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To: username who wrote (35443)	2/20/1998 1:34:00 AM
From: blankmind	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 61433

For a Successful Marriage, Listen to Your Wife WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Men who want their marriages to succeed should just do what their wives suggest, psychologists said Friday. John Gottman, a psychologist at the University of Washington, and colleagues said advice to engage in "active listening" and other interactive ways to resolve differences may be on the wrong track. They said couples who tried to follow such trendy advice did not have fewer divorces. "This was the biggest revelation we've had about how conflicts are best resolved in successful marriages," Gottman said in a statement. "Our analysis suggested that active listening occurred very infrequently in marital conflict resolution and its use didn't predict marital success." Gottman's team followed 130 newlyweds for six years, tracking how they handled disagreement. Many tried the "active listening" model, which calls in part for each person to re-phrase what the other has said and to indicate they are listening with responses such as "I hear what you are saying". They compared these couples to couples followed in an older study in which successful marriages were followed for 13 years. They found the people who stayed together almost never used such listening techniques. Gottman said this was because "active listening" was unnatural. "Asking that of couples is like requiring emotional gymnastics," he said. Instead, the marriages that seemed to work had one thing in common -- the husband was willing to be influenced by his wife. "We found that only those newlywed men who are accepting of influence from their wives are winding up in happy, stable marriages," Gottman said. "Getting husbands to share power with their wives by accepting some of the demands she makes is critical to helping to resolve conflict." The best predictors of divorce were what Gottman called the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse -- criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling. ^REUTERS@