Thirty Years Later

On January 11, 1996, I took Rebecca on our first date.

We had dinner at Olive Garden, then went to see The American President. It wasn’t a particularly original date, even by 1996 standards. But something about it stuck. Every January since, we’ve returned to Olive Garden and watched that same movie. Thirty years later, it’s become less of a tradition than a marker—a way of remembering not just where we started, but who we were and how far we’ve come.

We were twenty-three years old. I wasn’t a therapist. I was barely out of college. Rebecca and I had met only a few months before, at summer camp of all places. I hadn’t heard of John and Julie Gottman. I certainly wasn’t thinking about relationship research.

I was just hoping she’d say yes to a second date.

What began in 1996

It wasn’t until years later that I realized something else had begun in 1996. Around the same time Rebecca and I were starting our life together, John and Julie Gottman were beginning to shape the way an entire generation would think about marriage. Their research would become the foundation for books, workshops, counseling methods, and countless conversations about what helps relationships flourish.

Neither of us knew it, but 1996 would become a formative year for both our marriage and the field I’d eventually devote my career to. Thirty years later, I find myself reflecting less on what has changed than on what has endured.

The world of relationships certainly looks different than it did in 1996. Reb and I conducted our long distance relationship like luddites. We left messages on answering machines. We mailed each other letters written on paper. When we watched The American President on our second anniversary, we rented it from Blockbuster.

Today, couples navigate texting, social media, dating apps, video calls, artificial intelligence, and a thousand new ways to misunderstand one another.

Everything around relationships has changed.

Relationships themselves haven’t changed much

People still want to feel known. They still long to feel chosen. They still wonder whether they’re enough. They still need someone who turns toward them when life gets difficult.Thirty years of technological progress hasn’t changed those fundamental longings one bit.

One of the great ironies of John Gottman’s career is that he became famous for being able to “predict divorce”. Ask almost anyone what they know about his work, and they’ll mention the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and his remarkable ability to identify couples who were headed for trouble.

But if you’ve spent any time with John, you discover that’s never been the point.

John Gottman isn’t fascinated by divorce

He’s fascinated by what makes love endure.

He’s one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. He doesn’t seem particularly interested in celebrity or building a personal brand. Left to his own devices, I suspect he’d happily spend the afternoon talking about nonlinear mathematics, relationship data, or just spending a quiet evening at home with Julie and his corgis.

That’s what makes his work so enduring. It has never felt driven by the desire to be right. It has always felt driven by curiosity.

What actually makes relationships work?

That’s a much better question.

Over the years I’ve had the privilege of becoming a Certified Gottman Therapist and teaching these ideas to other clinicians and to thousands of couples. Along the way, I discovered something that surprised me.

People think the Gottman Method is primarily about communication.

It isn’t.

Communication matters, of course. The findings of “the Love Lab” have become part of the cultural vocabulary for good reason. Learning to soften a startup or make a repair attempt can absolutely change the trajectory of a difficult conversation.

But the longer I’ve practiced, the more convinced I’ve become that communication isn’t the foundation.

What is the foundation of successful relationships?

Friendship is.

John and Julie have been saying this for decades. Strong marriages are built on a deep sense of curiosity, affection, attention, and shared living. Positive sentiment doesn’t eliminate conflict, but it changes the atmosphere in which conflict happens. When friendship is strong, difficult conversations have somewhere safe to land.

I’ve seen couples spend years trying to communicate better while quietly neglecting the friendship that would have made better communication possible in the first place.

That lesson took me a long time to learn.

Actually, most of the important lessons have.

One of my greatest gifts of the last thirty years is the realization that I have never once in my entire life learned a single thing before I was ready to learn it. The best lessons have a way of waiting patiently for us until experience catches up.

When I was twenty-three, I thought getting married was how you became an adult. Now I think I had it backwards. 

Becoming an adult is what helps you stay married

No ceremony, no ring, no anniversary has ever rescued me from the work of growing up. Marriage has been less like crossing a finish line and more like enrolling in a school that never quite graduates you. It has exposed my selfishness, my defensiveness, my impatience, and, thankfully, given me countless opportunities to become a little wiser than I was the year before.

Perhaps that’s the greatest gift the Gottmans have given us.

Not a collection of techniques.

Not even a method.

They’ve given us confidence that small choices accumulate. That ordinary moments, repeated consistently over time, become the architecture of a marriage.

For all the emphasis on compatibility, chemistry, or finding “the one,” their research quietly points toward something much more hopeful: we have an extraordinary amount of agency in shaping the quality of our relationships.

Daily Choices…

That may be the idea that has stayed with me the longest. The quality of a relationship isn’t simply something we discover; it’s something we help create. Day after day, conversation after conversation, we are participating in the marriage we’re living. The Gottmans didn’t just give us language for healthy relationships. They gave us reason to believe that ordinary choices, repeated consistently over time, can profoundly change them.

Their motto: Small things often.

Every act of kindness matters.

Every repair matters.

Every moment of turning toward instead of away matters.

Every ordinary Tuesday matters…more than we think.

Thirty years after that first date, Rebecca and I still go to Olive Garden every January. The breadsticks are familiar. The movie is familiar. We quote the scenes verbatim and still notice new details we missed before. The tradition isn’t an attempt to recreate the past. It’s an opportunity to appreciate the distance we’ve traveled.

What has changed over the last 30 years?

The movie hasn’t changed. In fact, it holds up remarkably well. We have changed—and thankfully, so has our marriage.

And maybe that’s what healthy relationships have always been about.

Healthy relationships aren’t about finding someone who keeps you from changing. They’re about finding someone who helps you become the person you’re capable of being.

As I think about the Gottman Institute’s first thirty years, that’s the legacy I find myself celebrating most. John and Julie gave us more than memorable concepts or practical tools. It’s hard to imagine practicing couples therapy today without their influence. More importantly, they spent three decades reminding us that healthy relationships aren’t reserved for extraordinary people. They’re built by ordinary people who keep showing up for one another, one conversation, one repair, one small moment at a time.

For a therapist, that’s an extraordinary contribution. For a husband, it’s been an extraordinary gift.

Now, please pass the breadsticks.