Optimal marital strategies: how couples develop successful interaction styles

Abstract The study of marriage dynamics and of strategies to reduce the likelihood of divorce has been an important research area for many years. Gottman's (Gottman. 1993 J. Consult. Clin. Psychol. 61, 6–15. (doi:10.1037/0022-006X.61.1.6)) research on successful marriages revealed three matched interaction styles: conflict-avoiding, validating and volatile. There has, however, been little progress in explaining how couples develop these styles of interaction and why failure to do so leads to failed marriages. In this paper, we show that these interaction styles arise as solutions to an optimal control problem where spouses jointly maximize a common goal. The validating style arises when the benefit from achieving joint happiness is balanced by the emotional cost of adopting a particular style. The ubiquitous conflict-avoider style arises naturally when spouses do not care about emotional costs. The volatile style is not an optimal solution, but volatile marriages may still be successful for spouses with highly positive natural dispositions. The problem of the spouses having different goals in marriage is relevant to marriage repair, and this problem will be studied in a later paper using differential game theory.