Defining Contempt and the Forms It Takes
Contempt is the communication pattern that Gottman identified as the most destructive of Gottman's Four Horsemen. It differs qualitatively from mere criticism, because it arises from an attitude that looks down on the partner as an inferior being rather than from dissatisfaction with something the partner did. Its concrete forms include sarcasm, mockery, name-calling, eye-rolling, sneering, and mimicking the partner in order to ridicule them. Several of these are conveyed without words at all, which is one reason contempt is so difficult for the person expressing it to acknowledge and so unmistakable to the person receiving it. Underlying contempt is a sense of moral superiority, and the message it transmits is that the speaker is the better person and that the partner is stupid, incompetent, or without value. Because the target of the message is the partner's worth rather than any particular behavior, there is nothing the partner can correct in response, which distinguishes contempt from a complaint that can be answered. In Gottman's research, contempt is the single strongest predictor of divorce, and couples in whom contempt appears frequently divorce at extremely high rates.
How Contempt Develops
Contempt does not appear overnight. It emerges as the result of unresolved dissatisfaction accumulating over a long period, which means it is always a late symptom rather than an early one. According to Gottman, contempt tends to appear in relationships where negative sentiment override has settled in, meaning that the habit of reading the partner's words and actions in the worst possible light has hardened into the default. In the beginning, dissatisfaction takes the form of a complaint about a specific behavior, which is a legitimate and even necessary form of communication. When the complaint goes unresolved and the dissatisfaction accumulates, criticism of behavior turns into criticism of character, so that a request about a particular action becomes a statement about the kind of person the partner is. With further accumulation, this develops into contempt, which rejects the partner's character in its entirety. This escalation process signals that the culture of fondness and admiration between the partners has collapsed, since contempt cannot coexist with a working habit of noticing what the partner does well. In couples where contempt has taken hold, the tendency to interpret a partner's behavior charitably, which Gottman calls positive sentiment override, has been lost, and even neutral behavior comes to be read negatively. At that point the ordinary self-correcting mechanisms of a relationship no longer operate, because attempts at repair are themselves interpreted through the same hostile lens.
Preventing Contempt and the Implications for Compatibility
The antidote to contempt is to build a culture of fondness and admiration as a matter of daily practice, which means the work of prevention has to happen well before contempt appears. Concretely, this involves deliberately acknowledging the partner's good qualities, expressing gratitude, and putting respect into words rather than assuming it is understood. Gottman holds that maintaining what he calls the five-to-one ratio, in which positive interactions outnumber negative ones by a factor of at least five, is effective in preventing contempt from taking root. Among the Big Five traits, the combination of low agreeableness, and particularly its modesty facet, with high neuroticism, and particularly its hostility facet, raises the risk of contempt. Low modesty supplies the sense of superiority while hostility supplies the readiness to express it. Carrying these traits does not make contempt inevitable, however. The moment a remark starts to be about who the partner is rather than what the partner did is the moment at which the slide can still be reversed, and whether respect gets put back into words at that point is what makes the difference. Risk of escalation into contempt is especially high where both partners are low in agreeableness, and also where one partner has fragile self-esteem and responds defensively by asserting superiority, since in that case contempt functions as protection against feeling diminished. The best way to prevent this development is to establish, at an early stage, the habit of expressing complaints constructively and resolving them while they still concern behavior rather than character.