Free Gottman Worksheets and Exercises for Couples
Gottman exercises are short structured practices drawn from Gottman Method Couples Therapy, the approach developed by Drs. John and Julie Gottman from more than four decades of observational research on couples. Six of them are below, with free printable worksheets. Most take 15 minutes or less. You can do all of them at home without a therapist, and this page also explains the situations where doing them on your own is not the right call.
Written by Lisa Chen, LMFT, California License #140374. Lisa is the founder of Lisa Chen & Associates Therapy in Hermosa Beach and works with couples using Gottman Method Couples Therapy, EMDR, Internal Family Systems, and somatic approaches. Completed Level II Training in Gottman Method Couples Therapy.
All clinicians at this practice have been trained and completed Level 1 Gottman Method Couples Training: Lisa Chen, LMFT (#140374) Lisa Newman, LMFT (#150738), Jessica Slavin, MS, AMFT (#140590), Chandra Breslow, AMFT (#165437), Payton Rund, AMFT (#161567), Rebekah Richin, AMFT (#161608), Laura Malandrino, APCC (#15514), Elizabeth Dang, AMFT (pending).
Last reviewed: September 2026.
How to use these exercises
My clinicians at my practice and myself use these with couples in my office most weeks, so let me tell you how they actually work before you start.
These are practices, not fixes. The research behind the Gottman Method is observational. The Gottmans watched thousands of couples and noticed what the stable ones did differently, then built exercises to teach those behaviors on purpose. That means the value is in repetition, not insight. Doing the Love Maps exercise once is a nice evening. Doing it monthly for a year changes how well you know each other.
Pick one. Not six. Couples who try to install a whole new relationship in a weekend usually abandon all of it by Wednesday. Choose the exercise that matches the thing that is actually bothering you, run it for a few weeks, and add another only when the first one has become normal.
Do them when things are calm. Every one of these is harder in the middle of a fight, and two of them are actively counterproductive there. If you are flooded, meaning your heart is pounding and you cannot hear what your partner is saying, stop and come back in twenty minutes. That break is itself a Gottman intervention.
The worksheets (free PDF downloads)
Five printable worksheets, one for each exercise below. No email required.
Love Maps worksheet (PDF)
Fondness Jar worksheet (PDF)
Softened Startup communication worksheet (PDF)
Back-to-Back conversation worksheet (PDF)
Shared Dreams worksheet (PDF)
Print them, or open them on a phone and work through them together.
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
Gottman Therapy emphasizes 7 Principles for.a Healthy Marriage.
Build Love Maps: Take time to truly know your partner’s world—worries, hopes, joys, and life changes—so each person feels understood on a deeper level.
Nurture Fondness and Admiration: Regularly express appreciation and genuine respect, making the positive aspects of your relationship the focus instead of the flaws.
Turn Toward Each Other: Foster connection by responding to each other’s small bids for attention, support, or affection—whether that’s a smile, a question, or a comforting gesture.
Let Your Partner Influence You: Welcome each other’s ideas and opinions, allowing flexibility instead of digging in defensively.
Solve Solvable Problems: Address everyday conflicts with calm, compromise, and empathy, rather than allowing them to grow into insurmountable issues.
Overcome Gridlock: Tackle recurring conflicts by uncovering underlying dreams and values, finding ways to talk about differences without losing sight of each other’s needs.
Create Shared Meaning: Develop rituals, values, goals, and traditions that are unique to your relationship, giving your partnership a sense of purpose and cohesion
What is the “Sound Relationship House” Theory and How Does it Help Couples?
The Gottmans use a house as the picture for all of this. Trust and commitment are the two walls. Without them, nothing inside stays standing.
The floors go in order. At the bottom: knowing each other's inner world, actively noticing what you admire, and turning toward each other in the small daily moments. Those are Exercises 1, 2 and 3 on this page. Above them sit the conflict skills, which is where the softened startup lives. At the top is shared meaning, the rituals and goals that belong to the two of you, which is what the vision board builds.
The order matters. Most couples come in wanting to fix the conflict floor, and it rarely holds if the floors under it are thin. That's why this page starts with love maps and a jar of notes rather than how to argue. You're building the house in the order it needs to be built.
