Life Skills, Episode 6: Talking with the people closest to you. A 5.5-minute plain-language lesson: start gently, repair quickly, respond well to good news. Analogy: error correction on a network link - errors are normal; recovery is the skill. Relationship education (Hawkins 2008, 117 studies): communication effect 0.43-0.45, relationship quality 0.30-0.36 in experimental studies, mostly middle-class samples; ~0.06 in lower-income samples, ~zero in Building Strong Families. PREP with Army couples: 2.0% vs 6.2% divorced at 1 year (20 vs 62 per 1,000). Gottman's four horsemen and 5:1 ratio (73 couples) are observational rules of thumb. Skills: soft start-up and repair, speaker-listener (PREP), active-constructive responding (Gable 2004, correlational). Do this week: three times, ask a follow-up question about someone's good news.