In 1983, Dr. John Gottman of the Gottman Institute began studying couples in what he called The Love Lab. In this facility, he researched how couples interacted and engaged in conflict and resolution. In this, he began categorizing the couples under the terms “masters” and “disaster” of relationships. The “disaster” couples all engaged in four different communication tactics that contributed to the disastrous nature of their relationship: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. In which he deemed the Four Horsemen.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are figures seen within the New Testament of the Christian Bible. Each horseman represents death, famine, war, and conquest, all of which are signifiers of the end times within this literature. Similarly, Dr. John Gottman used this metaphor to describe detrimental characteristics seen within relationships.
In his 1999 research, he found that he could predict divorce with 90% accuracy based on how the first three minutes of conversation between couples went. Couples who started with criticism and elicited defensiveness from their partners were more likely to end up divorcing than those who did not use these horsemen (i.e., started the conversation by voicing their needs and sharing their feelings). The takeaway was:
The consistent use of the Four Horsemen is a marker for the end of the relationship.
