John Gottman was born in 1942 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were a Jewish couple who had to flee Vienna to escape the Holocaust. Being raised by two parents who lost all the material possessions they owned, John learned that everything was transitory and that he would do better to value education over belongings and property, as it is “something you can always carry with you, that nobody could ever take away” (30).

John excelled academically. While his initial area of study was mathematics, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he found that he became more interested in his roommate’s psychological studies and so changed his focus. When he began to work on relationships, he realized that he could apply his old mathematical training to make predictions about what makes for enduring love. He employs a variety of methods, including in-depth questionnaires and the acute study of microexpressions according to behavioral psychologist Paul Ekman’s principles. By patiently setting up experiments to test his theories, Gottman allowed the findings of his data to take over, sometimes having to accept that his preconceptions about love were wrong. This faith in data and its ability to triumph over human instinct and conditioning continues into his work today.