Conflict and repair

Since the 1980s, researchers — most famously John Gottman's lab — have brought couples into observation rooms, recorded real disagreements, and followed the couples for years. The question is not whether couples fight (nearly all do) but what distinguishes the fights of couples who last from those who separate.

The strongest signals are not the argument itself but what happens around it: contempt and stonewalling predict separation better than anger does; successful couples make repair attempts — a joke, a touch, a concession — and, crucially, the other partner accepts them. The often-quoted 5:1 ratio of positive to negative moments during conflict came from these observational studies. Conflict style is measurable and changeable: accommodating, competing, and avoiding are strategies, not personality.

Gottman's famous "94% prediction accuracy" was computed on the same data the model was built from — genuine out-of-sample accuracy is far lower, and popular writing routinely overstates it. Observational findings also describe couples on average, in a lab, mostly in Western samples. Our conflict test tells you your default strategy and its cost; it cannot tell you whether a specific relationship will survive, and Luna will say so if you ask.