Month: June 2014

“Trophy Wife” Actually Rare
Donald Trump and his third wife Melania Knauss-Trump

Donald Trump and his third wife Melania Knauss-Trump

The stereotypical “trophy wife” is less common than supposed, according to a new study reported by social science researcher Elizabeth A. McClintock: “Beauty and Status: The Illusion of Exchange in Partner Selection?”, American Sociological Review, 2014; DOI: 10.1177/0003122414536391

The “trophy wife” label generally refers to a beautiful but possibly not too bright wife of a powerful or wealthy husband, with the presumption she is a “trophy” of his high status selected for her looks, and in some sense trading her looks for access to the easy life offered by marrying a high-status man.

In the study (which is pay-to-view but was reported in Science Daily) young couples were interviewed separately and rated for physical attractiveness. Good-looking men tended to be with good-looking women, and highly-accomplished men tended to mate with high-accomplishment women.

“I find that handsome men partner with pretty women and successful men partner with successful women,” says McClintock, who specializes in inequality within romantic partnerships. “So, on average, high-status men do have better-looking wives, but this is because they themselves are considered better looking–perhaps because they are less likely to be overweight and more likely to afford braces, nice clothes and trips to the dermatologist, etc. Secondly, the strongest force by far in partner selection is similarity — in education, race, religion and physical attractiveness.”

McClintock’s research shows that there is not, in fact, a general tendency for women to trade beauty for money. That is not to say trophy wife marriages never happen, just that they are very rare.

“Donald Trump and his third wife Melania Knauss-Trump may very well exemplify the trophy wife stereotype,” McClintock says. “But, there are many examples of rich men who partner with successful women rather than ‘buying’ a supermodel wife. The two men who founded Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin) both married highly accomplished women — one has a PhD and the other is a wealthy entrepreneur.”

McClintock says the trophy wife stereotype is most often wrongly-applied among non- celebrities. “I’ve heard doctors’ wives referred to as trophy wives by observers who only notice her looks and his status and fail to realize that he is good-looking too and that she is also a successful professional–or was before she had kids and left her job,” McClintock says.

McClintock’s research also indicates that, contrary to the trophy wife stereotype, social class barriers in the marriage market are relatively impermeable. Beautiful women are unlikely to leverage their looks to secure upward mobility by marriage.

Thus the stereotype would appear to be a kind of selection or detection bias: you notice the beautiful wife, assume that characteristic is why her husband selected her, but fail to notice that she is a high-status or accomplished person on her own, and that her husband is also good-looking. This is similar to the common stereotype that Prius drivers tend to drive too slowly in the left lane of freeways, based on the easy identification of a Prius and the tendency to only notice the Prius drivers that are slow.

More on Attachment and Personality Types:

What Attachment Type Are You?
Type: Secure
Type: Anxious-Preoccupied
Type: Dismissive-Avoidant
Type: Fearful-Avoidant (aka Anxious-Avoidant)
Avoidant: Emotions Repressed Beneath Conscious Level
Serial Monogamy: the Fearful-Avoidant Do It Faster
Anxious-Preoccupied: Stuck on the Dismissive?
Anxious-Preoccupied / Dismissive-Avoidant Couples: the Silent Treatment
nxious-Preoccupied: Clingy and Insecure Relationship Example
Domestic Violence: Ray and Janay Rice
Malignant Narcissists
Teaching Narcissists to Activate Empathy
Histrionic Personality: Seductive, Dramatic, Theatrical
Life Is Unfair! The Great Chain of Dysfunction Ends With You.
Love Songs of the Secure Attachment Type
On Addiction and the Urge to Rescue
Sale! Sale! Sale! – “Bad Boyfriends” for Kindle, $2.99
Controlling Your Inner Critic: Subpersonalities
“Big Bang Theory” — Aspergers and Emotional/Social Intelligence
Porn Addiction and NoFAP
Introverts in Management

“Pills and Starships” by Lydia Millet – Pseudo Science Fiction

Pills and Starships by Lydia Millet

Pills and Starships by Lydia Millet

As a reader of science fiction from age 6 (if Tom Swift books qualify, which they do), it pains me to see politicized and depressing stories for young people, promoted by a certain negative East Coast US mindset that believes technology and the future are bad things, that freedom of thought is dangerous, and that Progress is about appointing certain right-thinking types (the nomenklatura that are literate in the arts but not in the sciences) to direct everyone down the righteous path to equality and Utopia.

