Optimal Marital Strategies: How Couples Develop Successful Interaction Styles

TL;DR

This paper models marital interaction styles as solutions to an optimal control problem, explaining how couples develop conflict-avoiding, validating, and volatile styles based on their shared goals and emotional costs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel control-theoretic framework to explain the emergence of different marital interaction styles and their relation to couples' shared goals and emotional costs.

Findings

Validating style balances joint happiness and emotional costs.

Conflict-avoiding style emerges when emotional costs are ignored.

Volatile style may be successful for highly positive dispositions.

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 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 the couples 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 the couple does not care about the cost. The volatile style is not an optimal solution, but volatile marriages may still be successful for couples 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 the next paper using differential game theory.