Sam Bayer

“On average, married couples experience a slow decline in the quality of their marriage as the years go by. It’s a depressing but well-established pattern. But when couples practice a version of going to the balcony, something unexpected happens. Social psychologist Eli Finkel and his colleagues directed a group of sixty married couples to spend seven minutes writing about their most recent fight from a different perspective. Specifically, “from the perspective of a neutral third party who wants the best for all involved.” They imagined a mediator like Gary in the room, in other words. “How might this person think about the disagreement? How might he or she find the good that could come from it?” Then they were asked to think about that person’s perspective during their next fight. Every four months, for a year, they repeated this writing exercise. The couples who did this marriage hack, reconsidering their conflicts from an imaginary third party’s point of view, reported feeling less upset about their disputes than couples who hadn’t done it. More importantly, the usual, slow loss of marital satisfaction did not happen for these couples that year. They still had conflict, but it didn’t wear on them the same way. Because it was healthy.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out