I also have a background in literary fiction: I have, for example, met John Updike at a Harvard writing class where he was a special guest, and experienced the joy of rejection slips with encouraging notes from the New Yorker. The New York/East Coast literary establishment — the academics, the publishers in Manhattan, the magazines that dictated tastes and high culture like the New Yorker — are in steep decline these days, and the damnable public insists on reading much more genre fiction, finding the literary novel less accessible and entertaining. Nothing makes a high-literary sort burn with resentment more than seeing self-published trash like 50 Shades of Gray and good science fiction like the Wool series route around the tasteful gatekeepers to make $millions for their authors.

Thus there is a temptation for literary authors whose sales are flagging to try to write in genres that might sell better. Unfortunately they sometimes try science fiction (which, if it is less technological but still projects a future society that runs on different principles, is sometimes called “speculative fiction.”) Being a futurist or technologist, or both, is not something most literary authors have the background for, and their lack of interest shows when they try it — generally they pick up the most hackneyed, uncreative current memes about the future and project them, mixed with their political biases, into a future world or society that is implausible to any student of technology or history.

A fine early example of this was Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which could only have been written by someone ignorant of the true American character. Somehow a people who are cantankerous and barely able to tolerate gun regulation are going to acquiesce to a fundamentalist religious dictatorship that enslaves women — really? Only an academic author would believe something so preposterous. The Wikipedia entry on the novel sets the scene:

Beginning with a staged terrorist attack (blamed on Islamic extremist terrorists) that kills the President and most of Congress, a movement calling itself the “Sons of Jacob” launches a revolution and suspends the United States Constitution under the pretext of restoring order. They are quickly able to take away all of women’s rights, largely attributed to financial records being stored electronically and labelled by gender. The new regime moves quickly to consolidate its power and reorganize society along a new militarized, hierarchical, compulsorily Christian regime of Old Testament-inspired social and religious ultra-conservatism among its newly created social classes. In this society, almost all women are forbidden to read.

This book became a bestseller and a movie, and the East Coast literati (with their paranoia about the feared Other, the fundamentalist religionists who were then getting headlines) were completely willing to believe that only one or two elections separated the US from a totalitarian religious state.

I was listening to NPR yesterday and heard an interview with author Lydia Millet about her new book, Pills and Starships. The book sounded like similar literati scare-mongering by someone of little or no scientific background, so I investigated further.

The PR blitzes legacy publishers can provide for a new book are still amazing. Not only is she getting a PR plug by those influence-peddlers at NPR for her crappy book, there are reviews in the Washington Post and the New York Journal of Books, as well as dozens of planted reviews at Goodreads. The book has climbed to around #2,000 on Amazon’s bestselling list but has only two reviews there so far, meaning the publisher was not able to game Amazon’s review system as effectively.

The world she proposes for the future (from the Amazon page):

Earth reached its ecological tipping point some years ago, and corporations now manage all aspects of life. No more babies are being born, the elderly must purchase contracts to die, and drugs (“pharma”) control a dwindling human population. Natalie’s parents have purchased a death contract, and they have one final week together. The 17-year-old must keep a journal, which she addresses to an unknown space traveler—the only place where starships come into the story. As the Bountiful Passing approaches, Nat and her rebellious younger brother, Sam, begin to make plans to save their parents, or, at the very least, to rescue themselves from the tyranny of the corps and their Death Math. A predictable plot and strained teen voice distract from the very beginning and with 90-plus pages of backstory, the real action doesn’t begin until well into the book. The ecological theme, clearly a passion of the author, unfortunately comes across as too heavy-handed and didactic in tone. An additional purchase only.—Katherine Koenig, The Ellis School, PA

