And Baby Makes Three: The Six-Step Plan for Preserving Marital Intimacy and Rekindling Romance After Baby Arrives

What This Research Establishes

Healthy relationships require increased cooperation and mutual support during major life transitions, with partners turning toward rather than away from each other during stress. The Gottmans identified specific behavioral patterns that predict relationship success or failure during vulnerable periods like becoming parents.

Emotional attunement and responsiveness become even more critical during times of change, as partners need to actively maintain connection despite competing demands and increased stress. Couples who thrive during transitions make intentional efforts to preserve intimacy and romance.

Conflict management skills are essential for navigating disagreements that arise during major life changes, with successful couples learning to discuss problems without criticism, defensiveness, contempt, or stonewalling—the “Four Horsemen” that predict relationship failure.

Creating shared meaning and supporting each other’s dreams remains important even when practical demands increase, as couples who maintain their emotional bond and mutual admiration are better equipped to handle external stressors together.

Why This Matters for Survivors

Understanding what healthy partnership looks like during stress and transition is crucial for survivors who may have experienced the opposite during vulnerable times with narcissistic partners. Where healthy couples increase support and cooperation during challenges, narcissistic partners often become more demanding, critical, and emotionally unavailable when their partner most needs understanding.

The Gottmans’ research illuminates how dramatically different healthy relationships function compared to abusive ones. Instead of using stress as an opportunity to gain control or withdraw support, healthy partners actively work to maintain connection and share responsibilities. This creates a template for what survivors deserve in future relationships.

For survivors who are co-parenting or considering new relationships, this research provides concrete examples of healthy behavior patterns. Recognizing how genuine partners respond during difficult times—with increased attunement rather than decreased empathy—helps survivors identify truly supportive relationships versus those that merely appear healthy on the surface.

The emphasis on mutual influence and respect offers hope for survivors who experienced relationships where their needs, feelings, and input were consistently dismissed or invalidated. Healthy partnerships involve both people affecting decisions and outcomes, not one person controlling while the other adapts.

Clinical Implications

Therapists working with narcissistic abuse survivors can use Gottman’s framework to help clients identify what was missing in their abusive relationships. The stark contrast between healthy conflict resolution and narcissistic manipulation patterns provides clear educational material for helping clients recognize the difference between normal relationship challenges and abuse.

The research offers valuable assessment tools for evaluating whether survivor clients are ready for new relationships or still drawn to familiar but unhealthy dynamics. Clients who can articulate the difference between healthy mutual support and trauma bonding demonstrate important recovery progress.

Understanding how healthy couples navigate transitions helps clinicians prepare survivors for the reality that all relationships face challenges, but the key difference lies in how partners respond to those challenges. This prevents survivors from either idealizing relationships or becoming hypervigilant about normal relationship friction.

The Gottmans’ emphasis on building positive sentiment override—maintaining more positive than negative interactions—provides concrete therapeutic goals for survivors learning to create and maintain healthy relationships after experiencing predominantly negative or unpredictable relationship dynamics.

How This Research Is Used in the Book

The Gottmans’ research on relationship dynamics during transitions provides essential context for understanding how narcissistic abuse often escalates during vulnerable periods. “Narcissus and the Child” draws on their findings to illustrate the stark contrast between healthy mutual support and narcissistic exploitation during times of stress.

“While healthy couples increase cooperation and emotional attunement during major life changes, narcissistic partners often view these vulnerable periods as opportunities to increase control and demand more attention. Understanding what genuine partnership looks like during stress—the kind of mutual support and shared responsibility the Gottmans describe—helps survivors recognize when they’re truly safe versus when they’re experiencing a temporary lull in an abusive cycle.”

Historical Context

Published in the late 1990s, this work emerged during a period of growing recognition that relationship problems could be scientifically studied and effectively treated through evidence-based interventions. The Gottmans’ research methodology, including their famous “Love Lab” observations of couple interactions, represented a significant shift toward understanding relationship dynamics through behavioral observation rather than solely theoretical frameworks. This empirical approach to studying healthy relationship patterns would prove invaluable for later understanding how these patterns are systematically disrupted in abusive relationships.

Further Reading

• Gottman, J. M., & Gottman, J. S. (2017). The natural principles of love. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 9(4), 444-458.

• Gottman, J. M. (1999). The marriage clinic: A scientifically based marital therapy. W. W. Norton & Company.

• Gottman, J. M., & Levenson, R. W. (2000). The timing of divorce: Predicting when a couple will divorce over a 14-year period. Journal of Marriage and Family, 62(3), 737-745.