Six Signs It’s Time to Leave
When John Gottman was asked what advice he'd give his younger self, he said, "Get out of bad relationships sooner" (The Gottman Institute, n.d.). It's an unexpected answer from the researcher most associated with keeping couples together, and it raises a practical question. How do you know you're in a bad one?
Gottman's answer came from an unlikely source: asking couples to tell the story of how they met.
How the story predicts the ending
Buehlman, Gottman, and Katz (1992) interviewed 52 married couples about the history of their relationship, from how they met to how they'd handled hard times. The researchers weren't looking for facts. They were coding how each couple told the story. Three years later, those codes predicted which couples had separated with over 94% accuracy. The sample was small and the follow-up short, so the number deserves some caution, but the pattern behind it has shaped how many couples therapists listen.
Six signs stood out.
1. The good years get rewritten. Couples rarely remember their history as mixed. They remember it as mostly good or mostly bitter. Once resentment builds past a certain point, Gottman calls the shift the "Story of Us Switch," and the happy early memories get edited to match how things feel now. A wedding once described as the best day of their lives becomes the day he got drunk and embarrassed her.
2. First impressions sour in hindsight. Ask a couple headed for divorce how they met, and you'll hear what bothered them early on. He seemed arrogant. She talked too much. The fondness that once colored those memories is gone, and the descriptions of each other turn cold.
3. "We" turns into "I." Stable couples tell their history as a joint project. Couples who split tell two separate stories that happen to overlap. In conflict, each partner argues to win, so the same fights repeat without resolution and the couple ends up gridlocked.
4. They can't describe each other anymore. Ask about a partner's current worries, friends, or hopes, and you get vague, generic answers. Gottman calls this detailed knowledge of a partner's inner world a Love Map. These couples have stopped updating theirs, usually long before either of them noticed.
5. Hard times divided them. Couples who last describe their struggles, whether a job loss, an illness, or a difficult first year with a baby, as something they survived together. Couples who split describe the same kinds of struggles as chaos, and often as the point where they started pulling apart.
6. One partner has lost faith in commitment itself. Disappointment in the relationship has spread to the whole idea of a lasting one. The partner sounds cynical about marriage in general, which tends to mean they've already started grieving this one.
What about staying for the kids?
The most common reason people give for staying in a bad marriage has data behind it, though not the kind they expect. Booth and Amato followed about 2,000 married adults for 20 years in the National Longitudinal Study of Marriage (Penn State, n.d.). When high-conflict marriages ended in divorce, the children did nearly as well as children from intact marriages on depression, well-being, and relationships with friends and family. The children hit hardest came from low-conflict marriages that ended, because they never saw it coming.
Staying for the kids, in other words, depends on the marriage. In a quiet one, it may protect them. In a marriage at war, the data gives no reason to stay on their behalf.
What to make of it
None of these signs decides anything on its own. Plenty of couples hit a rough patch where the story turns bitter for a while and then recover. What the research suggests is that the story a couple tells is a fairly honest measure of where the relationship already stands, often more honest than either partner would admit directly.
Most people in a bad relationship can hear it in how they talk about their partner. The more useful question is how long they've been telling it that way.
References
Booth, A., & Amato, P. R. (n.d.). National Longitudinal Study of Marriage [Data set]. Pennsylvania State University.
Buehlman, K. T., Gottman, J. M., & Katz, L. F. (1992). How a couple views their past predicts their future: Predicting divorce from an oral history interview. Journal of Family Psychology, 5(3–4), 295–318.
Penn State. (n.d.). Happy marriages: Studying causes and effects of divorce. https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/happy-marriages-studying-causes-and-effects-divorce
The Gottman Institute. (n.d.). 5 signs you may need to bail on your relationship, based on research. https://www.gottman.com/blog/5-signs-may-need-bail-relationship-based-research/
The Gottman Institute. (n.d.). The research: Predicting divorce from an oral history interview. https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-research-predicting-divorce-from-an-oral-history-interview/
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