Here’s her author bio from Amazon:

Lydia Millet is a novelist and short-story writer known for her dark humor, idiosyncratic characters and language, and strong interest in the relationship between humans and other animals. Born in Boston, she grew up in Toronto and now lives outside Tucson, Arizona with her two children, where she writes and works in wildlife conservation. Sometimes called a “novelist of ideas,” Millet won the PEN-USA award for fiction for her early novel My Happy Life (2002); in 2010, her story collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2008, 2011, and 2012 she published three novels in a critically acclaimed series about extinction and personal loss: How the Dead Dream, Ghost Lights, and Magnificence. June 2014 will see the publication of her first book for young-adult readers, Pills and Starships — an apocalyptic tale of death contracts and climate change set in the ruins of Hawaii.

She has no background in economics, history, or hard sciences, but with “feelings” and a literary sensibility, she is willing to project a stunningly unimaginative future designed to reinforce current public school emphasis on “climate change” and the depressing fate that awaits us all if we don’t follow “feelings” as a guide to policy. The widespread promotion of this kind of propaganda to young people might have been useful when the education establishment drenched them in optimistic technocratic futures, but now it is just piling on a Conventional Wisdom that discourages any kind of planning for a brighter future. A subversive work now would be technologically optimistic and recognize how much better the future will be than the past for most people.

There’s a place for dystopias in Young Adult fiction, for example the Hunger Games series. But they should be sharp and imaginative and realistic about how real people respond to conditions.

Here are some fragments from reviews less influenced by PR quid pro quos:

I didn’t love this book. The book is told as a journal, with the audience some unknown spacefarer on a ship somewhere out in the solar system. And for me, that’s where it doesn’t work. Okay, I understand the point of a journal, but I think Millet sticks a little too strictly to the format, telling us far more than she shows us. If anything, the beginning drags as she explains and explains the world where Nat and Sam live.

I did care about the characters, but it would have been more enjoyable for me to see things as they unfolded. Millet even describes the dialog in places, rather than recounting it — or trying to recount it — which comes across as a rookie mistake. Just when the plot was getting good, the book ended, too, which left me feeling like I’d missed something. — Dean Fetzer at LitReactor.com

… When, from beneath the glossy surface, a disturbing reality begins to emerge, Nat’s emotionally flat narration makes it hard to care. Passive and without affect, she accepts her parents’ choices and later abandons her brother during a horrendous storm with elegiac regret. Despite exposition that’s rarely interrupted by dialogue, this world’s puzzlingly out of focus, real places carelessly portrayed. The novel’s narrative conceit has Nat explaining her story to a hypothetical distant reader. Summarizing the action robs it of suspense and interest: Readers do not see the story unfold and watch characters act and interact, making it difficult for them to interpret their behavior for themselves.

Detail may be the lifeblood of fiction, but storytelling is its pumping heart; without it, this all-premise effort is DOA. — Kirkus Reviews

In other words, it’s bad fiction as well as bad science fiction. Yet it will be sold and pumped up by the ideologically-biased publishing industry, which is doing a fine job of destroying itself by promoting the dull and correct while blocking the novel and subversive works of much better authors.

For an update on this topic and the ongoing war in gaming see: YA Dystopias vs Heinlein et al: Social Justice Warriors Strike Again

For more on pop culture:

The Lessons of Walter White
“Blue Valentine”
“Mad Men”
The Morality of Glamour
“Mockingjay” Propaganda Posters
“Big Bang Theory” — Aspergers and Emotional/Social Intelligence
Real-Life “Hunger Games”: Soft Oppression Destroys the Poor
Reading “50 Shades of Grey” Gives You Anorexia and an Abusive Partner!
YA Dystopias vs Heinlein et al: Social Justice Warriors Strike Again
“Raising Arizona” — Dream of a Family

