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Saturn in Leo Transit Through the 7th House: Mathematics Of Marriage and Composite Charts - Predicting Divorce
Just Blathering…
Still on this topic, with Saturn transiting my 7th house (relationships), I am learning about how people relate. And I didn’t mean to, but I came across the name, John Gottman who is a psychologist who wrote among other things, “The Mathematics of Marriage”.
Now this guy studied the hell out of relationship in an effort to be able to predict who would divorce and who would not with very limited data.
And he came up with a super effective formula. If he listens to a couple talk about *anything, for an hour, he can predict with 95% accuracy if they will be married or divorced within 15 years. If he listens for just 15 minutes, he can still predict this with 90% accuracy.
Now eventually he got so good at this, he found he could eavesdrop on a couple eating dinner in a restaurant and have a pretty good idea where they were headed.
In short, he found that marriages have a sort of DNA. In other words, the way we relate to another is hardwired! And in terms of astrology, this is very interesting.
I thought of the composite chart as the DNA of a relationship. Because it’s my experience if you are hooked up with someone, the composite chart is inescapable. For beginners, a composite chart is a chart of the relationship between two people.
And I just thought it was cool science is making now making the same kind of claims astrologers are punished for. That is, that these things are predictable! And I don’t know why this makes people so uncomfortable.
Personally, I’d just as soon have this guy listen to me talk to my lover and tell me in advance the relationship was going nowhere! That it was not going to satisfy!
And if he said, “You two are very fortunate,” I would like that as well! In whatever case, I think this is enormously interesting and what do you think?
How do you feel about a guy being able to predict the future of your relationship after sharing lunch with you and your partner?
What about an astrologer looking at a few charts and doing same?
11 Responses to “Saturn in Leo Transit Through the 7th House: Mathematics Of Marriage and Composite Charts - Predicting Divorce”
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I read about this guy on WebMD. It’s cool, but I’d be leery.
Personally, I’m happy where I am right now relationship-wise. And if it’s not going to work, I don’t want to grieve early - I’ve already invested nearly six years, learning I’m doomed now would be depressing.
So, um. Nah, I’ll pass….
Mostly it makes me wish it wasn’t considered “weird” to ask a potential date for their birth data!
-K
For the record, Dr. Gottman has been studying married couples for 20 years. He doesn’t just listen to them or eavesdrop, he actually videotapes them for an extended period of time while he’s out of the room. He will then do follow-up work. It’s only after he studied thousands of couples over a 20 year period that he came up with the predictive parameters.
Right now I can only remember two of the predictive criteria for failure: contempt and stonewalling. If you think about it, that makes a lot of sense. But he did find that there are different kinds of happy marriages: some people loved to argue, others hated conflict, etc.
Btw, he was originally a mathematician who got sidetracked into psychology. He is now working on studying how same-sex couples behave with one another and apparently there a couple of differences between happily united same-sex couples and happily united hetero marriages.
Funny that you should post this today, Elsa, bc I had a question about composite charts that I posted on another astrology site.
We wil listen but we are all going to end up doing what ever our dang old hearts tell us to do. You know what I mean?
I would LOVE that.
I can dig it. I like the idea.
Unnerving stuff. Guess it helps to use the science to “minimse risk” from potentially negative relationships. But like Cassi says… some will just follow the heart. Besides… risk is just that… risk. The potential for behavioural change has not been taken into account…
Just my 2 cents.
I think I’d be interested in knowing, just because, like right now, I have some gut feelings about my future with my husband that I’d love some outside confirmation on.
Hmm, no, what Gottsman does is not really about risk. He observes the way that two people relate to each other. So, for instance, if someone is putting you down, not listening to you, not acknowledging you, etc., Gottsman will say: This relationship isn’t going to survive. See what the difference is? He’s not gauging compatibility. He’s observing a relationship dynamic. There’s a difference. For instance, we’ve all known people who were extremely compatible and then they got together and the relationship flopped. And it seems like a mystery, right? And then we know the opposite, right, people who don’t seem like they’re compatible at all and for some reason the relationship works. In the latter case, you’d think it’d be more of a risk to get involved with a person who’s not compatible. In fact, it may seem like there’s no risk at all going into a relationship with someone who shares a lot of interests, likes, traits, etc. For instance, it’s the difference between synastry aspects and a composite chart.
Gottsman is not evaluating each person individually and predicting the level of risk involved in pursuing a relationship with that person. He doesn’t say anything about risk at all; he says that if there are four danger signs present during a couple’s interaction, that relationship is doomed. And the difference is that these people are already in the relationship; these aren’t people who are making up their minds about whether or not they want to get involved with each other. I’m not sure if I’m being clear, I just wanted to show that there’s a subtle difference. In a way, what Gottsman is doing takes a lot less work than astrological analysis.
there was a whole this american life episode about this, with an interview with gottman himself and excerpts from some of these taped interviews with couples. it was fascinating. if you go to the TAL website, you can type in “gottman” in the search engine, and it will pull up an episode called “the sanctity of marriage.” you can download the audio file to your desktop or mp3 player and listen to it–it is truly revealing!!!
This is interesting. My husbands therepist just reccomended another of Gottmans books for Storm to read!