Unit 5: Selection Vocabulary 3

For the past four decades, he has studied thousands of couples in a quest to figure out what makes relationships work.

And Gottman made a critical discovery in this study—one that gets at the heart of why some relationships thrive while others languish.

Sometimes they would respond with overt hostility, saying something like, “Stop interrupting me, I’m reading.”

They know, in other words, that a good relationship requires sustained hard work.

They found that, in general, couples responded to each other’s good news in four different ways that they called: passive destructive, active destructive, passive constructive, and active constructive.

She was the urgent chirper

Fledgling flier.
And when spring rolled
Out its green
She’d grown
Into the most noticeable
Bird-girl.

The young couple scavenges seeds
On the patio.

Then we watch him fill his beak
Walk tenderly to her and kiss her with seed.

Under her hand scrolls
and crests gleam
darker still.

Wavery memory: home
from a dance, the front door
blown open and the parlor
in snow, she rushed
the bowl to the stove, watched
as the locket of ice
dissolved and he
swam free.

Wavery memory: home
from a dance, the front door
blown open and the parlor
in snow, she rushed
the bowl to the stove, watched
as the locket of ice
dissolved and he
swam free.

Long before the shadow and
sun’s accomplice, the tree.