John Gottman Love & Sex Coach

by Deborah Kotz McCabe, Special to AOL Coaches

From the man who first revealed how married couples interact after studying them in his Seattle 'Love Lab,'comes a cure-all for any kind of relationship that’s giving you trouble. Want to know what to say on a first date? How to interact better with a grouchy boss? The one word that can calm a marital fight in the heat of the moment? John M. Gottman reveals the answers to these questions in a book that covers the wide expanse of human communication and conflict. At the core of every conversation, he says, you’re looking to connect. If you are rebuffed in making that connection, you withdraw. Pretty soon, you feel a pervasive sense of loneliness even when you’re surrounded by the people you love.

In his five-step plan, Gottman shows you how to build good relationships with strong communication skills and how to fix the ones that are broken. In step one, he has you evaluate what he calls your "bids for connection." Every time you initiate a conversation (from a friendly hello to a bare-it-all gripe session), you make a bid. How that bid is received determines whether you’ll make a connection or fail, which strengthens or weakens the relationship. Bids can go beyond words to affectionate touching, facial expressions and vocalizing.

Step two gets you to recognize how your internal emotional system affects how you interact in various relationships. Step three examines how you were raised, and step four works on developing your emotional communication skills. Through each of these chapters, Gottman has you perform exercises and gives you sample dialogues to improve your relationships. By the time you get to step five, finding shared meaning, your relationship skills will be well honed.

Unlike most self-help relationship authors, Gottman is a researcher who has studied human interactions first hand. (He has spent over 30 years analyzing the way couples fight and communicate on a daily basis at the University of Washington in Seattle.) When he starts sentences with "we observed that" and "our research shows that," you believe that he really knows what he’s talking about when it comes to fixing relationships.

So what is the one word that can calm a marital fight? Empathy. Respect. Cherish. Listen. The particular word depends on you. It’s whatever you need when you’re being flooded with too much emotion during a fight. How to get your partner to recognize and respond to this word? Well... you’re just going to have to read the book.

1. Buy 'The Relationship Cure'