44 pages • 1 hour read
John Gottman, Julie GottmanThe Love Prescription: Seven Days to More Intimacy, Connection, and Joy
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaDay 7-ConclusionChapter Summaries & Analyses
Day 7 Summary: “Declare a Date Night”
Loneliness in marriage is a common affliction, as partners prioritize careers, child-raising, and endless to-do lists over keeping the spark alive in their marriage. As a result, the Gottmans note, “[W]e can find ourselves sitting in the same room with the person we married or committed to, the person we love, and feel very alone” (127).
In a 2002 study by UCLA’s Sloan Center, social scientists set up camp in the Los Angeles homes of working couples with children to determine how little time partners devoted to one another. They averaged a mere 35 minutes of conversation together a week, and the subjects of those were purely logistical. As they continued with their lives, they neglected the relationship at its center. Other studies demonstrate that childless couples and even those in retirement show similar outcomes to the Sloan Center’s study, as, “once committed and settled down, they stop paying attention to the relationship” (130). The Gottmans conclude that if we do not make time for our partners and find out how they have changed or what they desire, we will drift apart.
Their prescription is to go out and have some fun together. Research shows that couples whose sex life has dwindled are also starved in areas belonging to sensuality and adventure. These may seem like frivolous pursuits in the wake of adult responsibilities, but a shutdown in these areas is a sharp conduit to a loss of life drive and connection. Even the Gottmans’ own marriage suffered when they put their work ahead of their relationship: They were snappy with each other and stopped going on dates. As a result, John declared that they would clear their calendars that very evening and go on an emergency date night to an unexpected location. The date was so successful that it became a weekly responsibility. Both judged that the extra squeeze on their time—for example, having to stay up later to meet a deadline or missing it completely—was worth the prize of sustaining their marriage.
The Gottmans advise that date night should always have an element of adventure or features that draw a boundary between this special couple time and the drudgery of everyday life. Thus, date night can take place at home—but with a different routine, such as watching the sunset from the porch steps as opposed to eating at the dining table. In their tips for date night, the Gottmans lay down a ground rule: Phone and TV screens are outlawed in favor of uninterrupted face-to-face time. There should also not be the expectation of sex at the end of the date night, as it makes it too pressurized.
Conclusion Summary: “Renewing Your Prescription”
The Gottmans show how two couples at different stages in life have made their rules work. Young gay couple Ty and Ollie are experts at appreciating each other frequently and also allowing each other the space to be themselves and go for their individual dreams. They do the latter by expressing their needs clearly and making them about themselves rather than launching from a starting point of criticism.
Older, long-married couple Adrienne and Matt improved their relationship problem of keeping their big issues to themselves by talking about needs and feelings when they arose, letting small things go, and prioritizing having fun together. They describe their relationship “as two sets of train tracks—running together, closely in tandem; other times split apart and parallel; then intersecting again” (151). Instead of any big turning points, there was just the daily work of choosing their marriage over other responsibilities repeatedly and noting when they lost track of each other, as is inevitable in a long relationship.
As a concluding note, the Gottmans summarize the main points of the previous chapters, encouraging the reader to keep these going as they continue with their relationship journey. They express hope that the reader feels closer to their partner as a result of doing the exercises and that the practice has bolstered their store of emotional connection. They affirm that continuing the practices in the book will help relationships over the long term. They also advocate that couples document their progress by writing down their observations of how they and their partner have changed over time. This could be a daily journaling practice that only takes a minute or two. They advocate having a weekly “state of the union” meeting (156), in which partners reflect on what is going right in their relationship and appreciate each other. Finally, they affirm that the effort partners put in will be worth it, as thriving relationships are the foundation of other sorts of happiness, such as having a strong immune system and good mental health.
Day 7-Conclusion Analysis
Love and dailiness is foregrounded in this concluding section, as the Gottmans present case studies of a couple at the beginning of their relationship and a couple deep into a decades-long marriage. New lovers Ty and Ollie are putting the Gottmans’ suggestions into practice from the outset, actively building a daily culture of appreciation and making their weekly date nights sacred. They are also learning from each other how to be more honest about their needs. While long-term couple Adrienne and Matt have similarly learned to prioritize having fun together, the length of their relationship and its many evolutions through childrearing, career changes, and empty nesting mean that they have added the technique of reflection and evaluation to their practice. This allows them to chart when they are out of sync with each other so that they can realign faster. This is an unofficial version of the journaling the Gottmans advocate at the end of the book, which invites couples to become the scientists of their own relationship and to track their own and their partners’ progress as they go through the seven-day prescription and take its learnings into the future. As with Adrienne and Matt and even themselves, the Gottmans show that getting off track in a long-term relationship is inevitable, as partners get carried away with the demands of their individual lives and lose sight of each other. While one method for remedying this is ameliorating daily interactions, in the manner discussed in previous chapters, another is forsaking the daily for the unexpected by holding a weekly date night.
Contrary to other measures in The Love Prescription that require fleeting interactions before partners return to the responsibilities of the daily grind, the date night is bounded time away from routines and screens, in which a couple gets to focus on each other and connect as they did when they were first dating. This venture introduces the element of prioritizing play, as couples go back in time and get to know each other all over again, in settings that are conducive to taking a break from the continuum of daily life. The Gottmans offer many solutions for date night, which can be whimsical, cheap, and tailored to the requirements of the couple at that stage of their lives. For example, couples with children who cannot find a babysitter might opt for a date in their backyard, sitting on the steps instead of at the table. Even such a trivial-seeming change in routine can be helpful in getting partners out of the mindset of being logisticians and reminding them that they are lovers too.
Importantly, the Gottmans do not promise that following their prescription, which essentially entails prioritizing love more often, will make life perfect or even less frantic. They acknowledge that if we push our other responsibilities aside for date night, we might miss deadlines or not accomplish the infinite number of items on our daily to-do lists. Thus, in order for love to take center stage, something else will have to give. However, they encourage readers to accept this state of imperfection, because the foundation of a solid yet exciting relationship is life-affirming enough to be worth the sacrifice of lesser goals. They even argue that beginning from a relationship-centered base, rather than one based on promoting individuals, has the added boon of energizing us for the other responsibilities in our life. Love, therefore, might be the most meaningful work we can do.
