The Love Prescription: Seven Days to More Intimacy, Connection, and Joy

Julie Schwartz Gottman was born in 1951 in Portland, Oregon. As a girl, she grew up loving nature, sometimes even spending the night in the woods when tensions were rife at home. She is also a survivor of sexual assault, a feat that gives her specialized insight into how intimacy should be approached for people who have undergone similar experiences.

Julie studied psychology at Colorado College before earning her MEd, MA, and PhD, and her early research and professional preoccupations were to do with trauma work and mental illness. From 1976-1978, she worked in the psychiatric department at the University of Oregon Medical Center. She has always worked across demographics, seeking to address the trauma of sexual assault and incest in low-income patients. In the 1990s, following her marriage to John, her research interests shifted more to relationships and family dynamics. In addition to her work at the Love Lab with John, she maintains a private practice on Orcas Island, where she treats those with abuse and trauma problems as well as relationship problems. She is the author or coauthor of six books and the coauthor of over 30 peer-reviewed articles.

Julie’s background and personal research interests ensure that the Gottman Method is as inclusive as possible and applicable to people across demographics. While marriage counseling is often stigmatized as a luxury that only middle- and upper-class couples can afford, Julie’s input is invaluable for considering the additional burdens of being low-income or from a demographic that commonly faces discrimination.

The Love Lab is a key figure in the Gottmans’ research. While John Gottman began observing couple dynamics in the 1970s, it was not until 1986 that he and psychophysiologist Dr. Robert Levenson built a replica of a domestic apartment at the University of Washington to elevate his practice. As the Gottmans explain, “When people walked into it, we didn’t want them to feel like they were in a science lab. We wanted them to feel at home” (3). Later, when Julie became involved, she added paintings, comfortable furniture, and a well-stocked fridge to make the couples truly settle into the environment as the Gottmans watched them, aided by three cameras. The Gottmans’ initial study invited 130 newly married couples to the Love Lab to be observed. As the participants forgot about the cameras’ presence and lived, talked, and fought as usual, the Gottmans recorded and assessed “the smallest behavioral patterns” (4). It was in this study that they defined and established the importance of bids for connection. As they followed the couples over time and through life stages such as childbearing, they were able to accurately use Love Lab data to predict which couples would stay together and which would divorce.

Over time, the Love Lab has been updated and used for different experiments; however, as a simulation of a home environment, it is vital to the Gottmans’ observations of married life.