The Key to Successful Relationships: Effective Repair Attempts and Emotional Bank Accounts (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: What's different about the masters and the disasters is that the masters are repairing things effectively. So that we think that what's going on is that, yeah, you know, in a good marriage people have arguments that are kind of crummy arguments and, you know, and they don't follow communication rules and they, you know, they say mean-spirited things and they get defensive and they get critical and they get desperate and upset and they stonewall and they do all this stuff. But at some point they have a conversation where they recover from it, they can talk about it and they can repair it. And so what we want to suggest to you is really that's really what the major goal ought to be is how do you fix things? How do you make your next conversation on this problem area better than your last one? How can you repair it? And so for a lot of years we were looking at the repair attempt itself. How do people try to make it better? You know, like a repair attempt might be, gee, I don't think either one of us is really listening to the other right now, maybe we should try again. Or a repair attempt might be, you know, this isn't really what we're supposed to be talking about, we're getting off on a tangent. Or a repair attempt might be, I need a break. Or a repair attempt might be, you know, I'm sorry, I really wish I hadn't said that, you know. And we were looking at the repair attempt and how it was said and we found that we could not predict the effectiveness of repair from the nature of the repair attempt. You know, in fact, some people were making repair attempts in a beautiful way, it could have been written by a social worker and, you know, and it was failing. And other people were making repair attempts in this real clumsy way and it was successful, you know. I remember this one case where this guy who was a chemist and he and his wife were talking about the fact that because of the nature of his work he doesn't know exactly when he's coming home for dinner. He has these experiments going on at work. And she said, well, the kids get hungry and, you know, and they don't want to start dinner without you so they get irritable and I have to put up with the irritability. And he said, well, why don't you feed him a snack? And his wife gave him a look like, what do you think I am, a moron? Of course, I feed him a snack. She went like that. And he realized he needed to make a little repair. So he, this guy was wearing a red bow tie and he went, that was his repair attempt, this big stupid grin, you know. And she started to laugh and the repair attempt was effective, you know. I mean, it changed the way they were going. They weren't in this sort of negative downward spiral. So for years we were looking at what makes repair attempts effective and we didn't find any answers until we started looking at the person receiving the repair attempt, right. And what made the difference was really how much emotional money in the bank they have with that person. So in other words, my repair attempt with Julie is going to work well if I've really been a good friend to her, you know, especially lately. If I've been really putting emotional deposits in the bank account that we have and I've been, you know, I've been doing nice things, I've been kind, you know, I've been understanding, you know, I've been there for her when she needs me, all those kinds of things. That determines whether she's going to accept my repair attempt. And if I'm, if I've been kind of crummy and disrespectful to her, you know, and not a very good friend, then, you know, that repair attempt is going to fail. So we, it started us really looking at the quality of the friendship and the marriage.