When Tara Parker-Pope, mom, health writer and author of the New York Times’ “Well” blog, saw her 17-year marriage beginning to crumble, she found herself “at a loss.” “If the crisis in my life had been cancer or diabetes, I would have known exactly where to get answers, but I was facing this life crisis in my marriage and I really didn’t know what to do,” says Parker-Pope, who is now divorced. To try to make some sense out of her situation, she turned to the field she knew best—science. What she found was a “fascinating world” of research devoted to this most profound human relationship, and what began as a personal quest became the basis of the book “For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage.” In the book, Parker-Pope shatters widespread myths, describes a surprisingly hopeful future for today’s couples and offers practical, evidence-based advice—“a prescription for marital health”—for improving your relationship.

“For Better” is different from many other marriage books in that it draws its conclusions from scientific research. Yet even though you wrote the book as a science journalist, your tone is personal, and you’re open about the fact that your own marriage ended in divorce. What was it like writing this book as someone whose marriage ultimately did not work?

It was a bit cathartic. I can’t say that if I’d read this book, I wouldn’t be divorced; marriage and life are so much more complicated than that. I think, though, that I would have made more informed choices along the way. Sometimes I think, “Would [the book] have been better if I’d had a successful 30-year marriage?” and I’m not sure it would. When your marriage is falling apart, it’s a very isolating experience. Delving into the research made me realize that these are issues that people have always struggled with; I really wasn’t so alone. Once you’ve been through marriage and a divorce, there’s a lot of insight and wisdom that comes from that. I was happy to use that difficult experience towards something better.

One of the most persistent myths you debunk is the idea that the U.S. has a divorce rate of at or near 50 percent. What does the marriage landscape in America today really look like?

I think this was probably my biggest surprise in reporting this book. I remember the moment when I said to myself, “You know, half of marriages end in divorce,” and I just accepted that this is something that was a coin toss and I had just gotten on the unlucky side. But I realized that this is really not a true number. I realized it personally because when I got divorced I thought, where are all these people that are supposed to be divorced like me? I was married in the 80’s, and marriages in the 80’s are stronger than marriages in the 70’s, and marriages in the 90’s are stronger than marriages in the 80’s. What we know is that people who got married in the 70’s really struggled with marriage and that generation of couples are not at a 50 percent divorce rate yet, but they’re close to it. That generation was dealing with a lot of change.

But what happened to that generation really doesn’t have anything to do with couples today. The data show that when couples wait a little longer to be married, when they finish college before they get married, those couples have stronger, more stable relationships. That’s more typical of many of the couples who got married in the 90’s, and the divorce rate is dropping. Couples who choose to get married today, their chance of succeeding in marriage is greater than their chance of failing. People are so cynical and skeptical about marriage and the fact is, most of us are doing a pretty good job with it.

You say that couples today are asking far more from our marriages than ever before. What do you mean by that?

One hundred years ago, marriage was a social contract and an economic contract. Even in the 50’s, the model of marriage was very different in that the women typically stayed home and took care of the house and the man typically went to work and earned the money, and that’s a very separate kind of existence. With the current model of marriage, couples really are partners; they are both working in the home and they are both working outside the home. Even when you have one partner that does stay home and doesn’t earn money, you still have a lot more sharing—if it’s the woman who is staying home, she is more involved in her husband’s work life, and the man is involved in the home life. So the new model of marriage is that we’re spending a lot more time with the person that we marry, so we have higher expectations for the relationship. We want to be with somebody we like to be with; men and women are both looking for a partner to make life more interesting.

You talk about several ways by which couples can “diagnose” their relationship and assess their risk for divorce. In particular, you say that the way a couple tells the story of their first meeting and falling in love says a lot about the current state of their relationship.

Anybody can listen to themselves and learn a lot about what they’re feeling. One of the exercises is to talk about the early days of your courtship, and what you find is that couples who are feeling very connected now, when they talk about the past they will say things like “We did this.” And it might even be a terrible story, like “We got caught in a rainstorm and got lost.” A couple who is less connected will tell that story but in a different way. They’ll say, “You didn’t ask for directions, and I got soaking wet.” The memory is the same, but the connectedness is different.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how kids affect the marriage dynamic. What are some ways parents can care for both their children and their marriages?

I think it’s hard to talk about because we love our children so much, but it does take a toll on marriage. With the issue of sharing chores, I talk about how housework and childcare tend to fall disproportionately on the woman. I think that women need to learn to ask for help more, and they need to stop trying to micromanage the way their partner does things. He may pick the wrong pair of shoes or the wrong dress, but you know what? He got the kid dressed, so let it go. And I think men need to step up and say, “I need to contribute more.”

What, in your mind, are the most compelling lessons from the research on how couples handle conflict?

I think re-thinking the value of conflict in a relationship is a pretty important lesson. For me personally, the idea that conflict can be healthy in a marriage was a very hard thing to accept. But it makes a lot of sense that couples who have a lot of conflict early in their marriage are moving towards something better, they’re trying to work things out. Recognizing the power of conflict to clean house and to move yourself forward is a good thing. But I hear and see so much negativity when couples talk to each other, and I think “Gosh, just a slightly different word would change the whole tone of that discussion.” Instead of saying, “Ya think you could help me with this?” why not just say, “Honey, can you help me with this?” I think we miss opportunities to be kind to our partners. Couples that are successful get angry with each other, but they don’t rip each other to shreds during conflict. They know how to love their partner even when they’re angry with their partner.

You say that, according to the research, “compatibility is overrated.” What do you mean by that?

I think when you hear couples start to talk about compatibility—“we’re just not compatible”—that’s a red flag that shows that they’re unhappy and they don’t know how to express it. When you hear this coming out of your mouth or your partner’s mouth, this is a big siren going off in your marriage that something’s wrong, and the problem is most likely not compatibility. Couples who get divorced are no more or less compatible than those who stay together, in terms of the strictest definition of the word. So you have to stop focusing on issues of compatibility and hone in on what really is going wrong in the relationship.

You report that good marriages are good for overall health, whereas bad marriage relationships take a negative toll on well-being—even causing changes to the heart similar to those caused by smoking.

I found this data to be so compelling. Some of the research is so interesting, where they would literally create wounds on people’s arms and watch how quickly or slowly the wounds healed, depending on if they’d had a fight or if they’d had a positive exchange with their partner. For people in negative relationships, the wounds would take twice as long to heal. We know stress is bad for you, and marital stress is particularly bad for you because it’s so personal. Your marriage and your home is a place of refuge, and when that’s not going well, you’re going to internalize all that and it’s going to create a lot of problems. Knowing that taking care of your marriage is also taking care of your health is important. And if you love your partner, and yet there’s a lot of anger and hostility in your house, you have to know the toll that’s taking on your partner’s health.