Apparently empirical research has not been very successful at predicting which married couples are likely to separate/divorce and which married couples will stay together so far and only few researches have resulted in finding some indicators which could help with describing couples seeming to be at the greatest risk for martial dissolution.

Accordingly to Gottman and colleagues (Gottman, 1994; Gottman & Levenson, 1992) the way couples behave in conflict situations is more diagnostic of couple success than behavior in either pleasant or neutral interactions.

As I understand, this suggests that it is difficult to make up for negative interactions (in which speaker slopes isn’t significantly positive)  in conflict situations between spouses, even if there are positive and pleasant interactions between partners occurring as well. Read the rest of this entry »