The three questions that are guaranteed to save your marriage (and lead to better sex), unveiled by top psychologist Gregory Walton

Everyone who has ever had a relationship knows that you can get lost in a conflict. Once I had an ex a mug to me, right in front of the dining table. I don’t even know why.

How did we get there?

The truth is that poisonous spirals start with the stupidest things.

Arguments about Loading the dishwasheror the Toilet letter is left behindCan end without anyone winning.

But what if there was one way to go things outAnd keep your marriage in the process?

As a psychologist at Stanford, I often think that people are shocked when I tell them that marriages get worse over time.

It’s true. The very best research, longitudinal studies that follow pairs over time, believe that marital quality trends are negative, a infinite slope.

And it’s not as if that slope ends when the children go outside. It just remains trending low.

No matter how your marriage sees today, this is as good as it will ever be. It is planned to be worse in 12 months.

I learned this for the first time many years ago, just after my wife Lisa and I got married. It was a beautiful ceremony, in a ‘fairy ring’ under the Redwood trees in the Santa Cruz Mountains, an hour’s drive or so from our house.

So I wanted to learn more. To be honest, Lisa was too.

What I have discovered is a process that is known as ‘negative waste confirmation’ – a psychological phenomenon in which the negative emotional condition or behavior of one person causes a similar negative reaction in another, which leads to a cycle of negativity.

These cycles often start from the everyday complexities of a shared life: to balance jobs, money, children and everything else.

Lisa tells me that I spent too much time writing my book, so I feel bad and understand her.

She shouts back, I rush away and we go to the races – a downward spiral that takes away our love.

The standard advice in conflicts is to understand the perspective of the other. But in marriage or another long -term relationship, you know the perspective of your partner well – and they are crazy! Place the spoons in the dishwasher shovel? Disturbed! Schep-side down? Absurd!

For many people, a good marriage is one of the most cherished parts of life. Why can the stupidest things endanger it?

I think it is because in fighting when these big questions are just below the surface. Your partner does whatever it is that you annoy for the 14th time, and you ask yourself: “Are they not to respect me?” Or “Are we broken?”

That is what you respond to. They are not the spoons.

My colleague Eli Finkel, a social psychologist and relationship scientist at Northwestern University, approached me to try to find a solution for this seemingly inevitable decline.

He worked with a group of 120 Chicago-Rea -pairs, most in the thirty and 40s, married on average 11 years.

They were not in a certain state of marital need. These were normal couples, but they slowly walked down.

The couples answered questions about their marriage every four months. It was not even halfway through the two -year study when the Finkel team saw that couples felt less satisfied, less love, less intimate, less trust, less passion and less involvement than when the study started.

He suspected that there was a poisonous conflict cycle. Was there something we could do to stop?

We knew that telling people ‘would take the perspective of your partner’ would be useless. ‘Getting perspective’ on the deeper problems can help, but it can also return to ‘take my perspective’. No, really, let me explain again why I am right and you are wrong.

As much as I tried, that never worked for me.

So we took another tack. Can mate develop a third way to view a conflict?

In the Finkel investigation, all couples shared a ‘fact -based summary of the most important disagreement’ that they had had in the previous four months.

From month 12 we asked a happy half of the pairs (as it would turn out) three extra questions:

1. How would a ‘neutral third party who want the best for everyone’ look at your conflict?

How could that person think about the disagreement? How could he or she think that it could come?

2. Which obstacles can you prevent you from taking that perspective when you have a disagreement?

Although the perspective of third parties is useful, it is sometimes difficult to use.

So this question can help if you have a disagreement with your partner.

3. And how can you overcome those obstacles to take that perspective in future conversations?

In the next four months the participants were asked to do their best to take this perspective during interactions with their partner, especially disagreements.

Both people answered these questions, but independently of each other.

Couples who followed the survey as usual continued to continue their deterioration of the wedding quality and slowly sweared down the following year.

But those who answered the three stabilized. At the end of the two -year study, they felt more satisfied, more love, more intimate, more trust, more passion and more commitment than couples who did not.

That did not happen because their conflicts have just disappeared. Conflict is a fact of relationships.

Couples who received the extra three questions even reported that their fights were just as serious as couples who did not. But they were less sad because of those fights. They have no longer invited questions such as: “Is my husband a jerk?” Or “Are we broken?”

That reduction of emergency predicted better relationships over time.

A better marriage has all kinds of step -by -step benefits. So it is not that surprising, but still important that couples who received the extra questions were also less depressed, less stressed and more satisfied with their lives in general.

It is tragic when couples get lost in conflict and erodes a good marriage.

If you are both stuck in your own perspective, you are stuck in a downward spiral.

In our studies we only had seven minutes to play with at the end of the surveys that were divided on the follow-ups of 12, 16 and 20 months.

But it appears that all the couples needed to be stuck: seven minutes every four months for a year to take a step back and to make that perspective of third parties closer, more satisfied and more intimate.

Today Lisa and I have been married for 13 years. For us, as for many couples, an eternal source of conflicts is daily chores.

Lisa likes cooking and is a delicious cook, but sometimes it’s too much. So we talk about the schedule, I do my part, and the children do that too. And part of the deal is that I do all the laundry.

Once you have received those existential questions from the table, you can solve problems. That is the real magic.

Extract from normal magic copyright © 2025 by Gregory Walton. Used by the permission of Harmony Books, a print of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this fragment may be reproduced in writing or reprinted from the publisher without permission.