This won't hurt. It'll feel like a cat's tongue," the research
coordinator said, swabbing an exfoliant on the ribs near my
heart, the same spot on which she'd drawn a little Magic Marker
X a minute before. Soon several electrodes were dangling off
my body, and the technicians left the room. My wife sat across from me, similarly wired, shoes off, legs gathered on her seat. I was a lot more nervous.Then the green light went on atop the television, and my wife said, "All right," looking up.

The issue was my failure to listen. My wife accused me of being
adoring of her, like a character in light opera, rather than being
truly attentive. She was her usual forceful self, and I danced
away from her jabs before saying crisply that I'd registered her
concern and would try to be more thoughtful.

There was a knock on the door. Ten minutes of disagreement
had flown by in a few seconds. Sybil Carrre, a director of the
Family Research Lab, stood in the doorway. "Define a word for
us: 'Uxorious.' "

"Loving your wife too much," said my wife, who had thrown the
word at me in criticism.

My wife, Cynthia, and I had crossed the country to have an
argument in Seattle because the University of Washington had
gained an international reputation for the scientific assessment of
relationships. The Love Lab, as everyone called this unit of the
psychology department, had reportedly come up with tests so
deadly that after staging a 10-minute discussion of the sort my
wife and I had just enacted, it could predict with 90 percent
accuracy if you were going to divorce.

Before exposing the hidden tissue of my marriage to the Love
Lab's X-rays, I had had to overcome some resistance in my
household. My wife at first found it mortifying to open our inner
lives to the scrutiny of scientists. Yet the idea appealed to our
vanity. My wife and I thought we had a great relationship --
knock wood -- and (secretly) held our marriage over other
people's. And, like the Love Lab itself, we were endlessly
curious about marriage; it was our subject. We had often talked
about Iris Murdoch and John Bayley's understanding, about
Leonard Woolf's role in protecting Virginia's temperament. My
wife was a keen critic of an institution into which she had twice
been recruited. Marriage, she said, was advertised falsely -- the
myth of enduring romantic love -- and its responsibilities sharply
limited a woman's growth. Mistresshood, she said, offered a
woman far more freedom. And so it was not long before
Cynthia and I grew eager to pit our literary understanding of one
of society's mysteries against the scientist's, on his turf.

e met the professor, John Gottman, the night before our
electronically monitored spat, in another of the University of
Washington's petri dishes, a Motel-6-like chamber called the
Apartment Lab. He walked in a few minutes late, his red wool
vest draped over a purple shirt, and doffed a black leather
seaman's cap to reveal a bright blue yarmulke. Gottman, a small
man of 57, had a mane of silver hair, a neatly shaved beard, a
high forehead, a potbelly and the most soulful eyes I had ever
seen.

He is a rabbi's son who trained as a mathematician at M.I.T.,
and rabbi and mathematician have reached an uneasy truce in
him. Indeed, Gottman made his reputation by bringing hard
science into a field -- the ordinary marriage -- that had long been
the province of therapists.
In 10 minutes, my wife chalked up 130 moments of Criticism. I
displayed 132 moments of Defensiveness. No Surprise, no Joy
for either of us.

Other social scientists have made empirical forays into the
analysis of romantic relationships, but Gottman is at the forefront
thanks in large part to a paper he, Carrre and two others
published in The Journal of Marriage and the Family in 1998.
The study declared that the Love Lab was able to distinguish
"happy" from "unhappy" couples through statistical analysis of
observed interactions: disagreements lasted on average five
seconds longer in the unhappy cases; successful wives were
softer in their criticisms; successful husbands were more willing
to accept their wives' influence.

"Marriages will work to the extent that they provide for soothing
of the male," the authors ventured. Females had to avoid critical
"start-up." And the males had to be willing to share power with
females by validating their concerns. Gentleness was important
to Gottman. In a recent best-selling book, he writes darkly of
the "four horsemen" of divorce: criticism, defensiveness,
contempt and stonewalling.

I found him to be enormously personable. When my wife
accused him of promoting an institution with a nearly 50 percent
failure rate, he sidestepped deftly, saying that marriage conferred
many healthful benefits. He had merely come up with primitive
maps of the interior life of marriage, like the Portuguese maps of
the world that Columbus used. "With sea dragons," he added
charmingly.
 

