I’m often asked about the Gottman Sound Relationship House, in part because people ask, “What exactly is this, and why is it in a pretty little fancy house?” I’m going to explain that and try to translate it for you.
The Gottman research is excellent, amazing, 50 years’ worth of data, and dry, dusty, boring. Along comes Julie Gottman. She’s a trauma therapist, and when she meets her husband and sees the research, she essentially says, “Lovely, I love what you’ve done with all this research, and it’s boring.” I’m exaggerating here. “But let me help you.” So she came up with the Sound Relationship House theory: A little pictograph of a house.
How does that house work? Basically, the relationship is built in layers. Each layer has to do with one aspect of the relationship, and there are nine of them. Here they are in a nutshell, because this is just conceptual. I take my car to the auto mechanic. I don’t care how the spark plugs go in, although I do need to know that there are spark plugs and roughly what they do. So here’s your rough draft.
Level One: Build Love Maps
Level one, the foundation, is build love maps. If you don’t know how to connect with your partner, don’t know what floats their boat, and don’t know what makes them tick, you’ve failed at this level. This is foundational because you need to know what makes your partner tick.
Let’s say their favorite color is green. Wonderful, but that’s not knowing them well. Why is it green? Where does that come from? What’s the story behind it? Maybe they didn’t like green growing up, they liked purple, so help me understand that. Oddly enough, it’s perceptual. This level matters because it’s perceptual: It doesn’t matter how well you actually know your partner. You can know your partner excellently, but if they don’t feel well known, you’ve lost.
Level Two: Share Fondness and Admiration
Step two is share fondness and admiration. If the first level is knowing your partner well, or at least feeling well known, the second level is: Do you feel that your partner is fond of you, admires you, and respects you? Again, perceptual.
How are you going to communicate this? Through ESP? No. Through acts of service? What if they don’t notice acts of service? So you use your words. “Hey, by the way, for no particular reason, you’re the best thing since sliced bread.” “Hey, I liked how you were playing with the neighbor kids the other day, and it made me real proud of who you are as my husband. Just wanted to let you know.” These things matter. Letting them know.
Level Three: Turn Toward Instead of Away
We’ve got two levels here, both about friendship. Level three: The first was love maps, how well you feel known by your partner. The second was how much fondness and admiration you feel from your partner. The third is turning toward instead of away. How much does your partner respond to you when you need them?
Whether you’ve got an owie, “Don’t do this, the dishwasher hurts,” or you’re saying, “Hey, can we talk?” and trying to get their attention, or maybe, “Hey, I’d like to show you a cool TikTok about sheep running in a field,” and you think, “I could care less about TikTok, and I’m not interested in little animals,” but you say, “Show me anyway” more often than not. In fact, the metric is around 84 to 86 percent of the time. That’s when it’s good. When you drop down to 30 percent, that’s when you’re in danger.
Three levels of friendship, foundational. Why does friendship come first? Because if you deal with conflict first, that’s on the fifth floor. It’s like having a plumber fix a leak, and the fifth floor gets nice and done, but the lower levels are now damaged.
The Gottmans found this out back in ’96. They started putting on conferences and found that people who attended the conference on how to be better friends didn’t do so well long term. The ones who attended the conference on how to fight better didn’t do so well long term either. But the ones who attended both did much better. You could argue that if they attended both, they were already really invested in this, and sure, but the correlation was interesting.
Level Four: The Positive Perspective
First three levels are friendship. The fourth level isn’t conflict, it’s wedged in between. Think of that movie where there’s a tiny little floor separating everything. This is a barrier between conflict and friendship. It’s not technically an area you can work on directly. This is the positive perspective, sometimes called negative sentiment override.
Basically, how much benefit of the doubt are you willing to give your partner? Do they wake up grumpy, and you think, “Hmm, they must have had a bad sleep, must be having a bad day”? Or do you think, “There they go again, always grumpy”? That lens magnifies everything.
Here’s the catch: You can’t work on it directly. The Gottmans have tried for 37 years to get people to change this lens, and they’ve found success many times, but you cannot force a change in perception. If you kick me in the stomach every day for 30 or 31 days, I’m not going to suddenly say, “Ha ha, the sun is shining.” I’m going to be hesitant. My expectations are going to be less than stellar. It takes a long time for this level to develop, so it takes a long time to fix. Be patient as you work on it.
Level Five: Manage Conflict
Now we get to conflict, the nitty-gritty. Conflict has a lot of pieces to it, but here’s the key piece: Whether it’s getting overwhelmed, bringing things up harshly, or using the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse they talk about (contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and so on), it comes down to managing conflict.
I’ve had couples take the Gottman Relationship Checkup and score amazing in the area of conflict, but it’s a false positive. They have no conflict because they avoid conflict entirely. And yet they’re coming to a couples therapist because they’re disconnected and distant, managing fighting by not fighting. That’s not managing conflict. You have to manage conflict effectively.
There are three key areas here. First, you have to accept your partner’s influence, meaning don’t try to win all the time. Second, you have to dialogue about problems, actually talk about your issues. Third, you have to practice self-soothing. You have to be able to say, “Okay, I feel a little overwhelmed here, I’m about to make it worse, so my choices are make it worse or survive the impulse to make it worse.” A big call back to DBT there.
The Attic Levels: Make Life Dreams Come True and Create Shared Meaning
That’s five levels. Above that are the attic levels, which are a bit more fluffy and esoteric. This is where you store your treasured memories.
Make life dreams come true: Do I feel like my partner supports me in my life dreams, everything I aspire to experience, to be, to do? That’s very important.
The top level is create shared meaning. Do I feel connected to you? Do we have a ritual of connection that bonds us? Do we have time together that’s just ours? Do I feel supported by you? Do we have the same approach to what the Gottmans call symbols?
For some people, a Christmas tree represents hearth, family, and home, and you don’t dare take it down before April 1st. For another person, that same Christmas tree represents a fire hazard and the dog piddling on it, and you’d better take it down on December 26th. That’s a silly example, but symbols matter. What is love? What is connection? What is harmony? What is family? What is togetherness? When this is out of whack, the attic isn’t pretty.
The Walls: Trust and Commitment
The Gottmans also identified two more elements: The walls. Trust and commitment keep the relationship house from being drafty. You can work on conflict and the positive perspective and still feel a bit of a draft if these aren’t solid.
Trust isn’t just trust that you haven’t been betrayed. It’s trust that your partner will be there for you through the good times and the difficult ones, to help celebrate your wins and successes, and to be there when you’re not doing so hot, even if you’re not doing so hot in the relationship itself.
Commitment means I choose you, not just on the day we met. Someone might say, “I told you I love you the day we were married, and it’s been 20 years, and if that’s not good enough for you, I don’t know what is.” That’s not commitment. Commitment is choosing you, not just in the moment we decided to be together, but in every single decision we make together. I’m advocating for the relationship, for us. I’m not just committed to you, I’m committed to the relationship.
That means I’m not going to flood, overwhelm, and threaten the relationship. And if I do, I’m going to repair it quickly, because I’m committed to this relationship. If I need help, I’ll get help. If I have to juggle cats, I’ll juggle cats. If I have to go see a therapist and talk about my feelings, I’ll do that.
That’s it: Nine levels. The Sound Relationship House. Now, go forth and be excellent to each other.
