In Happy Relationships There is an Openness to Work Together

In an earlier post I mentioned the work of researcher Dr. Gottman and his insights into personal relationships after having studied thousands of married couples for the past 35 years. This is another excerpt from an interview he gave in the Harvard Business Review which I find to be very true and very enlightening:

“…one test we’ve used for years is the “paper tower task.” We give couples a bunch of materials, such as newspaper, scissors, Scotch tape, and string. We tell them to go build a paper tower that is freestanding, strong, and beautiful, and they have half an hour to do it. Then we watch the way the couples work. It’s the very simple things that determine success.

One time we had three Australian couples do the task. Beforehand, we had the couples talk on tape about each other and about a major conflict in their relationship that they were trying to resolve. So we had some data about how relatively happy or unhappy they were. When one couple who came across as happy started building their paper tower, the man said, “So, how are we going to do this?” The woman replied, “You know, we can fold the paper, we can turn the paper, we can make structures out of the paper.” He said, “Really? Great.” It took them something like ten seconds to build a tower.

The wife in an unhappily married couple started by saying, “So how are we going to do this?” Her husband said, “Just a minute, can you be quiet while I figure out the design?” It
didn’t take much time to see that this couple would run into some difficulties down the line.”