Vani Hari: “Food Babe” and Quack
Vani Hari Food Babe

Vani Hari Food Babe

Our goal here at JebKinnison.com is to give you reliable and useful information about living a high-quality life. Unfortunately others have made a good living providing misinformation designed to scare you into buying their products or giving them further attention to sell ad space; this is called “yellow journalism,” or in the health fields, quackery. While much myth and superstition is harmless, some has very real and dangerous consequences; we’re now seeing epidemics of childhood diseases like measles and whooping cough that had been almost eliminated by vaccination because some people created scare stories about vaccines and persuaded millions of parents to avoid vaccinations. Meanwhile, genetic engineering has been used to increase yields, reduce use of insecticides, and create wonderful new products like rice with natural Vitamin A, which could help end a type of Vitamin A deficiency-caused blindness among the very poor. Pseudoscience and alarmism have combined to produce a paranoid sect that, if widely followed, will turn the clock back to an era where starvation and disease were much more prevalent.

Quacks like Dr. Oz have made fortunes misleading the public. The latest example of this is Vani Hari, the “Food Babe,” who has made a career out of misleading scare stories about chemicals in common foods:

Like Mark Crislip, who recently wrote about her about her mind-numbingly stupid antivaccine post, until recently I had no idea who she was, but unfortunately, I do now. She’s photogenic and also has a talent and penchant for making her utter ignorance of chemistry and science work for her as a powerful P.R. tool that has catapulted her from an obscure food blogger to a guest on television shows such as The Doctors and that repository of all medical crankery and quackery, The Dr. Oz Show, where The Great and Powerful Oz himself praised her activities as part of the “Oz effect.” Her name is Vani Hari, but she is much better known by her blog name, The Food Babe. She’s been featured on this blog before, not surprisingly, both by Mark Crislip and Steve Novella, who dismantled her claims that microwaving food somehow destroys its nutritional value and renders it full of “toxins” and her attack on Subway for using azodicarbonamide, which she dubbed the “yoga mat chemical.”

Read the whole post for a flavorful deconstruction of Vani Hari, skillful propagandist and media manipulator.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples OrganizationsDeath by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations,  available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

 

More on Vani Hari and other modern quacks:

Vani Hari, “Food Babe” and Quack: Where the Money Comes From
Vandana Shiva: Quack
More on Quacks: “Dr. Oz” Testifies He’s a Victim!
“Parallel Science Propaganda Machine”
Mike Adams: Quack Suggests Murdering Monsanto-supporting Scientists
Cleanses and Detox Diets: Quackery
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Quack
Progressive Neighborhoods: Low Vaccination Rates Create Epidemics

For more on healthy eating, diet, and weight loss:

Getting to Less Than 10% Body Fat Like the Models – Ask Me How!
Starbucks, Jamba Juice Make You Fat
Fat Doesn’t Make You Fat. Government Guidelines Did!
‘Fed Up’ Asks, Are All Calories Equal?
Fructose: The True Villain?
More on “Fed Up”, Sugar Subsidies, and Obesity
Another Study on Diet Drinks
LeBron James Cut Carbs for Lean Look
Why We’re Fat: In-Depth Studies Under Way
Almonds: Superfood, Eat Them Daily for Heart Health
Fish Oil Supplements Ward Off Dementia
More on Diet Drinks: Best Studies Show They Aid Weight Loss
Sugared Soft Drinks: Health Risk? (and What About Diet Soda?)
Gluten-Free Diets: The Nocebo Effect
Acidic Soft Drinks and Sodas: Demineralization Damages Teeth
Fish and Fish Oil for Better Brain Health
Salt: New Research Says Too Little May Be Unhealthy
Bulletproof Coffee: Coffee, Oil, and Butter for Breakfast?

