By Hara Estroff Marano You and your mate have just had a fight. One of the countless minute, convoluted conversations that busy couples have every day in their push to Get Things Done, each one part spoken word, part signal code, part mind-reading, but one that suddenly flares into your own private Bosnia. A simple conversation that started out so expectantly just a second before goes off like a grenade in your hands. Couples' arguments can be so deeply mired in the minutiae of their lives that at times mates may feel like they are locked into their own special hell. But what if most times, without paying any attention, you and your spouse were sliding into a deeply carved groove, having the same argument as countless times before? The triggers may be different. Socks on the floor. A rude remark to a father-in-law. An outsize phone bill. A diaper unchanged. A puddle of orange juice on the counter. A shrug. When the atmosphere is right, no act is too small to incite hostility. In couples' myriad fights, despite our glorious individuality, we are all fighting exactly the same fight. Tolstoy, you see, got it wrong. Each couple may be unhappy in its own way, tripping over the particular furnishings of its own house, but every couple gets unhappy the exact same way and for the same reasons. We use the same words. We harden into the same positions. We feel the same alienation. And the same distress. The same processes overtake love in ways that marriage researchers now find extraordinarily predictable. Yet, it is this very fact - the ritualization of revenge - that now promises to save love. Over the past 20 years, experts have been putting our intimate relationships under the microscope, studying our private reactions both by looking at what goes on between partners and inside them: videotaping every grimace, shrug, and caress, audiotaping every expletive and sigh, and monitoring physiological reactions throughout. They've come to understand why some relationships happily endure, what can make some hellholes of unhappiness, and what, precisely, precipitates divorce, which still claims half of all first marriages, usually within the first seven years. Psychologists have seen with their own eyes that the overwhelming majority of couples start out with true love and great expectations. But mounting evidence suggests we get into trouble for a very humbling reason. We just don't know how to handle the negative feelings that, in the running of everyday lives, are the unavoidable byproduct of the differences between two people, the very differences that attract them to each other in the first place. Think of it as the friction any two bodies would generate rubbing against each other innumerable times each day. Love Survival Skills As a result, a growing number of researchers and clinicians have come to the conclusion that most unhappy couples don't so much need therapy as they do education. Education in how relationships work and in the specific skills that make them work well. "Having a good relationship is a skill," insists Howard Markman, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of Denver, a long-time marital researcher. Washington, D.C. family therapist Diane Sollee, M.S.W., agrees. "Marriage isn't a disease," she says, "you don't need therapy for it." Sollee is director of the recently formed Coalition for Marriage, Family, and Couples Education, an organization that aims to make people aware of the new information that can change the odds for marital success. "Couples need to learn a way to stay engaged - not withdraw or attack - in such a highly stressful situation," explains psychologist Sherod Miller, Ph.D., another pioneer in couples education, who practices in Colorado. This thinking embodies a sea change in the mental health world. For one, it formalizes the idea that the best way to help people is to teach them crucial psychological skills, so-called "psychoeducation." "Psychoeducation is nothing more than giving knowledge away to people so they can help themselves," says Sollee. In other words, courses aren't therapy - but they typically have a therapeutic effect. Psychoeducation also flatly rejects the medical model of illness - which sees problems as pathology - because it doesn't fit what are really normal problems of living, however much mental distress they may cause. In addition, it shifts value to prevention, so the development of problems that are costly to men, women, and children can be averted. "We haven't had the revolution we need about love," Sollee insists. "Couples don't do anything different going into marriage knowing that 50 percent of them will be divorced in a few years. They think their love is so special they'll make it. They don't realize that the survival of marriage is not about love, it's about skills. It's a skill to know how not to escalate a conflict. If it isn't working it's not that you picked the wrong person. You need smart love." For all the scientifically documentable benefits of preventing marital distress before it starts, Sollee is convinced that marital education is far and away the most romantic thing a couple can do, to stroll hand in hand into a course that will teach them how to keep their love alive. Or the best wedding present parents can give their children. Sollee has put her money where her mouth is, she has herself attended courses and given them a wedding presents to her two sons and their wives. What couples today need to make a go of relationships is not something they could readily have picked up in their family of origin. "No one has the skills because the world is changing too fast," says Miller. Until recently, when men and women entered relationships they stepped into rigid roles precast by the culture. "We didn't see how parents made decisions in an open, constructive way," he says. "In my lifetime, couples have gone from role-taking, defined along gender lines, to role-making."

Relationship Enhancement Bernard Guerney, Ph.D., then young professor of psychology at Penn State, now professor emeritus, and ever a maverick thinker, was coming to the conclusion that all psychotherapy is really psychoeducation. "The difference is whether it's consciously administered and done in a way consistent with learning theory," he says. "Therapy is simply education after a problem develops." Having concluded that it was more efficient to use couples to help each other resolve their own difficulties, he created a course called Relationship Enhancement (RE). Its starting point is empathy, or compassion-training, learning to see things from a partner's perspective. Empathy, Guerney insists, is what people are really seeking in marriage, and that expectation represents a major break with the past. "People are looking for someone to be emotionally supportive, an emotional friend, a helpmate, a soulmate. That's not the way it used to be." First and foremost in RE is empathic listening, Then comes empathic responding. Couples learn how to express themselves in an honest way that helps the other preserve self-image without invoking defensiveness. "You need to present your pain - pain the other has caused - in the context of your love so that he or she will be willing to make changes," says Guerney. "To convey one's feelings to the other is transformative to both." Guerney, who now runs the National Institute of Relationship Enhancement full time in Bethesda, Maryland, has come to see that marriage partners typically do not express their needs. Over time, they learn not to ask for what they want - while they wish their partner understood what they want. "Frustration builds, then they ask their partner for what they want - in an attack. Only that guarantees they won't get it. Hostilities worsen and partners withdraw." For Guerney, the trick is how to ask for what you want in a nonthreatening way likely to lead to cooperation. "It creates a positive cycle that keeps love alive and growing," he says. Using the X-ray as a guiding metaphor, he encourages couples to look for feelings and motives that haven't been expressed by a partner. "To do it, you have to put yourself in the other's place. It's a process of identification, not of emphasizing the differences between people. We teach people to imagine themselves as the other person. To help couples get it right, the course is coaching-intensive. Trained coaches work closely and privately with each couple, showing them what to do. "We help people realize they always have a choice in interactions as to what they do. Most people react reflexively. We slow down the process of responding so that people can see the choice and take control of the relationship." Guerney's program, like Miller's program, has undergone research to test its effectiveness. The evidence shows that while RE benefits all couples, distressed couples make the greatest gains.

Love Lessons: 6 new moves to improve your relationship Psychology Today, April 1997 Reprinted with permission from the author