“Can something so huge, so essential, so mysterious, so individual—have a formula? Is there a ‘prescription’ for love? In a word: Yes. And the most important thing to know about ‘the seven-day love prescription’ is that it’s a small one. Tiny little doses, every day, is what it takes to make a healthy relationship.”

The Gottmans juxtapose the vast unwieldiness of love, which can take many forms, with the smallness of their daily prescription for it. The abundance of synonyms for small in this extract, such as “tiny” and “little,” emphasizes that a prescription for love is not only possible but manageable in the modest unit of a day. Smallness also equates to the empirical nature of the Gottmans’ scientific approach, which observes and measures details to make big predictions rather than making sweeping unfounded statements.

“Love is a practice. More than a feeling, it’s an action. It’s something you do, not something that just happens to you. And you need to give—and get—a daily dose to maintain a healthy, thriving relationship.”

The Gottmans bust the common myth that love is a psychosomatic affliction akin to a mood that the possessor has no control over. Instead, it is an action that is performed in the unit of a day. Thus, external manifestations of love such as behavior matter more than the internal sensations one keeps to oneself when it comes to having a good relationship.

“60% of his earliest ideas about what makes marriages succeed or fail were off base. Like the rest of us, he’d spawned those ideas from cultural stereotypes—our favorite novels, TV shows and movies, our own families and experiences. These all have the capacity to lead us astray, and often do. That’s why we really need data. Analyzing data can accurately reveal what’s true and not true about what helps relationships succeed.”

This extract reveals John Gottman’s subordination of instinct and experience, both lived and cultural, to data when it comes to analyzing the success of relationships. In showing how Gottman, too, despite his education and mathematical mind, was able to be led astray by stereotypes of successful love, they demonstrate the pervasive destructiveness of these cultural myths and why data is essential to discovering the truth.