Exercise 1: Love Maps
A love map is your picture of your partner's inner world. What keeps them up at 3am, who's irritating them at work, what they'd do with a free Saturday.
Set aside 20 minutes. Take turns asking questions you don't already know the answer to, and follow up on each answer. The follow-up is the whole exercise.
A note before you start. These are practices, not fixes. The value is in repetition: once is a nice evening, monthly for a year changes how well you know each other. Pick one exercise, not six, and do it when things are calm. Flooded, heart pounding, not hearing each other? Stop and come back in twenty minutes. That break is itself a Gottman intervention.
Questions I use with couples:
What are you most worried about right now that you haven't told me?
What's a childhood memory you think about more than you let on?
What does a genuinely restful day look like for you?
What's something you want that you think I'd find silly?
Who's been on your mind lately, and why?
Two rules. Don't correct your partner's answer, and don't turn it into a conversation about you.
Learn how to do the Love Map Exercise together with this blog post.
Exercise 3: Fondness Jar
When a relationship is strained, both people get very good at scanning for evidence that things are bad. The fondness jar is a deliberate counterweight.
Get a jar. Every day, each of you writes one specific thing you appreciated about the other on a slip of paper and drops it in. Once a week, read a few out loud.
Specific is the operative word. "You are a good partner" does nothing. "You took the trash out Tuesday without being asked and I noticed" does something, because it proves you were paying attention.
Give it three weeks before you judge it. Most couples feel silly for the first week and then notice, somewhere around week three, that they have started looking for things to write down. That shift in attention is the point of the exercise, more than the jar itself.
Exercise 3: Rituals of Connection
The Gottmans found that stable couples respond to each other's small bids for attention far more often than unstable couples do. A bid is any small move toward you. A question about your day, a hand on your shoulder, a comment about something on the news. Turning toward those bids is more predictive of how a relationship goes than any grand gesture.
Rituals make turning toward automatic, so you are not relying on noticing in the moment. Pick two of these and hold them for a month.
A real goodbye. Before you separate for the day, learn one thing that is happening in your partner's day.
A reunion. When you come back together, six seconds of physical contact before anything else. Six seconds is long enough to feel awkward, which is how you know you did it.
Appreciation at night. One specific thing you appreciated about your partner that day.
One hour without phones. Same hour every day if you can manage it.
A correction worth making, since I see it repeated everywhere: the six-second version is the kiss. The hug in Gottman's work is twenty seconds. Both are long enough to trigger an actual physical settling, which is what makes them work.
Exercise 4: The Softened Startup
The Gottmans found that the first three minutes of a conflict conversation predict how the whole conversation goes, and to a striking degree how the relationship goes. If you start harshly, the conversation almost never recovers. So the highest-leverage change available to most couples is not learning to fight better. It is learning to start better.
The structure is three parts, and the order matters.
Describe the situation with no adjectives about your partner. "The dishes were in the sink this morning," not "you left the dishes in the sink again."
Say how you feel using a feeling word. "I felt overwhelmed."
State a positive need. Say what you want, not what you want stopped. "I would like us to figure out a system for the kitchen" rather than "stop leaving your dishes."
Number three is where most people fail. Almost everyone can manage the first two and then finish with a complaint anyway. Write the sentence out before you say it, the first several times.
Exercise 5: The Back-to-Back Conversation
This one sounds strange and works better than it has any right to.
Sit back to back, or side by side facing a wall, and have a difficult conversation without looking at each other. For couples who get flooded quickly, or where one person shuts down under eye contact, removing the face changes what is possible to say. You are still touching, so you have not withdrawn. You just are not being watched.
I use this most often with couples where one partner tends to stonewall. Something about not being looked at lets them stay in the room.
Fifteen minutes, one topic, then turn around and sit facing each other for a minute before you talk about anything else.
Exercise 6: The Shared Dreams Vision Board
Most gridlocked conflicts, the ones you have had in the same shape for years, are not really about the thing you are arguing about. Underneath each position is usually a dream, and the fight persists because the dream has never been said out loud.