After that exchange, Gottman shut the Apartment Lab door on us, and we made dinner under his remote observation. For an eerie hour and a half, three cameras made their insect noises, following us around the room, and microphones at our belts
picked up our conversation. We were a little self-conscious.
When my wife plucked a crumb of cheese off my sweater, she
knew she would score well for grooming, she told me later.

Gottman's technique was to pore over the resulting videotape,
rating each spouse's "facial affect" from second to second
according to a system that categorized a wide range of emotions
-- from anger, defensiveness, contempt and belligerence to
validation, humor, joy and surprise. Still, our jaded New York
ironies ("Is this marital Apgar?" I joked at one point) seemed to
go over the heads of the West Coast audience. Later I'd see on
the scientific coding chart that we each scored 0 for Play. But for Negativity, Cynthia scored 8 -- and I scored 12. Things didn't look promising.

If the previous night's experiment was a fluid simulation of playing
house, the morning offered a more structured encounter, one
that was to be the official basis of our assessment. I got a foretaste of our conflict driving up Interstate 5 to the university when I exclaimed over the sudden appearance through the fog
of Lake Washington. My wife had been talking. She went coldly
silent and refused to finish her point.

"But I was moved -- that's where Kurt Cobain killed himself," I
said.

"It was my turn. You're like that huge fat guy from 'Saturday
Night Live' who killed himself because he didn't know what to
do when the audience went home."

"Chris Farley," I said defeatedly, and parked outside a wood-
frame building called Guthrie Annex 2.

Gottman was on the second floor. We filled out questionnaires
on marital satisfaction, then Gottman conducted an oral history,
interviewing us about our marriage and our conflicts as we sat on
a futon and cast wary glances at the office chairs on wired jiggle
pads so reminiscent of electric chairs. For a while the conversation couldn't have been more pleasant: our highly
romantic first meeting, our early years, our difficulties overcoming ethnic differences, our great intellectual rapport. But he pressed ahead for a fault line, and suddenly my wife was
crying and the silvery guru in his cable-knit sweater and Day-Glo
shirt and yarmulke was bent halfway out of his chair, asking where it hurt in the sweetest, most empathetic way you could imagine. The issue was my dismissal of my wife's insecurities as
irrational, my failure to empathize when she felt inadequate, my
inability to, as she put it, "get down behind my eyeballs."

Gottman sat up with a glimmer of pride, like a fisherman whose
reel has gone taut. We were asked to enter the Love Lab and discuss my failure of empathy, and I was to really listen this time.
Electrodes were affixed. The door was closed.

"You're uxorious in a Gilbert and Sullivan way," my wife said,
"because I don't feel like you hear me, you just love the sound of your voice. So I think, Who's he in love with?"

"Cyn -- "

"No. Seriously. I'm saying this with complete sincerity. I feel like
you have created an image which you adore and I do fuel that image but it's not me. I don't feel heard."

I often feel like a piker when my wife is describing our emotional
terrain -- so I went for the high-minded dodge.

"But don't you have an existential belief that no one listens to anybody?"

"Dr. Gottman was listening to me."

"Huh?"

"He wasn't telling me it was dumb; he wasn't telling me it wasn't
true."

"But communication is a becoming, not a being."

"And I feel like if you do listen, but then you don't do what I ask
you to do -- what is that?"

My left flank was gone. I counterattacked. "What about your
dramatic arts, are they in play today?"

The soft knock. Gottman came in with a troubled look. It appeared that something had gone terribly wrong.

"I have to do some repair," he said. He turned gravely to my wife: "You have a lot of real strong feelings about being married
and not being married. I think you took a risk and tried to let
Philip hear you. But I don't think he did."

He sat down on the futon, the rabbi in him now at the helm. "I think this is very important," he said, gazing at my poor, fragile
wife. "I felt what you are feeling. I feel it's important for him to feel it."

Well, I felt awful. In the endless siege of issues that is marriage,
this issue was a new one. My general policy in those cases is to "mull" it -- never to fold and agree. But now I was called upon to talk about it, in front of a bunch of prescriptive strangers.
Gottman wanted to lock us in for another 10 minutes. My wife
was to be less critical, me less defensive.
 

