How to not get divorced

Marriage is one of the oldest and most sacred traditions of humanity. Unfortunately, though, the odds are that you or someone you know is considering divorce.

Your friends make jokes like, “He will be a great first marriage,” but are they really even joking anymore? Personally, having just gotten married three weeks ago, I thought this was a good topic to explore statistically.

With experts citing infidelity or financial disagreements as the main reasons couples divorce, I couldn’t help but wonder if there is something deeper behind that — something that triggers self-destructive behavior in the first place.

A divorce lawyer compared marriage to buying a car — something he said that many people give more thought to than who they are going to marry. If I told you to “pick your dream car,” you might say a Lambo or a Ferrari or a Bugatti. But if I instead said to “pick the one car that you will have for the rest of your life and no other,” you might make a different choice, because the car you want when you’re single and carefree is probably different than when you’re in your 40s with a few kids in tow.  

As unromantic as that may seem, it kind of makes sense. It would be easy to get annoyed at a Ferrari — it breaks down, costs a fortune to fix, gets terrible gas mileage etc. This level of annoyance could actually start to breed contempt down the road, no matter how enamored you are at first with its speed and style.

Your bad decision about a car expires eventually, but marriage only works if it ends in death. You and your partner have to flex together through different phases of life as you evolve, each independently and together as a unit. You need someone who makes sense in all different phases of your life.

And if, like 50 percent of the U.S. population, you google questions about divorce, your search will most likely bring up the “Love Lab” of John Gottman, who claims he can predict divorce with over 90 percent accuracy after watching a five-minute taped conversation between the couple. He says that “contempt” is the most destructive part of any marriage. The eye-rolling, hostile humor, mimicking, sneering actions that illustrate contempt make the target of that contempt feel despised and worthless.

This claim brought Gottman’s Love Lab to the front of the popular culture conversation. His team taped 15 minutes of conversation between 57 couples on a contentious issue and then followed up three to six years later to see if they were still married.

The statistical fact-checking of this is a little dicey, but here is what Gottman did: He didn’t make predictions after the videotaping of who would get divorced and who would stay together. Rather, his team simply watched the tapes and labeled them for different emotions (contempt, happiness, compassion, empathy, etc.). He waited until the follow up, three to six years later when he knew the marital status of the couples and then fed the marital status information into a computer with the different emotion labels of the conversations. He told the computer (in effect) to pick out the emotions that most of the couples had that got divorced. i.e. create a formula after the outcomes are already known, not predict the future.

While potentially interesting, this result remained statistically irrelevant unless he could apply it to a new, fresh set of couples to see if it successfully predicts whether they end up divorced three to six years later. And so he eventually did that, only to find that his formula was right about 80 percent of the time.

That’s not bad, considering how high the divorce rate is. But where does this really leave us? Just ignore everything and buy a Lambo for a 20 percent chance of success?

Not exactly.  A mathematician came up with some formulas based on Gottman’s research that are not total hogwash. It has to do with something called a “negativity threshold.” To put it in layman’s terms, it measures how annoying your husband can get before you start to get super-pissed off with him.

Now, I would have imagined that a good marriage would be about not sweating the small stuff and letting things go. But in reality, the opposite turned out to be true. The couples that didn’t let anything negative go by — who overall communicated their feelings constantly — were much better off than those with a high negativity threshold.

So regardless of whether you decided to marry a Lambo or an F150, and you don’t want to get a divorce, here are the two things statistics say you can do to minimize the chances.

The first is to have a low negativity threshold. Don’t just bury it instead of getting angry — instead, communicate with your partner whenever you feel a negative emotion. The second is to show fondness and admiration for your spouse, which turns out to be Gottman’s antidote to contempt. Remind each other of how you met, when you first said “I love you,” when you got engaged. Keep alive the memories of why you got together in the first place.

Statistically speaking, when the humdrum of life takes over, it pays to take a step back and appreciate those first moments. It can have a statistically significant effect on the longevity of your marriage.

Liberty Vittert is a professor of data science at Washington University in St. Louis and the resident on-air statistician for NewsNation, a sister company of The Hill.