For more on worthwhile supplements and life extension habits:

Supplements and Life Extension:

Getting to Less Than 10% Body Fat Like the Models – Ask Me How!
Low-Dose Aspirin Reduces Pancreatic Cancer
Daily Aspirin Regimen Reduces Cancer Rates
Almonds: Superfood, Eat Them Daily for Heart Health
Fish Oil Supplements Ward Off Dementia
Lower Back Pain: Acetaminophen (Tylenol, Paracetamol) Useless
Cleanses and Detox Diets: Quackery
Gluten-Free Diets: The Nocebo Effect
Scams: Multi-Level Marketing, Herbalife
Fish and Fish Oil for Better Brain Health
Vitamin D: Anti-Dementia?
Salt: New Research Says Too Little May Be Unhealthy

“The Science of Happily Ever After” – Couples Communications

Happy Couple: Tigers

Happy Couples: Tigers — Shutterstock


The Gottman Institute has been studying what makes for a happy marriage for many years, and their techniques and materials are widely used in couples counselling. The Atlantic has an excellent article by Emily Esfahani Smith which describes the studies they’ve undertaken and the results — which are very simple: couples who have happy marriages are responsive to and respectful of each other’s requests for attention.

I described the basic request-response patterns in this chapter of my book. The article goes into much greater depth, and is worth study. The takeaway for my readers: the most important behavior an avoidant type can work on to increase the happiness of their relationships is to practice positive response even when their impulse is to deny response or respond negatively; and the most important behavior an anxious-preoccupied type can work on is to curb the impulse to request attention and reassurance when their partner is busy or irritated. In both cases, one needs to understand how it feels to be the other partner, and tune your request or response to their needs as well as your own. Cultivate the habit of considering your partner’s state before responding carelessly or asking for reassurance, and the relationship is much more likely to reach a happy state of mutual trust and love.

Every day in June, the most popular wedding month of the year, about 13,000 American couples will say “I do,” committing to a lifelong relationship that will be full of friendship, joy, and love that will carry them forward to their final days on this earth.

Except, of course, it doesn’t work out that way for most people. The majority of marriages fail, either ending in divorce and separation or devolving into bitterness and dysfunction. Of all the people who get married, only three in ten remain in healthy, happy marriages, as psychologist Ty Tashiro points out in his book The Science of Happily Ever After, which was published earlier this year.

If you’ve read my book, I don’t need to point out to you that about half the population has an attachment type that tends to make a happy marriage more difficult to achieve. The Secure types, about 50% of the population, are more likely to marry each other and find this kind of supportive but unintrusive communication easier. The Dismissive-Avoidant and Fearful-Avoidant tend to be less supportive and reject true intimacy, and so see requests as clingy demands; while the Anxious-Preoccupied have an excessive need for reassurance that drives them to request attention more often and with less respect for their partner’s state of mind.

From the data they gathered, Gottman separated the couples into two major groups: the masters and the disasters. The masters were still happily together after six years. The disasters had either broken up or were chronically unhappy in their marriages. When the researchers analyzed the data they gathered on the couples, they saw clear differences between the masters and disasters. The disasters looked calm during the interviews, but their physiology, measured by the electrodes, told a different story. Their heart rates were quick, their sweat glands were active, and their blood flow was fast. Following thousands of couples longitudinally, Gottman found that the more physiologically active the couples were in the lab, the quicker their relationships deteriorated over time.

But what does physiology have to do with anything? The problem was that the disasters showed all the signs of arousal—of being in fight-or-flight mode—in their relationships. Having a conversation sitting next to their spouse was, to their bodies, like facing off with a saber-toothed tiger. Even when they were talking about pleasant or mundane facets of their relationships, they were prepared to attack and be attacked. This sent their heart rates soaring and made them more aggressive toward each other. For example, each member of a couple could be talking about how their days had gone, and a highly aroused husband might say to his wife, “Why don’t you start talking about your day. It won’t take you very long.”

The masters, by contrast, showed low physiological arousal. They felt calm and connected together, which translated into warm and affectionate behavior, even when they fought. It’s not that the masters had, by default, a better physiological make-up than the disasters; it’s that masters had created a climate of trust and intimacy that made both of them more emotionally and thus physically comfortable.

