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Workshop: The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work

The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
Workshop for couples

Our goal for you is simple: To strengthen your relationship.
Workshop’s purpose is to understand how a couple life can be improved and better managed.

Dr. John Gottman became famous through a study on newly married couples, after having children, during the 10-20 years of marriage, divorced or grandparents, which was on the base of his algorithm of prediction about divorce, with an accuracy of 95%.

“The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work” workshop could give you a lot of information about how to use these principles to have a functional, happy, and balanced marriage.

You will learn to:
1. Deepen your knowledge of one another.
2. Build friendship and trust.
3. Recognize and respond to bids for emotional connection.
4. Be open to influence.
5. Understand and work with both solvable and difficult problems.
6. Get through gridlocked conflict.
7. Create a unique “Story of Us.”
8. Maintain your relationship gains.
This workshop is a psycho-educational workshop and does not replace a couple therapy. Privacy is a mandatory condition.


The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work

—John Gottman

01. Enhance Your Love Maps
The foundation of a strong relationship is friendship.

Dr. Gottman defines friendship as having three components:

  • Deep, richly detailed Love Maps
  • A strong Fondness and Admiration system
  • Regular Turning Toward your partner’s bids for emotional connection

02. Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration IT IS EASY to take
each other for granted.

When you openly share with your partner what you appreciate about them, it strengthens your bond. When you create a firm foundation of affection, honor, and respect, it is much easier to overcome problem areas positively and productively. Building a climate of appreciation also protects against contempt. Even if you feel like your relationship is stable and happy, you can always heighten your fondness and admiration for each other. Friendship is the foundation of passion, intimacy, and good sex. When your friendship is strong, other areas of your relationship flourish. Affection, fondness, and admiration can be rekindled!

03. Turn Toward Each Other
Instead of Away
The Magic 5:1 Ratio

5:1 This means that there are five times as many positive things going on in relationships that work as negative. That’s an interesting equation! And it suggests that if you do something negative to hurt your partner’s feelings that you have to make up for it with five positive things. The equation is not balanced in terms of positive and negative. Negative actions have a lot more ability to inflict pain and damage than positive feelings have to heal and bring you closer.

—John Gottman

04. Let Your Partner Influence You
Yield to Win

ACCEPTING INFLUENCE is about trying to accommodate each other’s wants, desires, and needs without sacrificing your own. Attitude plays a crucial role in accepting influence. The goal is to look for as much as you can in your partner’s request that you can honor. Look for what you can do to accommodate each other’s wishes instead of being annoyed by them and resistant to them.

05. Solve Your Solvable Problems
5 steps for resolving solvable problems:

  1. Soften your start-up.
  2. Learn to make and receive repair attempts.
  3. Soothe yourself and each other.
  4. Compromise.
  5. Process any grievances so that they don’t linger

The way you start a conversation is predictive of the way it will end.

06. Overcome Gridlock
How do you know if your issue is gridlocked?

Relationship problems become gridlocked when hopes, dreams, or aspirations become blocked.

  • Talking, talking, talking without making any headway.
  • There’s no humor, empathy, or affection about the topic.
  • You become deeper entrenched in your positions.
  • Compromise seems impossible because it would mean selling out or giving up something essential and core to your beliefs, values, or sense of self.

07. Create Shared Meaning
Your marriage can ‘work’ even if
your dreams aren’t in ‘sync.’.

Developing a culture in one’s relationship doesn’t mean a couple sees eye to eye on every aspect of their life’s philosophy. Instead, there is a meshing. They find a way of honouring each other’s dreams, even if they don’t always share them. The culture that they develop together incorporates both of their dreams. And it is flexible enough to change as husband and wife grow and develop. When a marriage has this shared sense of meaning, conflict is much less intense, and perpetual problems are unlikely to lead to gridlock.

Gottman Couple Psychotherapy

In case your relationship is already damaged, you can do Gottman Couple Psychotherapy sessions, and you will receive personalized solutions that will completely remodel your “relationship house,” brick by brick.
Couples who want to participate in Gottman Couple Therapy go through a deepen evaluation process to get a clearer picture of the couple’s relationship, their strengths, and the issues that have led to the need for therapy, but also a diagnosis of possible individual gridlocks.

Schedule a session with an ID Therapy Specialist, Gottman certified

Dr. Nadia Gorduza is the only psychotherapist and trainer in Romania specialized in Gottman Couple Therapy and represents in Romania The Gottman Institute.

Nadia Gorduza
MD, EMBA Psychotherapist and founder ID Therapy
couple problems, phobias, anxiety, panic attacks


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