This TED talk by Julie and John Gottman explores the dynamics of fighting in romantic relationships, emphasizing that it's not the presence of conflict but how couples handle it that determines relationship success. Through extensive research at the Gottman Institute, they reveal that constructive fighting can enhance connection and intimacy, offering insights into the behaviors that distinguish successful couples from those who struggle.

So most of us think that fighting is bad for romantic relationships, right? How many people do you know who say, "Hey, I had a great fight the other day," or "Oh yeah, my partner and I fight all the time and we're super happy"? Fifty-two years ago, we put love under the microscope. Julie and I are the founders of the Gottman Institute and the Love Lab, and we've made the study of relationships our life's work. Our research tells us that fighting is good for relationships, not bad. In our lab, we saw that almost all couples fight. In fact, how they fight in the first three minutes predicts with 96% accuracy not only how the rest of the conversation will go, but how the rest of the relationship will go six years down the road. My God, I know, it's terrifying, isn't it? So it's not if we fight that determines relationship success, it's how we fight. In fact, our research has revealed that some fighting actually increases connection and even improves our sex life. So how do we fight right? Early on, John and his colleague, Robert Levinson, in their lab simply watched couples interacting. Sounds simple, but nobody had ever done that before. Over time, 3,000 couples came to the lab. As they were being videotaped, they wore monitors that measured such things as respiration, heart rate, and stress hormones. Then they had a conflict discussion and talked about the events of their day. Afterwards, they rated how they felt during each conversation before returning home. They would return to the lab every year or two and repeat the same procedure, and some were followed for as long as 20 years. Videotapes were synchronized to the physiological data, and then in a split-screen video, second by second, we measured the couple's words, emotions, facial expressions, and physiology year after year. Over time, we saw that some couples separated or divorced, some remained together unhappily, while others stayed together happily. What made the difference between the couples who were successful and the couples who were unsuccessful, or as we call them, the masters and the disasters?