Before we were old enough to have opinions about relationships, we were already forming them. Attachment theory is the science of how that happens and why the patterns formed in the earliest years of life show up decades later in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday with someone we love. 

In the late 1970s, a young researcher and psychologist named John Gottman set out to understand why some marriages succeed and others fail. It was not, on its surface, an unusual question. Therapists had been asking versions of it for decades. But Gottman wanted to do something different. He wanted to measure it. What followed […]