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Dr. John Gottman of The Gottman Institute has made it his life’s work to study the many aspects of marriage and to find out the skills that couples actually need to strengthen their relationships. Gottman and his colleagues studied 130 newlywed couples for six years in an effort to identify factors that predict which marriages are successful and which are not. What he found actually gave credence to the saying “Happy wife, happy life.”

Everybody seems to have some piece of marriage advice: don’t go to bed angry, don’t sweat the small stuff, and count to ten before you speak. Advice is great, especially when it works, but it can be exhausting trying to pick out the useful pieces of advice among all the counsel a couple can get. Turns out, a happy relationship is a lot simpler than that. Husband just have to give in to their wives more!

A study found that men who allow their wives to influence them have more successful marriages.

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The researchers found that men who give in to their wives because they have emotional intelligence have happier marriages and are less likely to divorce. Not only is this skill not reserved for heterosexual couples, but the research also showed that gay and lesbian couples are much better at it than straight couples.

In the study, the researchers found that marriages that were successful and worked well all had one thing in common: the husband was willing to give in to his wife. “If you want to change marriages,” Dr. Gottman said, “you have to talk about the ’emotionally intelligent’ husband. Some men are really good at accepting a wife’s influence, at finding something reasonable in a partner’s complaint to agree with. We found that only those newlywed men who are accepting of influence from their wives are ending up in happy, stable marriages.”

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Accepting the influence of your partner means being able to see things from their perspective.

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The researchers surmised that men who resist their wives’ influence do so without even knowing it. Accepting influence is equally a mindset and a skill cultivated by paying attention to your spouse every day. And when conflict happens, the important thing to do is to understand where your partner is coming from and to be able to compromise.

The study said that it wasn’t that marriage can’t survive moments of anger, complaints, or criticism and other human emotions; they can. Couples may find themselves in a bad place if they match negativity with negativity instead of working to de-escalate the conflict. For many men, the fallback response is to increase negativity during an argument.

What was truly interesting about the study was that active listening played no role in the success of the relationship. What Gottman noted was “If you can genuinely listen and be empathetic when you are the target of the complaint, that can be very powerful,” he said. But for the average person, “it is just too hard. The average person meets anger with anger.”

In a nutshell, active listening is for therapy. In real life, men who actually take their wives’ opinions into account and let them influence their decisions are the ones who thrive and stand the test of time. 

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Gottman said criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling are not only predictors of divorce but signs that a man is resisting his wife’s influence.

“The only way to change marriage for the better is to improve the quality of friendship between a husband and wife and help them deal with disagreements differently,” Gottman said. “There has to be a kind of gentleness in the way conflict is managed. Men have to be more accepting of a woman’s position, and women have to be more gentle in starting up discussions.”

The best strategy for a happy and rock-solid marriage is to accept your partner’s influence, and in addition, you’ll also get more respect, power, and influence of your own.

Share the power — that’s the best advice of all.

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