The positive health benefits of a happy marriage come from the reductions in stress and worry seen when one has a trusted and respected partner there to assist. An unhappy relationship with a partner who is adversarial and undermining is worse than no relationship at all.

The study revealed the request-response dynamics of the good relationships, which tended to reinforce trust and a sense of closeness, while the bad relationships showed carelessness in both requests and responses were damaging to the relationship and could predict divorce:

Throughout the day, partners would make requests for connection, what Gottman calls “bids.” For example, say that the husband is a bird enthusiast and notices a goldfinch fly across the yard. He might say to his wife, “Look at that beautiful bird outside!” He’s not just commenting on the bird here: he’s requesting a response from his wife—a sign of interest or support—hoping they’ll connect, however momentarily, over the bird.

The wife now has a choice. She can respond by either “turning toward” or “turning away” from her husband, as Gottman puts it. Though the bird-bid might seem minor and silly, it can actually reveal a lot about the health of the relationship. The husband thought the bird was important enough to bring it up in conversation and the question is whether his wife recognizes and respects that.

People who turned toward their partners in the study responded by engaging the bidder, showing interest and support in the bid. Those who didn’t—those who turned away—would not respond or respond minimally and continue doing whatever they were doing, like watching TV or reading the paper. Sometimes they would respond with overt hostility, saying something like, “Stop interrupting me, I’m reading.”

These bidding interactions had profound effects on marital well-being. Couples who had divorced after a six-year follow up had “turn-toward bids” 33 percent of the time. Only three in ten of their bids for emotional connection were met with intimacy. The couples who were still together after six years had “turn-toward bids” 87 percent of the time. Nine times out of ten, they were meeting their partner’s emotional needs.

By observing these types of interactions, Gottman can predict with up to 94 percent certainty whether couples—straight or gay, rich or poor, childless or not—will be broken up, together and unhappy, or together and happy several years later. Much of it comes down to the spirit couples bring to the relationship. Do they bring kindness and generosity; or contempt, criticism, and hostility?

The accumulated record of sensitivity to the other’s needs either cements the bond or gradually erodes it. The habit of responding thoughtfully and positively even when interrupted or annoyed demonstrates love for the partner, while either not responding or responding negatively demonstrates contempt or indifference — this is commonly the Avoidant’s tendency. Meanwhile, the Anxious-Preoccupied are focused on their own need for constant reassurance, and over-request regardless of their partner’s state; this is as thoughtless in its way as the Avoidant’s dismissal.

Contempt, they have found, is the number one factor that tears couples apart. People who are focused on criticizing their partners miss a whopping 50 percent of positive things their partners are doing and they see negativity when it’s not there. People who give their partner the cold shoulder—deliberately ignoring the partner or responding minimally—damage the relationship by making their partner feel worthless and invisible, as if they’re not there, not valued. And people who treat their partners with contempt and criticize them not only kill the love in the relationship, but they also kill their partner’s ability to fight off viruses and cancers. Being mean is the death knell of relationships.

Kindness, on the other hand, glues couples together. Research independent from theirs has shown that kindness (along with emotional stability) is the most important predictor of satisfaction and stability in a marriage. Kindness makes each partner feel cared for, understood, and validated—feel loved. “My bounty is as boundless as the sea,” says Shakespeare’s Juliet. “My love as deep; the more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite.” That’s how kindness works too: there’s a great deal of evidence showing the more someone receives or witnesses kindness, the more they will be kind themselves, which leads to upward spirals of love and generosity in a relationship.

There are two ways to think about kindness. You can think about it as a fixed trait: either you have it or you don’t. Or you could think of kindness as a muscle. In some people, that muscle is naturally stronger than in others, but it can grow stronger in everyone with exercise. Masters tend to think about kindness as a muscle. They know that they have to exercise it to keep it in shape. They know, in other words, that a good relationship requires sustained hard work.