Take turns. One of you is the speaker, one is the listener, and you do not switch for at least fifteen minutes.
Speaker names the position they have been defending.
Speaker answers this: what does this position mean to you, and is there a story behind it?
Listener asks about the dream. Not whether it is reasonable. What it means, where it comes from, what it would feel like to have it honored.
Switch.
You are not solving anything in this exercise. You are finding out what you are actually arguing about. Most couples find the argument gets smaller once both dreams are on the table, even when nothing has been decided.
The Four Horsemen, and What To Do Instead
The Gottmans identified four communication patterns that predict relationship breakdown with unusual accuracy. Every couple does all four sometimes. The question is the ratio and whether you repair afterward.
Criticism
Attacking your partner's character rather than naming a specific behavior. "You never think about anyone but yourself" instead of "I needed help last night and I did not ask well."
The antidote is the softened startup above.
Contempt
Sarcasm, mockery, eye-rolling, name-calling, the sense of speaking down from a higher position. Of the four, contempt is the strongest predictor of a relationship ending, and it is also the one people most often defend as just their sense of humor.
The antidote is not biting your tongue in the moment. It is building the reservoir, which is what the fondness jar does. Contempt is hard to sustain toward someone you have been actively noticing.
Defensiveness
Counter-attacking or explaining why the complaint is invalid. It is a very reasonable reaction to feeling accused, and it reliably escalates.
The antidote is taking responsibility for some part of the problem, even a small part. Not the whole thing. Just one piece you can honestly own.
Stonewalling
Shutting down and going silent. This is almost always flooding rather than indifference. The person has hit a physiological limit and gone offline.
The antidote is a named break. Say you need twenty minutes, say when you are coming back, and actually come back. A break with no return time reads as abandonment and makes things worse.
The 5:1 ratio
In Gottman's observational work, couples whose relationships remained stable had roughly 5 positive interactions for every negative 1 during conflict, and closer to 20 to 1 in ordinary time together.What is your ratio in your relationship? 
Frequently Asked Questions
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Gottman exercises are structured practices drawn from Gottman Method Couples Therapy, an approach built by Drs. John and Julie Gottman from more than forty years of observational research on couples. They target specific behaviors that distinguished stable couples in that research, such as knowing each other's inner world, responding to small bids for attention, and starting difficult conversations gently.
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Yes. The six exercises on this page are free, and the worksheets are free to download with no email required. The Gottman Institute also publishes free material, and sells card decks and a paid app separately.
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Yes, for many couples. The exercises were designed to be practiced at home between sessions, and they work the same way without the sessions as long as you repeat them. They are less likely to be enough on their own if you are dealing with an affair, an addiction, gridlocked conflict that has not moved in years, or any fear of your partner.
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Start with Love Maps if you feel like strangers, the fondness jar if you feel critical of each other, the softened startup if your fights escalate fast, and shared dreams if you have one argument you have been having for years.
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Most take fifteen to twenty minutes. The rituals of connection take under a minute each but are done daily. Give any of them at least three weeks before deciding whether it is working.
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Criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Gottman's research found these four communication patterns predict relationship breakdown with unusual accuracy. Contempt is the strongest single predictor.
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It is the finding that stable couples had about five positive interactions for every negative one during conflict. It is most useful as a way to check where a relationship currently stands, rather than as a number to hit.
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Yes. All six work over video. The back-to-back exercise is the only one that needs adapting, and couples usually turn their chairs away from each other and keep the camera on the room.
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Look for a licensed therapist who states which level of Gottman Method training they have completed rather than using a title. The Gottman Institute prohibits clinicians from calling themselves Gottman therapists at any training level, so a therapist naming a specific level is a sign they are describing their training accurately.
If the exercises on this page helped but did not go far enough, that is usually a sign the problem is structural rather than a skills gap, and that is what couples therapy is for.
Our couples work is done by licensed clinicians and supervised associates who have completed formal training in Gottman Method Couples Therapy. We see couples weekly and in extended intensive sessions, in our Hermosa Beach office and by telehealth throughout California and Florida. Session fees range from $180 to $450 depending on the clinician.