After studying 3,000 couples in the past three decades, researcher John Gottman and his wife Julie are combining his research and her clinical savvy in a science-based therapy. Can a nuts-and-bolts approach focused on fiddling with tiny daily interactions bring couples therapy scientific respectability?

All couples fight, but the fights that really define the relationship are always the same thing: whether partners feel they have a safe, secure connection with each other.

It takes time—measured in years, not weeks,—for couples to find their bearings again after the birth of a child, and many never do.

Research can tell us a great deal about what works and what doesn't both in couples' relationships and couples therapy.

A dirty little secret in the therapy field is that couples therapy may be the hardest form of therapy, and most therapists aren't good at it. Of course, this wouldn't be a public health problem if most therapists stayed away from couples work, but they don't. Surveys indicate that about 80 percent of therapists in private practice do couples therapy.

Ascribing negative intent to those who prefer to steer clear of therapy is unfair, often incorrect and almost always hurtful to those who wish their partners would share their enthusiasm about the benefits of therapy. They end up blaming their partners even more intensely.

The pioneers who birthed couples and family therapy never paused to scienti cally study the relationships they treated. Now, after systematically observing and doing therapy with thousands of couples, two of the field’s leading researchers summarize what they’ve learned about successful relationships and effective couples therapy.

At this moment in history, we seem to be in a divorce-busting mode, relatively speaking, and so fewer therapists are likely to tacitly encourage divorce as many of us once did. This shift certainly has the weight of traditional morality behind it and probably isn’t likely to begin swinging the other way again any time soon. But this issue of the Networker features some intrepid authors who explore, with an unusual degree of transparency, how difficult it can be to determine what’s in the best interests of clients on the brink of making perhaps the most momentous decision for which therapists regularly have a front-row seat. It’s intended as a reminder of how powerfully we can influence the process, all too often without acknowledging it, even if we don’t have the deciding vote.

When it comes to helping couples considering divorce, therapists have a hundred ways to ask “What’s right for you?” but often find themselves tongue-tied when it comes to asking “What’s right for the others in your life?” Is it possible to talk about interpersonal responsibility without shaming clients and driving them away?

We spend countless hours focused on how best to keep couples together, but rarely pay much attention to how to best help them split up. And we spend even less time examining how our own emotional reactions can influence their decision about whether to divorce.