We all went out for lunch to a Thai restaurant -- my wife under
protest, as she doesn't care for Thai food. The talk was spirited.
Gottman told of the sacred cows he had taken on. He had enraged marital therapists by dismissing "active listening" -- in which partners parrot back each other's feelings -- as meaningless to a good marriage. He'd rankled fellow psychologists by studying ordinary people's issues rather than  embarking on studies of schizophrenia or other disorders.

After the meal, my wife and I got an hour off before we were to meet Gottman back at his offices. The rental car had a CD player, so we went disc shopping, then duly showed up at a second academic building, a short walk from the Love Lab.

I glimpsed a garish orange leather chair, yet another in Gottman's
spectrum of bright colors, before he gathered his papers and led
us into a conference room with a somber look on his face. My
heart began to sink. He sat down at a large table and shuffled the papers around, avoiding eye contact. My wife and I sat across from him and I looked at the photograph on the wall of Einstein riding a bicycle.

First the good news. In the Apartment Lab, there was a lot of affection, rapport. Gottman liked the way my wife had flicked the cheese off my sweater. But when we came to Friday morning, Gottman moved through our questionnaires in a clinical way. "Both of you were high on separateness rather than We-ness," he said.

"I want to know what our grade is," my wife said.

"I'm going to get to that. Phil is more happily married than you are. His score is higher than yours in marital satisfaction. You frequently wish you'd never married. This being married/not being married issue is not an easy issue. There's some sadness, some fear on Philip's part."

Then there was our demeanor during the argument. Boy, had we
done badly. In the course of our session, I'd chalked up 1 flash
of Contempt, my wife 5. She had experienced 2 moments of
Belligerence, 130 of Criticism (balanced by about 46 moments
of Low Validation). I had 11 moments of Tension -- and 132 moments of Defensiveness. No Surprise, no Joy for either of us.Not one point for Humor. "And your heartbeat went from 88 to
120," Gottman said to me. "You became very aroused."

Gottman showed us a graph that plotted the data using mathematical equations that identified the ways that spouses influenced one another. The five intersections of our lines were
"steady states." Gottman said these were the planets of a couple's solar system -- emotional zones of gravitational pull, to which couples naturally returned. Our planets were not propitious. We had met three times in negative territory, either
my wife being negative affect or myself being negative affect, or
both of us being negative affect (and only twice had we met in
dual positive). And the numbers revealed that our interaction had
strong "inertia" to stay in those places. "Neither of you is very
flexible and neither one of you is drawn to a very positive place."

The only good news was that after Gottman had performed his
"intervention," we'd both improved. "You started off quite affectionate and tender," he said approvingly to my wife. "And Phil, your heart rate is lower. It's still aroused. This is not an easy discussion for you. But you're nowhere near as defensive."

"What's our grade?" my wife demanded.

Gottman coughed.

"Zero to one hundred," she said.

"If you ignore the relationship, there's a 20 percent chance of
success."

Far to my left, I heard my wife laugh.

"But if you work on it, it's more like 80 percent. You're capable
of soothing one another and really connecting."

When I reached out to shake his hand, Gottman gave me a big
consoling hug.

We went back to the hotel and changed, to go over to the guru's
house for dinner. I was in shock. I wondered if Gottman hadn't
shone his light into deep fracture lines I was not even conscious
of. The talk of my wife's dissatisfaction reminded me of coming across her journal a few weeks back (she'd left it open by the
phone, so my snooping was legal under the Geneva Convention)
and reading the line "I can't believe how much I hate him sometimes." My wife had explained that away as a genuine but fleeting feeling. Now she held my hand in the car.

"This doesn't change my opinion of our marriage one iota," she
said. "I know the surface of the relationship better than anybody.
I know where the big old mountain is, where the crevices are.
He's not telling me anything I didn't know. But it's always helpful
to have someone validate them."

When we got to Gottman's house, a modern place with a view of Rainier, Gottman's wife, Julie, a psychologist herself, brought me wine. "After your harrowing day," she threw in, and I felt he had clued her in on the wreckage. I sat apart from my wife at dinner, too prideful to even attempt to show off our intimacy to Gottman and his wife, who seemed to look on us as star-crossed. Once, when I said that my wife and I were hard-boiled about having our marriage rutinized, Gottman corrected me. She's sensitive, he said. As if he knew her.

