Contempt in Relationships: Why It Predicts Divorce and What to Do When You Spot It
Contempt is the single biggest predictor of divorce in Dr. John Gottman's research — and the most damaging of the "Four Horsemen" of communication breakdown. In this episode of What Your Therapist Thinks, I talk with hosts Kristie Plantinga and Felicia Keller Boyle about how contempt enters a relationship, how to recognize it (including in yourself), and how to interrupt it before it does lasting damage. If you're working through these patterns in your own relationship, I offer Gottman Method couples counseling in Salt Lake City and Raleigh, with telehealth available across Utah and North Carolina.
Dr. John Gottman is a relationship researcher who spent decades studying what distinguishes couples who stay together from those who divorce. In that research, one pattern stood out above every other: contempt. Not how much couples fight. Not whether they have unresolved issues. Contempt — and specifically, whether one partner regularly treats the other from a position of moral superiority — predicts divorce more reliably than any other communication pattern Gottman measured. It's the most destructive of what he calls the Four Horsemen of relationship breakdown.
That finding has been replicated for decades. And in 25+ years of working with couples, I've found that the most common reason contempt in relationships destroys them isn't because partners decide to be cruel. It's because they don't recognize what they're doing.
What is contempt in relationships?
Contempt is treating your partner as beneath you. Not just disagreeing with them, not just being frustrated with them — looking at them and, in the moment, believing you are a better person than they are.
This is what makes contempt different from frustration or anger. You can be furious with someone you fundamentally respect. Contempt in relationships is what happens when respect has eroded enough that you've started to see your partner as the problem rather than as a partner with a problem.
Signs of contempt in marriage
Gottman's research identified specific behaviors that signal contempt is present in a relationship:
Eye-rolling during disagreements
Sarcasm that carries an edge of disrespect
Mockery or imitation of your partner
Name-calling, including subtle forms like "you're being ridiculous"
Sneering or a particular tone reserved for when you think your partner is being stupid
"Helpful" correction that's really condescension
Hostile humor — jokes at your partner's expense that you'd never make about a friend
These are the symptoms. The thing underneath is the conviction — sometimes momentary, sometimes chronic — that your partner is the lesser person in the relationship.
Why partners almost never recognize their own contempt
This is the aspect of contempt in relationships I want to spend the most time on, because it has a significant impact on couples interactions and couples therapy.
In my office, partners are usually quick to identify contempt in the other person. "She rolls her eyes every time I bring up money." "He talks to me like I'm an idiot when I forget something." Those are easy to name when it's being done to you.
What's almost impossible to see is your own contempt. There are a few reasons for this.
Contempt feels like accuracy from the inside
When you're being contemptuous of your partner, you don't experience it as contempt. You experience it as being right. The eye-roll feels justified — they really did just say something ridiculous. The sarcastic comment feels earned — they really did just do the thing you've asked them not to do fifteen times. Contempt arrives wearing the costume of fairness, and from inside that experience, it just looks like you're responding accurately to the situation.
It gets normalized inside the relationship
Couples develop their own communication norms over time. If contempt has been part of how you talk to each other for years, it stops registering as remarkable. The tone you'd never use with a colleague becomes the tone you use with your spouse at the dinner table. The comment you'd find shocking from a stranger becomes a routine exchange between you and the person you're supposed to love most.
By the time couples come to therapy, both partners have usually been participating in a contemptuous communication culture for so long that neither of them sees how far it's drifted from how they actually want to treat each other.
It sometimes hides inside humor
This is the disguise I see most often. Sarcasm and "just joking" become acceptable ways to deliver contempt while maintaining deniability. If the partner on the receiving end objects, the response is some version of "I was kidding — why are you so sensitive?" The contemptuous content is the true message. The humor is the wrapper.
Partners who use humor this way often genuinely believe they're not being contemptuous. They're just being funny. But the function of the humor is to communicate disdain in a way that can't be challenged directly.
How to test whether something was a joke or contempt: Would you make the same comment, in the same tone, to your boss or a respected colleague? If not, the humor isn't the point — the disrespect is.
What to do when you spot it in yourself
If you've gotten this far and recognized your own behavior somewhere in the descriptions above — that's the work. Recognition is the part most people never reach.
The next step isn't apologizing or making promises. It's two specific things.
First, stop trying to win the argument you were having when the contempt showed up. Contempt almost always emerges in the middle of a disagreement where you've decided you're right and your partner isn't seeing it. The work of repair starts when you can recognize that being right is no longer the most important thing — and that how you've been pursuing being right has cost you something.
Second, name what you did, specifically, without softening it. "I rolled my eyes at you and that was disrespectful" lands differently than "I'm sorry if I came across as dismissive." The first acknowledges contempt. The second tries to negotiate whether it happened at all.
This is harder than it sounds. Most partners who recognize their own contempt want to qualify it immediately — to explain why they did it, to point out what their partner did first, to soften the acknowledgment. The repair has to come without the qualifier.
When to bring in help
Contempt in relationships can go on for years without being recognized or addressed. If so, it may be challenging to undo the relationship damage on your own. Not because you're not motivated — but because the patterns are too established and partners frequently can't see them clearly enough from the inside.
The Gottman Method — the approach I use most often in couples therapy — has decades of research behind specific interventions for reversing contemptuous patterns. The work involves identifying when contempt shows up, what triggers it, what each partner is communicating underneath it, and how to replace it with a way of talking that doesn't leave both of you feeling worse afterward.
I recently talked through some of this on the What Your Therapist Thinks podcast with Kristie Plantinga and Felicia Keller Boyle — including why contempt is so destructive, how it shows up in everyday interactions, and what couples can do to start interrupting the pattern. You can listen to the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
If you're seeing contempt in your relationship and you're not sure how to address it, that's exactly the kind of work I do with couples — using the Gottman Method, with telehealth across Utah and North Carolina. I work with couples in Salt Lake City and across the Salt Lake Valley, and in Raleigh and across the Triangle.
Contempt rarely resolves on its own — but with the right approach, most couples can interrupt the pattern. If you're ready to start, the next step is a brief consultation.
