The Four Horsemen: Four Habits That Predict Relationship Trouble
The Four Horsemen are four communication habits that researcher John Gottman linked to relationship breakdown: criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling. Every couple slips into them sometimes. They become a warning sign when they are the usual way you argue and attempts to repair stop working. Each one has an alternative you can learn.
What are the Four Horsemen?
The name comes from psychologist John Gottman, who borrowed the image of the four horsemen of the apocalypse to describe four ways of handling conflict that tend to show up in relationships that are in trouble. The Gottman Institute describes them as criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling.
Criticism
A complaint is about a specific thing that happened. Criticism turns it into a statement about who your partner is. “You said you would call and you didn’t, and I was worried” is a complaint. “You never think about anyone but yourself” is criticism. Watch for the words “always” and “never.”
Contempt
Contempt is criticism delivered from a position of superiority: sarcasm, mockery, name-calling, eye-rolling, a sneer. The message is not “I am upset with you” but “I am better than you.” The partner on the receiving end feels despised.
Defensiveness
Defensiveness is the natural response to feeling accused. You explain, make excuses, or turn the complaint around: “I only forgot because you didn’t remind me.” It feels like self-protection. To your partner it sounds like “the problem is you.”
Stonewalling
Stonewalling is shutting down. The listener goes quiet, looks away, leaves the room or gets busy with something else. It usually happens when a person feels physically overwhelmed by the conflict, not because they do not care. There is more on this in the guide to stonewalling and the silent treatment.
How do the four habits feed each other?
They rarely show up one at a time. A common pattern runs like this. One partner raises an issue as a criticism. The other defends. The first, feeling unheard, pushes harder and contempt creeps in. The second, flooded, shuts down. The first reads the silence as indifference and gets louder.
Notice that neither person is the villain in that sequence. Each move makes sense as a reaction to the one before it, which is why couples can repeat it for years while both feel like the injured party. When one partner routinely pushes and the other routinely retreats, you may be in what therapists call the pursuer-distancer pattern.
Where does the idea come from?
It comes from observational research. Starting in the 1980s, Gottman and his colleague Robert Levenson brought couples into a lab, recorded them discussing a real disagreement, coded their behavior moment by moment, and then followed them over time.
In one early study, 73 married couples were studied in 1983 and again in 1987. Couples whose conflict discussions carried more negativity showed more defensiveness and more withdrawal, and were at greater risk of separating. The authors proposed a “cascade” in which a marriage moves through stages on the way to ending.
A later study of 124 newlywed couples reported that the emotional tone of just the first three minutes of a conflict discussion was related to whether the couple was still married six years later. That finding is behind the common advice to start hard conversations gently.
Do the Four Horsemen really predict divorce?
You will often read that these habits predict divorce with very high accuracy. Treat that claim with caution.
The Gottman Institute states that contempt is the single greatest predictor of divorce, and the underlying studies did find that these behaviors were more common in couples who later split. But other researchers have pointed out a problem with the headline accuracy figures. In a 2001 paper, Richard Heyman and Amy Slep showed that a prediction formula’s accuracy drops sharply when it is tested on a new group of couples instead of the group it was built from. In their demonstration, the share of predicted divorces that were correct fell from about 65 percent to about 29 percent. They reviewed 15 divorce prediction studies that reported accuracy between 67 and 95 percent, and noted that most used small samples and had not been checked this way.
The original samples were also limited. They were married couples, studied decades ago in a research setting, so the findings may not carry over neatly to unmarried couples, same-sex couples or couples today.
A fair summary: the four habits are well-described markers of a relationship under strain, and they are worth taking seriously. They are not a test that can tell you whether your relationship will last.
What can you do instead?
Each habit has a counterpart. The Gottman Institute calls these the antidotes.
- Instead of criticism, a gentle start-up. Describe your own feeling and a specific need, without blame. “I felt left out at dinner tonight. Can we talk for a few minutes?”
- Instead of contempt, appreciation and respect. Contempt grows where resentment has been stored up. Regularly noticing what your partner does well, and saying so, changes the climate over time.
- Instead of defensiveness, responsibility. Accept even a small part of the problem. “You’re right, I did say I would handle it.” This is often the fastest way to lower the temperature.
- Instead of stonewalling, a real break. Say that you are overwhelmed and need to pause, then come back. The Institute suggests a break of at least twenty minutes, spent on something calming and not on rehearsing your case.
None of this is easy in the heat of an argument, and you will not do it perfectly. Start with the one habit you recognize most in yourself, not the one you see in your partner. The site’s article on how criticism and defensiveness damage marriages looks more closely at the first and third.
How do you tell a bad week from a pattern?
Every couple criticizes, gets defensive and goes quiet at times, especially when tired or stressed. A few questions help you judge how worried to be:
- Is this how most of your disagreements go, or only some?
- When one of you tries to repair, with an apology, a joke or a touch, does it land?
- Do you recover within hours, or do arguments leave days of coldness?
- Has contempt become a regular part of how you speak to each other?
- Are there still good times between the arguments?
If repair still works and warmth returns, you are probably dealing with ordinary conflict. If the habits have become the default and repair attempts fail, that is a pattern.
When is it worth getting help?
Consider couples therapy if you have tried to change these habits and keep sliding back, if contempt has become routine, or if one of you has stopped engaging at all. A therapist can slow the sequence down in the room so you can both see it. spiral2grow draws on the Gottman Method among other approaches in its couples counseling.
One caution. Insults and put-downs that come with threats, intimidation, control over your money or movements, or fear of your partner are not a communication problem. That is abuse, and couples therapy is not the right first step. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233.
A conversation can be the first step
If you recognize these habits and want help changing them, Moshe Ratson, LMFT, offers a free phone consultation. Sessions are held in Midtown Manhattan and Online by Video. You can reach out through the contact page to set up a call.
Common questions
The Gottman Institute singles out contempt, meaning sarcasm, mockery or disgust aimed at your partner, as the most damaging of the four and the strongest warning sign in its research. Contempt usually grows out of long-held resentment, so reducing it means dealing with the underlying complaints as well as changing your tone.
Yes. These habits are common, and seeing them in your relationship does not mean it is ending. What matters is whether you can both recognize the pattern, repair after arguments and practice the alternatives. Many couples learn to do this, and some find it easier with a couples therapist guiding the process.
Not quite. Stonewalling usually happens during a conflict when someone feels overwhelmed and shuts down to cope. The silent treatment is often a longer, deliberate withdrawal used to punish. From the outside they can look alike, and both leave the other partner feeling shut out, but they call for different responses.
A gentle start-up is a way of raising a complaint without blame. You describe how you feel, name the specific situation and say what you need, for example, I felt worried when I did not hear from you, and I would like a text if you are running late. It replaces criticism.
Sources
- The Four Horsemen: Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling, The Gottman Institute
- The Four Horsemen: The Antidotes, The Gottman Institute
- Marital processes predictive of later dissolution: behavior, physiology, and health (Gottman & Levenson, 1992), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, via PubMed
- Predicting divorce among newlyweds from the first three minutes of a marital conflict discussion (Carrère & Gottman, 1999), Family Process, via PubMed
- The Hazards of Predicting Divorce Without Crossvalidation (Heyman & Slep, 2001), Journal of Marriage and Family, via PubMed Central
- National Domestic Violence Hotline, National Domestic Violence Hotline
This article is part of the Couples Counseling Guide. It is general information, not a substitute for care from a licensed professional who knows your situation.
This article is for general education. It is not a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis or treatment.