“If your partner expresses a need,” explained Julie Gottman, “and you are tired, stressed, or distracted, then the generous spirit comes in when a partner makes a bid, and you still turn toward your partner.”

In that moment, the easy response may be to turn away from your partner and focus on your iPad or your book or the television, to mumble “Uh huh” and move on with your life, but neglecting small moments of emotional connection will slowly wear away at your relationship. Neglect creates distance between partners and breeds resentment in the one who is being ignored.

The hardest time to practice kindness is, of course, during a fight—but this is also the most important time to be kind. Letting contempt and aggression spiral out of control during a conflict can inflict irrevocable damage on a relationship.

“Kindness doesn’t mean that we don’t express our anger,” Julie Gottman explained, “but the kindness informs how we choose to express the anger. You can throw spears at your partner. Or you can explain why you’re hurt and angry, and that’s the kinder path.”

John Gottman elaborated on those spears: “Disasters will say things differently in a fight. Disasters will say ‘You’re late. What’s wrong with you? You’re just like your mom.’ Masters will say ‘I feel bad for picking on you about your lateness, and I know it’s not your fault, but it’s really annoying that you’re late again.’”

For the hundreds of thousands of couples getting married this month—and for the millions of couples currently together, married or not—the lesson from the research is clear: If you want to have a stable, healthy relationship, exercise kindness early and often.

When people think about practicing kindness, they often think about small acts of generosity, like buying each other little gifts or giving one another back rubs every now and then. While those are great examples of generosity, kindness can also be built into the very backbone of a relationship through the way partners interact with each other on a day-to-day basis, whether or not there are back rubs and chocolates involved.

One way to practice kindness is by being generous about your partner’s intentions. From the research of the Gottmans, we know that disasters see negativity in their relationship even when it is not there. An angry wife may assume, for example, that when her husband left the toilet seat up, he was deliberately trying to annoy her. But he may have just absent-mindedly forgotten to put the seat down.

Or say a wife is running late to dinner (again), and the husband assumes that she doesn’t value him enough to show up to their date on time after he took the trouble to make a reservation and leave work early so that they could spend a romantic evening together. But it turns out that the wife was running late because she stopped by a store to pick him up a gift for their special night out. Imagine her joining him for dinner, excited to deliver her gift, only to realize that he’s in a sour mood because he misinterpreted what was motivating her behavior. The ability to interpret your partner’s actions and intentions charitably can soften the sharp edge of conflict.

“Even in relationships where people are frustrated, it’s almost always the case that there are positive things going on and people trying to do the right thing,” psychologist Ty Tashiro told me. “A lot of times, a partner is trying to do the right thing even if it’s executed poorly. So appreciate the intent.”

Another powerful kindness strategy revolves around shared joy. One of the telltale signs of the disaster couples Gottman studied was their inability to connect over each other’s good news. When one person in the relationship shared the good news of, say, a promotion at work with excitement, the other would respond with wooden disinterest by checking his watch or shutting the conversation down with a comment like, “That’s nice.”

We’ve all heard that partners should be there for each other when the going gets rough. But research shows that being there for each other when things go right is actually more important for relationship quality. How someone responds to a partner’s good news can have dramatic consequences for the relationship.

In one study from 2006, psychological researcher Shelly Gable and her colleagues brought young adult couples into the lab to discuss recent positive events from their lives. They psychologists wanted to know how partners would respond to each other’s good news. They found that, in general, couples responded to each other’s good news in four different ways that they called: passive destructive, active destructive, passive constructive, and active constructive.

Let’s say that one partner had recently received the excellent news that she got into medical school. She would say something like “I got into my top choice med school!”

If her partner responded in a passive destructive manner, he would ignore the event. For example, he might say something like: “You wouldn’t believe the great news I got yesterday! I won a free t-shirt!”

If her partner responded in a passive constructive way, he would acknowledge the good news, but in a half-hearted, understated way. A typical passive constructive response is saying “That’s great, babe” as he texts his buddy on his phone.

