Week 5- Repair Attempts

As Goddard says in his book “Drawing Heaven into Your Marriage”, “Sometimes we imagine that learning some tidy set of skills will enable us to process our partnership woes effectively. But good marriage is not about skills. It is about character.” In order to have a successful marriage we must not only having skills but we have to truly be and act a certain way, it has to be engraved in our character. As I thought of my own marriage during this week’s readings I found that my marriage has a positive sentiment override, that’s not to say we don’t argue or have conflict, but we let the positive out-weigh the negative. The indicators that have drawn me to this conclusion is we always try to think the best of each other instead of jumping to conclusions and becoming angry, we also accept each other’s repair attempts. Like I said we are definitely not perfect, and we have our problems as every couple does, but we both strive to remain positive.

In the book “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work,” Gottman explains that friendship is the most important thing in a marriage. He explains, “Rediscovering or reinvigorating friendship doesn’t prevent couples from arguing, but it does give them a secret weapon that ensures their quarrels don’t get out of hand.” A little bit later on in the book he explains what that tool is, he says, “Repair attempts are a secret weapon of emotionally intelligent couples—even though many of these couples aren’t aware that they are employing something so powerful. When a couple have a strong friendship, they naturally become experts at sending each other repair attempts and at correctly reading those sent their way.” Gottman explains that the success of repair attempts has to do with how strong the friendship is in the marriage. This is why it is so important, every marriage will have its fair share of conflict, and that doesn’t mean it is doomed to fail, the thing that marks it as unsuccessful is if those repair attempts don’t work.