The Gottmans had a warm home and a happy marriage. We-ness abounded. Their daughter did some kind of cartwheel in the next room. Gottman described a friend's gravestone that said, "He Filled Our Lives With Laughter," and wondered if anyone would ever say that about him, and Julie held his hand, lovingly.

My wife and I cared too much about self-awareness to indulge in such a fishing trip, I thought. Score another point for Contempt.

We left right after dinner.

My wife slept fine. I couldn't. At 5 o'clock I got up to walk around
the Seattle harbor. The market opened and I had coffee and read through the thick file of papers Gottman had given us.

When I came back my wife was in the bathtub and gave me a
pep talk. "He doesn't really listen," she said. "He knew I didn't like Thai food and we went out for Thai food. I said that I don't like marriage and they read that as deep dissatisfaction. Well,
dissatisfaction is one of the keys on my piano. I'm not satisfied with anything. Yes, I have a lot of problems with marriage. But I love our relationship."

"Well, what's the difference?"

"Sort of the difference between religion and spirituality. I don't like the institution."

I asked her about the six "Trues" on the questionnaire as to whether she had considered divorce and such. Any more than four was a high predictor of divorce, Gottman said.

" 'Have you ever discussed divorce with a friend?' "my wife said,
recalling one question. "I don't think I know a woman who hasn't
discussed breaking up and leaving her husband with her girlfriends. Come on!"

We were back on safe ground, pride. "I'm insulted that you take so seriously the opinion of someone who's met us for an hour," my wife said. "How many people like us do you think he has in his studies? He compares himself to Columbus. Well, the biggest mistake Columbus made was calling the Indians Indians because of his frame of reference. Gottman sees us as Indians."

In the afternoon my wife and I went for a hike in the foothills of
the Cascades. By then I'd halfway recovered, and amid an unfamiliar terrain of giant firs and electric green rain-forest mosses, I was able to dissect the lab's paperwork for her.

The heart of Gottman's method was a coding of not just our facial expressions but also our statements, performed by a young technician -- and we were sophisticated people in our 40's, who between ourselves had been in therapy a million years. The
technician had, in my view, taken our honest dialogue for dissatisfaction. Looking at her code sheet, I wondered how she
could have agreed with the  statement "Husband sounds bitter,
hopeless or sad about his marriage." That reading was at the very least an interpretation. These interpretations were dressed up with hard science, but the only reference anyone had made to physiological data was to my heart rate. As Julie told me,
"When the heart rate is above 95, a person cannot cognitively process what they're hearing, consequently discussion is useless until they calm themselves down." Maybe. Still, the emphasis on calmness seemed very West Coast to me.

'If you ignore the relationship, there's a 20 percent chance of success,' Gottman told us.

Soothing was something that obviously worked for the Gottmans, but my wife and I embraced contention, volatility. The coder gave us low points on "We-ness."
What if self-knowledge and independence were higher gods than We-ness? What if you saw honest criticism from your partner as a key to your growth? There was omething prescriptive and homiletic about Gottman's system. And they  didn't
even know the meaning of "uxorious"! Moreover, the Love Lab showed a stunning indifference to a couple's sex life. There had been almost no questions about sex.

In no time, my wife and I had successfully reduced the Love Lab's 
findings to a pathetic mound of feathers. Even so, I knew I was still racking up big defensive points.

Was the psychologist alive to something I had no inkling of? Had his machines detected some creeping ailment that would knock us apart in two or three or four years, right on schedule? Some vital measure that made everything we said so much pretentious New York cross talk?

"You know, this has helped our marriage," my wife declared, stopping on the trail on the way down. "I'm damned if I'm going to get divorced. I don't want him to be vindicated."

We flew back early the next morning. At check-in, my wife
asked to be seated separately from me so she could lie down.
But the clerk said, "I'll have to seat you next to someone else,"
and my wife said, "Well, then, I'll sit next to him."

I counted that as a victory till the plane was in the air and my
wife moved to an empty row toward the rear. Now and then I
looked back, longingly