Fighting style is very much an indicator of whether a relationship will last, agrees Sybil Carrere, PhD, a research psychologist and assistant professor of family and child nursing at the University of Washington School of Nursing, Seattle, who has conducted many studies with John Gottman, PhD, known as the University of Washington's marriage research guru. After observing couples argue, Carrere and her co-researchers found, they could predict divorce among newlyweds based on the first three minutes of an argument. Couples who ultimately divorced were more likely to start the dialogue with an attack on their partner's character, says Carrere. You always hold in everything. And so the fight escalates.
Happy partners remember minute details of their meeting.
For example, she recalls a woman who remembered that her mate, at their first meeting, kissed her hand. And it's not just the happily coupled women who remember such romantic details. So do the happy men. When stories of first meetings are barren of details, Carrere takes it as a bad sign. Some couples are unable to tell what attracted them to each other initially, another predictor of a flailing partnership.