What happy couples do differently: the science of staying close after kids
Conflict reappraisal: the 21-minute writing task that protected marriages
Over one year, some married couples spent 21 minutes in all rethinking their fights in writing, and their marriages stopped going downhill. The trick was in how they were asked to look at each fight.
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In the Chicago area, a team followed 120 married couples for two years. Every four months, each partner said how happy they were in the marriage. In the first year, the answers slid down a little each time, as they do in most marriages.
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Every four months, all of them also wrote down their biggest recent fight, just the facts. In the second year, half the couples got one extra task: three times that year, seven more minutes on that fight. That makes 21 minutes in the whole year. How they looked at the fight in those minutes was the trick.
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