Chapman found that the most common mistake that leads to fall and winter stages is “allowing negative emotions to dictate their behavior,” rather than focusing on positive characteristics. As a Christian, he suggests following Jesus’ life of service to others. Chapman encourages learning about your partner’s love language and practicing empathetic listening (instead of egocentric listening) to enhance understanding. Then partners can learn from their differences and appreciate them.
Like Chapman, Jed Diamond, a therapist and author, identifies stages in marriages. He has been married three times so he has both personal and professional motivations to understand why marriages fail. In our video interview, he explains the five stages of marriage and also more extensively in his book The Enlightened Marriage.28 He tells his clients that 90% of their problems have their roots in childhood, just as he was initially attracted to emotionally cold women like his mother. The unconscious hopes to heal the childhood wounds by repeating the pattern.
— I was impressed that after decades of marriage our 30 couples are still learning about each other with enjoyment. We in turn can learn from their misunderstandings and solutions, as well as from the conflict resolution methods explained by our experts since disagreements are inevitable between two imperfect humans.
What stood out for me in reviewing the research and hearing the couple’s stories is the power of our unconscious patterns, beliefs, and predispositions, like the unseen depth of the iceberg that propels it through the water. This phenomenon is explained by psychologists in the first two chapters and illustrated in stories of couples like Robin and Alvin who realized the impact of their religious upbringing on their expectations of each other or the more obvious cultural expectations when two different cultures combine. Understanding each other requires talking about feelings, which also prevents boredom.
