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I don’t want to sleep with the men, but I really do love the attention.’ Her partner said, ‘I knew that, and it hurts me. But then she said, ‘I think you are right. “At first,” Gottman told me, “the partner was defensive. I’ve watched you flirt and I think you love the attention.”
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Her partner upped the ante, though, saying, “That’s bullshit, I think you get off on this, on dressing provocative and on all of these double entendres. The flirty partner swore that she was only making herself attractive to men for the money. Her partner thought her behavior was threatening and obnoxious. The woman accused of being too flirty worked in a bar and made a lot of money in tips by being flirtatious and dressing provocatively. John Gottman told me about a lesbian couple he saw in his lab who were having a disagreement about whether one of them was being too flirty with men. The directness and lack of defensiveness have an added benefit: It lets the couples actually resolve their conflicts. “Can you imagine,” Julie Gottman, a clinical psychologist, chimed in, “A man saying to his pregnant wife: ‘You don’t have the kind of body right now I find most attractive in a woman?’” But my question is: Who do you think initiated sex together this morning?” The first said to his partner, “Who do you think initiated sex this morning?” His partner responded saying, “You don’t have the kind of body on a man that I find most sexually attractive.” To that, his partner said, “I know that. Gottman gave me an example of two gay men who were debating who initiates sex more. “The gay and lesbian couples,” Gottman told me, “were much more open and much more direct, particularly when talking about sex.”
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In this study, the gay and straight couples brought up the same sort of problems, but gay couples were, by a statistically significant margin, less defensive during fights and more likely to use shared humor to soften the tension of the conversation. Gottman has performed some version of this study many times and has found that couples often bring up topics like uneven division of chores, money problems and sex-usually one person wants to have more and the other person doesn’t. And gay couples have a healthier fighting style than straight couples.įor one peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Homosexuality, Gottman and his colleague Robert Levenson at the University of Washington brought straight and gay couples into Gottman’s lab and interviewed each couple separately about an issue they fought about. The key distinction between couples who ultimately stay together and those who get divorced is not how often they fight, but how they handle themselves during conflict. Some couples fight frequently and other couples avoid conflict altogether. “They are,” John Gottman told me, “a lot nicer to each other during fights.” They are finding that gay and heterosexual marriages share a lot in common in terms of why they thrive or fail, but on one of the biggest determinants of marital success-how couples fight-gay couples have an edge. Now that the Supreme Court has decided that gay marriages deserve the same rights as straight ones, it’s worth keeping in mind the findings of psychologists John and Julie Gottman, arguably the world’s leading experts on what makes relationships work.