the mathematics of love
Some excerpts from a talk with John Gottman. The entire article is very much worth reading and there is even a video available at the Edge website page where the transcription resides.
We were able to derive a set of nonlinear difference equations for marital interaction as well as physiology and perception. These equations provided parameters, that allowed us to predict, with over 90 percent accuracy, what was going to happen to a relationship over a three-year period. The main advantage of the math modeling was that using these parameters, we are not only be able to predict, but now understand what people are doing when they affected one another. And through the equations we were now really able to build theory. That theory allows us to understand how to intervene and how to change things. And how to know what it is we’re affecting, and why the interventions are effective. This is the mathematics of love.
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And the government is thinking that when these scientifically based programs will teach social skills to lower-income couples, couples on welfare, that they’ll learn and they’ll be better. They’ll learn from what the middle class is doing. But I think the major learning’s going to come the other way because many of the couples we have worked with who have been through a history of slavery, forcible breakups of families by slaveholders, bad schooling, racism, poverty, unequal employment opportunities, bad parenting, criminals as their only successful role models, incarceration, drug addiction, and alcoholism, and violence, and some of these couples are still together. Many of these people who have triumphed despite it all are amazingly articulate when my wife talks to them, and helps them to reveal their highly articulate wisdom. We are seeing a new kind of commitment on the part of men, and on the part of women supporting the men, and who are staying with them in spite of incarceration and addiction. It’s breathtaking, because it’s a real existential change.
via blogdex
(and this is completely unrelated: secret packrat fantasy actually comes true!)
23 April 2005, 17:39 ::
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