Love Maps
Peer-Reviewed
Gottman's term for the detailed mental map you maintain of your partner's inner world — their dreams, fears, stresses, preferences, history, and goals.
Gottman's term for the detailed mental map you maintain of your partner's inner world — their dreams, fears, stresses, preferences, history, and goals. Couples with rich love maps handle stress and conflict far better. Updating them regularly (asking open-ended questions, being curious) is one of the simplest relationship practices.
Evidence
Peer-Reviewed
Love Maps, the detailed knowledge partners hold of each other's inner world, earn Peer-Reviewed by inheritance from Gottman's descriptive research program. That program's observational tools, the Love Lab and the Specific Affect Coding System, are among the best validated in couples research (Heyman, 2001), and Love Maps is one of its core descriptive building blocks of friendship. The rating reflects that descriptive science, not the marketed divorce-prediction precision, which is a separate and weaker claim.
Origin
John Gottman
Sources
- The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work — John Gottman, 1999