Lessons from marriage counseling for the right and the left

I was fascinated by this short piece in Slate, entitled (oddly) "What Would Scooby Do? What marriage counseling can teach liberals and conservatives." Shankar Vedantam translates the current political landscape into familiar terms...likening left and right to warring partners in a disintegrating marriage. He summarizes (and oversimplifies, but there's a grain of truth there):

The right is convinced that the left is evil. The left is convinced that the right is retarded.

The right is angry. The left is contemptuous. And therein lies the problem:

Both anger and contempt have deep psychological roots. Anger usually stems from feelings of unfairness or betrayal. Contempt is anger mixed with disgust. Anger and contempt are not just emotions. They are scripts that determine our political conversation....In recent decades, the field of marriage research has been changed by a paradigm known as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Invented by marriage researcher John Gottman, the paradigm suggests that dysfunctional relationships often have four markers—criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.

Readers of Gottman's research (and of Malcolm Gladwell's summaries of that work) will know that of the four horsemen, contempt is the clearest predictor of subsequent divorce. Vedantam goes on:

What couples learn in counseling is that their conflicting visions are accurate, but accurate in the way caricatures are accurate. They miss nuance and fail to see how different underlying dreams prompt each side to value things differently. Surely underlying personality and different upbringing have much to do with the desire among so many liberals to see a president who is, first and foremost, smart, and the desire among so many conservatives to have a president who is, first and foremost, a patriot?

This is the core of how Jeff and I make our bipartisan marriage "work." We default to a positive interpretation of one another's motives and desires (whenever possible; Sarah Palin may be an exception), and that keeps the debates civil and the discussions productive. Well, that and the fact that he does more than his share of cat box duty.