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This article extends a mathematical approach to modeling marital interaction using nonlinear difference equations. Parameters of the model predicted divorce in a sample of newlyweds. The parameters reflected uninfluenced husband and wife steady states, emotional inertia, influenced husband and wife steady states, and influence functions. The model permits separation of uninfluenced parameters—that is, what is initially brought to the interaction by each person's personality or the relationship's history—from where the interaction heads once influence begins. In the present model, a theoretical shape of the influence functions is proposed that permits estimation of negative and positive threshold parameters. Couples who eventually divorced initially had more negative uninfluenced husband and wife steady states, more negative influenced husband steady state, and lower negative threshold in the influence function. The application of mathematics to the study of marriage was presaged by von Bertalanffy (1968), who wrote a classic and highly influential book titled General System Theory. This book was an attempt to view biological and other complex organizational units across a wide variety of sciences in terms of the interaction of these units. The work was an attempt to provide a holistic approach to complex systems. Von Bertalanffy's enterprise fit a general Zeitgeist, with Wiener's (1948) Cybernetics, Shannon and Weaver's (1949) information theory, and VonNeumann and Morgenstern's (1947) game theory. Von Bertalanffy inspired many major thinkers of family systems and family therapy. Unfortunately, the mathematics of general systems theory was never developed, and theorists of family interaction kept these systems concepts only at the level of metaphor. Even at the level of metaphor these
Gottman et al. (Mon,) studied this question.