Two people, Sam and Alex, having a conversation. You'll watch it, change one thing, and watch it again. Six short steps.
Each step asks you to guess before it shows you — a guess you've committed to is the only way to find out what you actually believed.
Sam and Alex are not real, and they are not you. This is a model — it has never met anyone, it measures nothing, and nothing you do here leaves your browser. It can't tell you about your relationship. It can show you a few things about how any two people's moods pull on each other.
Step 1 of 6
What you called
—
Three things to carry out
This was a model, not a measurement. Sam and Alex are a shape with dials. The shape is the published form of a real model of marriage; the numbers behind it are illustrative, not fitted to anyone.
The fortune-teller isn't a fraud. The famous "94%" and the replicated "29%" are honest answers to two different questions — how well you can explain a marriage you've already watched end, and how well you can call one that hasn't ended yet.
What every school of couples therapy agrees on isn't why couples hurt — it's what hurting looks like: one person pressing while the other pulls back. They argue about the cause. They describe the same thing.
Sources. Gottman, Murray, Swanson, Tyson & Swanson (2002), The Mathematics of Marriage ·
Buehlman, Gottman & Katz (1992), J Fam Psychol 5 (the 94%, 52 couples) ·
Heyman & Smith Slep (2001), J Marriage Fam 63 (the 29%) ·
Schrodt, Witt & Shimkowski (2014), Communication Monographs 81 (demand/withdraw).
The full model with every dial exposed: The Dyad Lab.
Related practices: NVC Journaling · Living Into Values.