The Marriage Savers

Monday, Jan. 12, 2004 By RICHARD CORLISS AND SONJA STEPTOE
Therapist David Schnarch believes making couples more attached doesn’t help a marriage—and it kills sex
LANCE W. CLAYTON FOR TIME
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Rod and Victoria give it a try. While Victoria is speaking, Rod interjects to ask a question. That's not allowed, he's told. Later he doesn't correctly paraphrase what she said. Rod tries again. When he gets it right, Victoria smiles and says, "Yes! That's good." For a moment they have connected. But Rod is struggling to remember his role, and Victoria still feels unnatural: "Does anyone really talk like this?'' Sadoff assures her she will get better with practice. He explains that, although artificial, the technique provides a safe way for couples to talk about thorny issues. "We're after progress, not perfection," he says.

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Six months after the first session — and despite follow-up therapy with Sadoff — problems linger. "We tried, but the techniques just don't take care of the deeper issues," says Rod, who is thinking of ending the marriage. "The future of our relationship doesn't look good."

But many evaluators award PREP high marks. While two studies did not find it more effective than other methods, two others, involving a total of 210 couples, found that those who take PREP, either before marriage or after, have lower rates of breakup and divorce than couples who took a different training class or did nothing. Also, seven studies involving about 500 couples concluded that PREP participants had less negative communication for up to five years after the course. Men are particularly partial to the method.

Such results have made PREP popular around the world and in a wide range of settings, including U.S. military bases and churches. Oklahoma has embraced it as part of a $10 million government initiative to reduce divorce. That's how Shelitha and John Coleman Jr. came to PREP in November, in a Christianized version offered free at their church, G.A.P. [God's Apostolic Prophetic] Restoration Tabernacle in Oklahoma City. The Colemans' marriage of nearly two years was doing fine, but John's parents didn't seem to think so and were interfering. "They wanted me to have the same kind of marriage they had, where I'm the man and I run the whole show," explains John, 28. He and Shelitha, 29, needed a way to declare their independence without sounding rebellious.

PREP techniques helped them do that while improving their own communication. John's parents, says Shelitha, "were having trouble letting go. Our talk revealed some things about how they feel about seeing their children grow up and live on their own. Now all four of us are using PREP methods." The religious aspect of the program was important to the couple. "We make the word of God part of the foundation of our marriage," says John. "In terms of communicating, it shows up in principles about being honest with your partner about everything. When a difficult problem comes up, you shouldn't hide."

--LESSONS FROM THE LOVE LAB Heinrich Heine called marriage "the high sea for which no compass has yet been invented." John Gottman figures he has found the compass. At the Gottman Institute in Seattle, a husband and wife sit in sensor-loaded chairs with wires strapped across their chests, taped to their fingertips, clipped to their earlobes. The wires are connected to an array of computerized measuring devices that will track physiological data about them. As the couple discuss a glitch in their marriage, a technician in the next room monitors the data: heart rate, sweaty palms, the speed of blood flow. Another technician watches them on a video screen, recording facial expressions, calibrating emotional vital signs of couples during actual marital conflict. Survivor, Fear Factor — that's kid stuff. This is true reality TV.

Gottman, a clinical psychologist, has essentially distilled the art of love and war — a.k.a. marriage — into a kind of science. After 30 years of such studies inside his physiology lab, nicknamed the Love Lab, Gottman's group has developed a model that he claims can assess whether a couple are on a path to dysfunction. Now when Gottman wires up therapy clients and videotapes them, "in the first three minutes of the conflict discussion," he says, "we can predict if a couple is going to divorce." He and research partner Robert Levenson of the University of California, Berkeley, found that during arguments, couples in stable relationships have five times as many positive factors present as negative ones. "In relationships that were working, even during conflict, there was a rich climate of positive things, such as love, affection, interest in one another, humor and support. Couples in unstable unions had slightly more negative factors than positive."