, according to him, lies in the ratio of positive vs. negative interactions. He found that in order for a relationship to be stable, positive interactions have to outnumber negative interactions by a factor of 5 to 1. For couples that fall short of this ratio, the relationship tends to spiral into negativity and eventually end in breakup.

Contrary to popular belief, Gottman found that a couple doesn’t necessarily have to be excellent communicators who always work out their problems calmly and agreeably. A volatile couple can have a great relationship too because the heated arguments and screaming fights are often offset by passionate makeups and uproarious good times. In contrast, an avoidant couple may rarely confront their differences head-on — they simply agree to disagree. But, these couples tend to lead separate lives and are often more reserved in their expressions of affection for one another. In their own way, they can also strike the 5:1 balance and be pretty happy together. The problem comes when a volatile person dates an avoidant person. In these cases, the avoidant partner would often feel attacked and picked on while the volatile partner would experience a lot of frustration, since from their perspective, their partner is always running away from the problems and never seems to face things head on.

In his book Why Marriages Succeed or Fail, Gottman gives solid advice to help couples fight in a more compatible manner. After all,

total negativity = amount of negativity generated by a fight x fight frequency.

Therefore, both fighting less and fighting better can reduce the total amount of negativity you experience in a relationship. By learning to fight in a more compatible way, the amount of negativity generated by a fight is reduced. When the two of you work on the problems in your relationship actively, presumably, you are able to fight less and less over time.

OK, before I start making bad Fight Club jokes, I just want to shift the topic away from negativity to positivity. I happened upon Gottman’s book a few years ago and it had fundamentally changed the way I view relationships. I used to approach relationship problems with the attitude of “leave no stone unturned”. I wanted to get to the bottom of everything. Underlying that behavior is the implicit assumption that problems in relationships need to be solved ASAP before they breed more problems in the future. There is definitely truth in that and this approach works fine a lot of the time. This belief, combined with the fact that I’m a compulsive problem solver, tend to make me focus on the negative aspects of a relationship. Until I read Gottman’s book, I had never conceived of the possibility that it might be OK to let some problems be.

The choice seems clear when you put things this way: if you can either work to decrease the problem from a 2.3 to a 2.1, or you can devote that same energy to make the amount of fun you have increase from a 4 to a 9, it’s obviously more productive to choose the latter. Personally, I’ve found new meaning in the old advice of “focus on the positive” or “just have fun.” Of course, having fun together often entails having free time and not feeling stressed out. These realizations have been shaping my life choices in the last few years, particularly now. I just wanted to share with you what I learned from Gottman’s book since it had helped me so much. The book Blink that I was reading opens with Gottman’s work in the first chapter but doesn’t go into too much detail. Gottman has a new book out that I haven’t read. It’s supposed to be really good. He also wrote a book called The Mathematics of Marriage. I just checked it out of the library. If I start posting about the trajectory of Brangelina in phase space, you will know why .