In distilling his very thorough research for practical application, John Gottman argues that there are four main relationship killers: criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling. He calls them “The four horsemen of the apocalypse,” a surprisingly, unnecessarily, and incendiary gender-biased choice, given that in a great many troubled relationships, a woman already thinks her “horseman” is to blame.
I understand the literal reference to The New Testament’s craziest chapter, The Book of Revelations, but he could have been clearer and more to the point.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with each of his four horsemen. Each has its virtues. They only become vices when they’re employed by someone who has gotten on their high horse, pretending they’re the ultimate objective and infallible judge rather than a subjective advocate arguing with an equal. Going through each:
Criticism: There’s nothing inherently wrong with giving critical feedback. We all do it and won’t stop doing it. Pretending that there is something inherently wrong with criticism, is a recipe for self-deception, “Me? I don’t criticize because criticism is evil. I’m merely saying you’re wrong.” Gotttman attempts to make the problem with criticism more credible by arguing that criticism is a killer when it attacks someone’s character, but what criticism can’t imply that there’s something wrong with the other person’s character? And what if there is something wrong with the other person’s character? Should Stalin’s young wife have kept from voicing criticism of his character? Criticism is deadly in relationship only when voiced not as your opinion about someone but as the objective truth. In other words, when the critic mounts a high-horse and talks down to the person he or she criticizes, in effect, pulling rank and pretending to deserve the final word on what’s true.
Contempt: Contempt has its place too. Who doesn’t find Stalin’s killing in the tens of millions contemptible? Still, contempt may be the best thoroughbred killer in Gottman’s stable, because it is high-horse condemnation by definition. Indeed one could argue that there’s really only one high-horse manifest in four ways.
Defensiveness: What’s the difference between defending yourself when you’ve been wrongly accused or misunderstood and “being defensive,” or engaging in “defensiveness”? There’s not always a clear line, but the closest we may be able to come to one is the difference between saying, “I’m speaking objectively when I tell you that you are wrong about me,” and “My opinion is that you’re misjudging me,” in other words, between pretending your voicing the absolute objective truth and voicing your subjective opinion. We often pretend that we can be objective about our own behavior, saying things like, “Don’t tell me what I think and feel. I know my own feelings.” In fact, we don’t necessarily know our own feelings. It’s easy to think of examples of people claiming to know what they feel when they don’t. Given the ease with which people claim objective knowledge of their own intentions, it’s especially important to qualify our “You’re wrong about me” defenses with subjectivity caveats like “I think,” or “In my opinion you’re wrong about me.”
Stonewalling: Have you ever stopped listening to someone either permanently or temporarily? Isn’t that readily interpreted as stonewalling and does that mean it’s always wrong? I don’t think so. I think we all have finite attention and must try to allocate it carefully, which means giving full attention to some voices and no attention to others, while giving some attention to still others in between. Stonewalling only becomes a problem when it’s done from a high horse, in other words as a contemptuous dismissal from a self-proclaimed infallible judge who knows for all humankind what’s worth listening to and what isn’t.
The vagueness at least in popular interpretations of Gottman’s work causes more trouble than necessary. It focuses on problem relationships in which both parties are roughly equal in their tendency to mount his four horsemen and it under-emphasizes the virtue of ending relationships with people who lean far more heavily into horsemen behavior than you do.
By failing to emphasize that the problem is getting on one’s high horse, Gottman’s findings easily become ways to attack someone else’s character from a high horse. “It would be objectively obvious to anyone of good character that you are criticizing, contemptuous, defensive and stonewalling and therefore the problem here.”
There's a simple fix: Call them the four high horses of the apocalypse.