Are we doing Gottman’s four horsemen when we fight?

Which of the four horsemen shows up in our fights?

Criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling make up the four horsemen: four styles of arguing that John Gottman and his colleagues identified in couples whose relationships were in difficulty. Spotting them in your partner takes seconds. Spotting the one you reach for yourself takes longer.

• Criticism. A complaint about something that happened turns into a verdict on your partner’s character, usually carried by the words always and never.
• Contempt. Sarcasm, mockery, a sneer or a roll of the eyes. Of the four, it is the one that wounds most in my experience, because it signals that you no longer regard your partner as your equal.
• Defensiveness. A reply that sets out why the complaint is unjust. It guards your sense of being a good person, and for some people it is the only response they ever saw modelled at home.
• Stonewalling. One of you goes blank and stops answering. The body has left the conversation before any decision has been made to leave it.

Most couples have a favourite. Knowing which is yours matters more than cataloguing your partner’s.

How does one horseman call up the next?

Each move provokes the following one, and once the chain is running neither of you is really talking about the original subject any more.

It starts with a feeling, not an argument. Your partner points out the thing you forgot, and before any thought arrives you feel the sting of falling short. Your shoulders rise, your throat narrows, your voice climbs. Only after that does your mind supply the line that proves the complaint is unfair, and out it comes. Your partner hears that they are being brushed aside. Their reply has a bite to it, and that bite is what the two of you remember days later.

The part that is easiest to overlook is what happens when one of you falls silent. The silence holds back the cruel sentence you might never be able to unsay, and at the same moment it tells your partner you have gone somewhere they cannot follow. They get louder to reach you, which is exactly what keeps you hidden. In my experience the weight of this is uneven: the partner who cannot leave the subject alone carries most of it, because silence gives them nothing to hold, so they keep pressing.

What can we do instead of each one?

Each horseman has a gentler behaviour that can take its place, and those behaviours are learned on calm evenings, not in the heat of a fight.

• For criticism. Name your feeling, then your request, and keep the sentence about what happened rather than about who your partner is.
• For contempt. Tell your partner what you still admire in them, and do it on ordinary days, not only when you are patching things up.
• For defensiveness. Look for whatever part of the complaint is fair, however small, and acknowledge it before anything else. Your explanation can wait.
• For stonewalling. Take a pause, and use it to calm your body down, not to sharpen your argument.

Try them clumsily and soon rather than polished and too late. Read more about online couples therapy.

Do the four horsemen really predict divorce?

The well-known accuracy figures exist, but nobody produced them by tallying these four behaviours.

People often reach this question with a knot in the stomach, as if somewhere there were a score that could tell them whether they will make it. What the researchers actually measured was quieter than a row.

• What they looked at. Couples were asked to tell the story of their marriage, and the telling was rated for warmth, for how much they spoke as a team, and for disappointment and negativity. The horsemen themselves were not counted.
• What they found. In 95 newlywed couples, that interview separated those still together from those who divorced with about 87 per cent accuracy at a first check, roughly 4 to 6 years in, and 81 per cent at a later one¹.
• Why to hold it lightly. Only 16 of the 95 couples had divorced by the later check, a small base for a percentage, and the researchers name this. Couples who dropped out also differed from those who stayed.

So nobody is grading your Sunday argument. The evidence supports something narrower: the way two people tell the story of their life together says something about where they stand today.

Where does the model fall short?

Naming behaviours captures how an argument looked. It does not say what each of you was trying to protect, or who holds more power between you.

• Circumstances. In couples under real financial and social pressure, a husband stepping back from his wife’s requests for change went with her satisfaction staying steady, while in better-off couples that identical pattern was linked to her satisfaction dropping². Those studies looked at married heterosexual couples, but they suggest that whether a habit harms you hangs partly on whether the requested change is within reach at all.
• Wise withdrawal. When raking over it again tonight can achieve nothing, walking away can be good sense rather than stonewalling.
• Power. The model treats each argument as a meeting of equals. Many are not, and it says nothing about who decides when the conversation ends or who pays for it afterwards.
• Fear. If you are afraid of your partner, or spend your evenings keeping their mood steady to keep the peace, none of the replacements here is the right place to begin.

How do we start changing it, and when is that not enough?

Turn the names on yourself, find the move that usually opens your fights, and rehearse its replacement while you are both calm.

• Name your own. Saying “sorry, that sounded like criticism, I will put it differently” opens a conversation. Telling your partner “that was contempt” just hands them a new label to fight over.
• Choose one habit. Most couples have a typical opening move, and altering that single move achieves more than trying to fix all four at once.
• Agree the pause in advance. Settle how long a break lasts and when you will come back while nobody is upset, because a pause with no return is a walkout.
• Rehearse on small things. Taking an imperfect break over something minor, and returning when you promised, shifts the next big argument more than any discussion of the model.

These steps fall short when the names have turned into a way of keeping score, when every new attempt collapses into the familiar fight within minutes, or when only one of you is doing the repairing. They are the wrong tool entirely if you feel unsafe with your partner, or if there is something between you that neither of you has yet managed to put into words. That needs a third person, whether in a session together, in couples therapy on your own, or a free 30-minute call to see where to begin.

Questions people ask

Can we work on this in couples therapy by video?

Yes, the pattern usually shows itself on a screen much as it does at home. Sit so that both of you are in view, because who goes still and who leans in matters.

Can we change this ourselves, or do we need therapy?

Many couples make real progress at home with the replacements described here. Therapy is worth considering when every attempt turns into the same fight or one of you carries all the repair.

What would we talk about in a first session?

I ask you to bring one recent argument and slow it right down, each of you describing what you felt and wanted as it began. The first few exchanges usually reveal more than anything said later.

Will you take sides if one of us is more critical?

No, I interrupt the pattern rather than judge who started it. If one of you is carrying more of it, I will name that, which is different from blame.

What if only one of us is willing to come?

You can start on your own, and your part of the pattern is the part you can change. Even so, the conversation between the two of you is still waiting to happen.

If you recognise criticism, contempt, defensiveness or stonewalling in your own fights, I can help you both step out of them in online couples therapy.

Sources

1. Carrere, S., Buehlman, K. T., Gottman, J. M., Coan, J. A., & Ruckstuhl, L. (2000). Predicting marital stability and divorce in newlywed couples. Journal of Family Psychology, 14(1), 42-58.
2. Ross, J. M., Karney, B. R., Nguyen, T. P., & Bradbury, T. N. (2019). Communication that is maladaptive for middle-class couples is adaptive for socioeconomically disadvantaged couples. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 116(4), 582-597.

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.