Fall in Love, Stay in Love , livre ebook

Other books by Willard F. Harley, Jr.
His Needs, Her Needs Love Busters 5 Steps to Romantic Love Your Love and Marriage Surviving an Affair His Needs, Her Needs for Parents The One

© 2001 by Willard F. Harley, Jr.
Published by Revell a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.revellbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2012
eISBN 978-1-58558-701-8
For individual use, forms in appendixes may be copied without fee. For all other uses, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
CONTENTS
Cover
Other books by Willard F. Harley, Jr.
Title Page
Copyright
Part 1 Setting the Stage
1 How I Learned to Save Marriages
2 The Love Bank
3 Instincts and Habits
Part 2 How to Make Love Bank Deposits
4 Learning to Care for Each Other
5 His Most Important Emotional Needs
6 Her Most Important Emotional Needs
7 Identifying and Meeting Important Emotional Needs
8 The Policy of Undivided Attention
Part 3 How to Avoid Love Bank Withdrawals
9 Learning to Protect Each Other
10 Love Busters: Part 1
11 Love Busters: Part 2
12 The Policy of Radical Honesty
13 Identifying and Overcoming Love Busters
Part 4 How to Negotiate in Marriage
14 The Giver and the Taker
15 The Three States of Mind in Marriage
16 The Policy of Joint Agreement
17 Four Guidelines for Successful Negotiation
18. How to Resolve Everyday Problems
Conclusion
Appendixes:
A Summary of My Basic Concepts to Help You Fall in Love and Stay in Love
B Emotional Needs Questionnaire
C Agreement to Meet the Most Important Emotional Needs
D Time for Undivided Attention Worksheet
E Time for Undivided Attention Graph
F Personal History Questionnaire
G Love Busters Questionnaire
H Agreement to Overcome Love Busters
About the Authors
Back Ads
part one
SETTING THE
STAGE
chapter one
HOW I LEARNED TO SAVE MARRIAGES
I’ve been counseling couples with marital problems for over forty years, and during that time I’ve learned what makes marriages succeed and what makes them fail. But I sure didn’t start out knowing that. In fact my first ten years of marriage counseling taught me only one thing that I was not qualified to counsel. Although almost every couple I saw was sincerely grateful for my advice, I cannot think of a single couple I actually helped. Most of their marriages ended in divorce, and the rest continued to have serious problems.
Miserable Beginnings
One couple I counseled was my pastor and his wife. The choir director and my pastor’s wife were having an affair, and I tried to help end it. I explained to her how the affair was threatening the happiness and success of their children and ruining her husband’s ministry, and how the choir director’s wife and children needed him just as much as her husband and children needed her. But she replied that since God was a God of love, he had approved her relationship with the choir director by giving her the feeling of love for him.
I had come face-to-face with the irrationality that the feeling of love can create, and I didn’t know how to handle it. Eventually my pastor’s wife and the choir director divorced their respective spouses and married each other. The children in both families suffered greatly throughout the entire ordeal, and to the best of my knowledge are still suffering. The church began a downward spiral from which it never recovered and it eventually disbanded. This tragedy took place because my pastor’s wife had fallen out of love with her husband and fallen in love with the choir director. (Incidentally, after a few years of an unhappy marriage, the choir director had another affair and divorced my pastor’s former wife.)
My pastor was not alone in the tragedy of divorce. His was just one of a host of marriages caught up in a wave that was overwhelming families in the mid-1960s. This trend toward divorce would escalate over the next twenty years until more than half of all marriages were ending in divorce. I didn’t know that at the time. I thought that this failure was, at least in part, due to my inexperience. I blamed myself, thinking that I should not have tried to give advice, that I should have left it to an “expert.”
“Expert” Failures
Over the next few years, couples kept asking for my advice regarding marriage, especially after I earned a Ph.D. degree in psychology. So instead of turning these people away, I decided to learn enough about marriage counseling to help save their marriages I decided to become an expert. After all, if scientists could send men to the moon, surely they would know how to save marriages.
I read books on marital therapy, was supervised by experts in the field, and worked in a clinic that specialized in marital therapy and claimed to be the best in Minnesota. But none of it helped. I was still unable to save marriages. Almost everyone who came to me for help ended up like my pastor divorced.
But in my effort to become an expert, I made a crucial discovery: I wasn’t the only one failing to help couples. Almost everyone else working with me in the clinic was failing as well! My supervisor was failing, the director of the clinic was failing, and so were the other marriage counselors who worked with me. And then I made the most astonishing discovery of all: Most of the marital experts in America were also failing.
What made me unique among marriage counselors was my curiosity to know if my efforts really worked. Hardly any other therapist I knew wanted to know about the outcome of his or her therapy. Many did not know they were failing because they never followed up on their cases to see how the marriages were doing. But I had access to their cases, so I did the follow-up for them. In the clinic where I worked, I couldn’t find any therapists who were actually saving marriages. And to make matters worse, many of these marital experts were divorced themselves. The director of the clinic, and creator of their “successful” marital therapy program, was divorced shortly after I left the clinic.
Was I working with a particularly inept group of therapists? Or were the problems I witnessed only the tip of the iceberg? To satisfy my curiosity, I did what I should have done in the very beginning of my venture I read studies that evaluated the effectiveness of marital therapy in general. To my surprise, I learned that marital therapy throughout America had the lowest success rate of any form of therapy. In one study, I read that less than 25 percent of those surveyed felt that marriage counseling did them any good whatsoever, and a higher percentage felt that it did them more harm than good.
Searching for Answers
What a challenge! Marriages were breaking up at an unprecedented rate, and no one knew how to fix them! So I made it my own personal ambition to find the answer, and I looked for that answer not in books, scholarly articles, or experts but rather among those who came to me for answers couples who were about to divorce. I stopped counseling and started listening as spouses told me why they were ready to throw in the towel. What did they have when they decided to marry that they lost somewhere along the way, and what would it take for them to find it again?
By 1975 I had discovered why I and so many other marital therapists were having trouble saving marriages we did not understand what makes marriages work. We were all so preoccupied with what seemed to make them fail that we overlooked what made them succeed. Couples would come to my office for counseling because they were making each other miserable. So I thought, as most others thought, if I could simply get them to communicate more clearly, resolve their conflicts more effectively, and stop fighting with each other so much, their marriage would be saved. But that wasn’t the answer.
Couple after couple explained to me that they didn’t marry each other because they were communicating so clearly or resolving their conflicts effectively or were not fighting with each other. They married because they found each other irresistible they were in love. But by the time they came to my office, they had lost that feeling of love. Many actually found each other repulsive. And one of the most important reasons that they were communicating so poorly, resolving their conflicts so ineffectively, and fighting so much was that they had lost their feeling of love.
If your marriage was in trouble and I asked you what would it take for you and your spouse to be happily married again, what would you say? My guess is that at first you might not imagine that ever happening. You might think that the only way you could be happily married would be if you were married to someone else! But if I persisted, and you were able to reflect on my question, you might say what others have told me: “We would be happily married again if we were in love.”
Over and over that’s what couples told me when I asked that question. But what they didn’t tell me was also instructive. They didn’t tell me that if they communicated better or resolved their conflicts or stopped fighting so much, they would be happily married. Granted, poor communication, failure to resolve conflicts, and fighting all contribute to the loss of love. But these are also symptoms of lost love. In other words, I began to realize that if I wanted to save marriages, I would have to go beyond improving communication. I would have to learn how to restore love.
With this insight, I began to attack emotional issues with couples rather than rational issues. My primary goal in marital therapy changed from resolving conflicts to restoring love