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      Who Are the Exceptional Seven Percent?

      There is no more lovely, friendly, and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage.

      —MARTIN LUTHER

      I CALL IT THE I-dare-you-to-make-me-love-my-mate stare.

      That was the look Jack and Alicia had on their faces as they sat across from me in my marriage counseling office. It’s a look I’m accustomed to, and frankly, I have come to enjoy the challenge it presents for me, because I know a secret. I know that in the span of a few weeks, that defiantly pessimistic expression can be transformed into something beautiful: a look of love rediscovered, joy returned, and purpose restored. In fact, only four short weeks later, Jack and Alicia appeared to be more in love than they had ever been. They told me they could hardly believe the change.

      What could possibly cause such a dramatic transformation? Nothing less than learning the secrets of what I call the Exceptional Seven Percent, those couples in first-and-forever marriages who exhibit much greater than average passion, happiness, longevity, and fulfillment in their relationships.

      Mark and Jennifer have been married for nearly twenty years. Through good times and bad they have been able to maintain a partnership that is truly enviable. Mark says of his wife, “There isn’t anybody who understands me as well as she does. I have friends at work and in the community, but there isn’t anybody I’d rather be with than Jennifer—and she makes it pretty obvious that she feels the same about me. Sometimes my male friends kid me about how much time I spend with my wife. They think I don’t go out with them after work because I’m afraid that I’ll get in trouble or something. How ridiculous! They just don’t get it, and I’m really not sure how to explain it to them. The reason I rush home at the end of the day is because Jennifer is my best friend—I mean, we share absolutely everything—and I genuinely miss her.

      “Of course we have interests outside of our marriage and family life. Lots of things compete for our attention: the work we do, the causes we support, our community involvements.... But everything else has to be secondary to our marriage because as far as we’re concerned, the success of everything else depends on our ability to succeed as a couple.”

      What Planet Are These People From?

      While it is uplifting to hear the stories of those who are happily married, the knowledge that exceptional couples like Mark and Jennifer exist leaves us with several important questions. For example, if less-than-exceptional marriages are made up of men from Mars and women from Venus, what planet do these couples come from? What do Exceptional couples know that others don’t, and, more important, can what they know be taught? To begin to answer these questions, let’s take a brief look at some of the research on exceptional couples.

      In 1968, Dr. Don Jackson and William Lederer of the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute wrote a book called The Mirages of Marriage. In it, they identified a group of couples they called “collaborative geniuses” whose common backgrounds and “gracious stability” enabled them to be happier than average with each other over the years. The authors of the study suggested that only about 10 percent of all married couples fell into this, or similar, categories. However, Jackson and Lederer’s description of such happy couples was purely theoretical and took up only two pages in their 450-page tome, thus demonstrating psychotherapy’s traditional lack of interest in healthy people.

      It was not until the mid-1990s that it was possible to say more about “exceptional” marriages based on observations of actual couples. At this time, sociologist Dr. Pepper Schwartz wrote a book called Peer Marriage that identified certain exceptional couples who exhibited traits like egalitarianism, a solidified value system, uncommon intimacy, deep friendship, and a unique commitment to their relationship. Around the same time, psychologist Dr. John Gottman wrote a book called Why Marriages Succeed or Fail, which described his fascinating longitudinal study of both healthy and unhealthy marriage behaviors. Remarkably, Dr. Gottman’s study was able to predict, with 95 percent accuracy, which couples would be together and which couples would be divorced within five years. Even more importantly, data from his study strongly suggested that exceptional couples are made, not born.

      Finally, psychologist Dr. Judith Wallerstein completed a critical examination of healthy marriages in her book, The Good Marriage (1995). In it she described a marital type called “Romantic Marriages,” which I found to exhibit many traits strikingly similar to Dr. Schwartz’s “peer couples.” Dr. Wallerstein went on to state that 15 percent of the marriages she studied fell into this highly desirable category and about half of these—the group I call the Exceptional 7 Percent—were in first marriages.

      Some cynics suggest that exceptional couples are “just born that way,” but this is simply not the case. Dr. Gottman’s study demonstrated that the difference between couples who were happy together and those who weren’t boiled down to certain teachable skills, attitudes, and communication patterns. Further, Gottman’s study is supported by Wallerstein’s finding that half of all exceptional couples are in second marriages. In other words, if all exceptional couples were simply “born that way,” half of them wouldn’t have had to get divorced to figure out how to do it!

      In my attempt to identify and explain what makes exceptional couples tick, I not only examined the relevant research on the subject, but I also thought about the couples I know personally and professionally who exhibit many of the traits these studies identified as being necessary for achieving exceptional status. I considered these couples with an eye toward identifying the rules they live by, the ways they think about their individual and married lives, and what habits, behaviors, or choices they demonstrated on a consistent basis that made them different from other good but somewhat less satisfying relationships.

      Consider the following pages to be an orientation to the nine secrets of exceptional couples. As you read through each summary, complete the quizzes throughout the text. They will help direct you to the areas of your own marriage you should begin working on first. For best results, it will be necessary for both you and your mate to complete the quizzes. However, if for some reason your mate is unable to take the quizzes, you may attempt to answer for him or her. This is obviously a less desirable approach, but it is acceptable as long as you remember to be both fair in your answers and cautious in your interpretations

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