`Til Death Do Us Part? Predicting The Odds by Jon Sindell Forget your psychic, your astrologer, and your wise Aunt Hattie. Marriage counselors trained in conducting specialized interviews can evidently gauge a new marriage's odds of survival with a high rate of accuracy "How people talk, not the content, is the key," says Kim Buehlman, a therapist and co-author of a new University of Washington study that tracked the marital paths of 95 newlywed couples from the Seattle area for seven to nine years. Researchers interviewed the couples for one hour shortly after they were married, then used an extremely detailed technique for interpreting their highly coded responses. The result: an 87 percent accuracy rate in predicting which couples would remain married four to six years later, and an 81 percent accuracy rate in predicting which marriages would last seven to nine years. The clues were found between the lines of the newlyweds' responses to the researchers' open-ended questions. Modeling their interview methods after those of the famed oral historian Studs Terkel, the researchers focused not so much on what the couples said, as on how they said it. They went beneath the couples' mere words to focus on the negative or positive nature of their references to their partners. The happiest couples spoke in quasi-musical harmony, while ill-fated pairs struggled for positive things to say about each other. The happy couples spoke in a symmetrical manner, while the unhappy pairs did not. The researchers concluded that friendship is a key indicator of a healthy marriage. Sybil Carrere, a co-author of the study, explains, "A lot of couples neglect the friendship in marriage and it erodes over time because of such things as career demands and having children. When you neglect friendship, the positive perceptual filter you have about your partner begins to fail." Partners in a healthy marriage know how to disagree without damaging the marriage, Buehlman adds. Couples with a strong bond find ways of avoiding destructive arguments because they like each other, while couples with a weak bond do not respect each other and are not kind to each other. They simply aren't friends.

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