In the third kind of response, active destructive, the partner would diminish the good news his partner just got: “Are you sure you can handle all the studying? And what about the cost? Med school is so expensive!”

Finally, there’s active constructive responding. If her partner responded in this way, he stopped what he was doing and engaged wholeheartedly with her: “That’s great! Congratulations! When did you find out? Did they call you? What classes will you take first semester?”

Among the four response styles, active constructive responding is the kindest. While the other response styles are joy-killers, active constructive responding allows the partner to savor her joy and gives the couple an opportunity to bond over the good news. In the parlance of the Gottmans, active constructive responding is a way of “turning toward” your partners bid (sharing the good news) rather than “turning away” from it.

This advice is very simple — treat your partner like the most important person in the world to you, with the best manners you can muster. And even if you find it hard at first to habitually be kind when you are not feeling it, making the effort to fake it until it becomes a habit will pay enormous dividends in the happiness of your marriage, and the regard of everyone in your life as you treat them with more kindness and respect — because once you get in the habit, you will tend to treat everyone with more consideration.

Further reading:

My book, Bad Boyfriends: Using Attachment Theory to Avoid Mr. (or Ms.) Wrong and Make You a Better Partner, goes into greater detail on how a good communication style builds better relationships, and helps you attract the best partner for you.

Dr. John Gottman’s book (The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work) is a great guide on how to strive for secure attachment with your partner by open and positive communication combined with empathy.

More on Divorce, Marriage, and Mateseeking

Marriages Happening Late, Are Good for You
Monogamy and Relationship Failure; “Love Illuminated”
“Millionaire Matchmaker”
More reasons to find a good partner: lower heart disease!
“Princeton Mom” Susan Patton: “Marry Smart” not so smart
“Blue Valentine”
“All the Taken Men are Best” – why women poach married men….
“Marriage Rate Lowest in a Century”
Making Divorce Hard to Strengthen Marriages?
Student Loan Debt: Problems in Divorce
“The Upside of ‘Marrying Down’”
The High Cost of Divorce
Separate Beds Save Marriages?
Marital Discord Linked to Depression
Marriage Contracts: Give People More Legal Options
Older Couples Avoiding Marriage For Financial Reasons
Divorced Men 8 Times as Likely to Commit Suicide as Divorced Women
Vox Charts Millennial Marriage Depression
What’s the Matter with Marriage?
Life Is Unfair! The Great Chain of Dysfunction Ends With You.
Leftover Women: The Chinese Scene
Constant Arguing Can Be Deadly…
“If a fraught relationship significantly shortens your life, are you better off alone?
“Divorce in America: Who Really Wants Out and Why”
View Marriage as a Private Contract?
“It’s up there with ‘Men Are From Mars’ and ‘The Road Less Travelled’”
Free Love, eHarmony, Matchmaking Pseudoscience
Love Songs of the Secure Attachment Type
“The New ‘I Do’”
Unrealistic Expectations: Liberal Arts Woman and Amazon Men
Mark Manson’s “Six Healthy Relationship Habits”
“The Science of Happily Ever After” – Couples Communications
Free Dating Sites: Which Have Attachment Type Screening?
Dating Pool Danger: Harder to Find Good Partners After 30
Mate-Seeking: The Science of Finding Your Best Partner
Perfect Soulmates or Fellow Travelers: Being Happy Depends on Perspective
No Marriage, Please: Cohabiting Taking Over
“Marriage Markets” – Marriage Beyond Our Means?
Rules for Relationships: Realism and Empathy
Limerence vs. Love
The “Fairy Tale” Myth: Both False and Destructive
When to Break Up or Divorce? The Economic View
“Why Are Great Husbands Being Abandoned?”
Divorce and Alimony: State-By-State Reform, Massachusetts Edition
“Sliding” Into Marriage, Small Weddings Associated with Poor Outcomes
Subconscious Positivity Predicts Marriage Success…
Why We Are Attracted to Bad Partners (Who Resemble a Parent)