Your Love and Marriage , livre ebook

© 1997 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 2013
ISBN 978-1-4412-4157-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Endorsements
Part 1 Introduction
How to Use This Book
My Basic Concepts of Marriage
The Love Bank
The Most Important Emotional Needs
Love Busters
The Policy of Joint Agreement
The Giver and the Taker
The Three States of Marriage
The Rule of Honesty
Part 2 How to Survive Infidelity
What to Do with an Unfaithful Husband
What to Do with an Unfaithful Wife
Escaping the Jaws of Infidelity: How to Avoid an Affair
Infidelity on the Internet
The Lover’s Perspective
How to Forgive
Part 3 Sexual Adjustment
What to Do When You Are Not Meeting Your Spouse’s Need for Sex
How to Overcome Sexual Aversion
How to Overcome Pain during Intercourse
What to Do When Your Spouse Has an Addiction to Pornography
Part 4 How to Negotiate in Marriage
Negotiating with the Policy of Joint Agreement
How to Follow the Policy of Joint Agreement When You Seem VERY Incompatible
Can a Marriage Be Saved by One Spouse?
Can You Negotiate with an Angry or Violent Spouse?
How to Resolve Conflicts of Faith
How to Be Honest with Your Spouse
Part 5 Living Together before Marriage
Does Living Together Prepare You for Marriage?
What Is It Like to Be Married after Living Together?
Part 6 How to Keep Love in Your Marriage
How to Get through the First Year and Keep Love in Your Marriage
How to Have the First Baby and Keep Love in Your Marriage
How to Divide Domestic Responsibilities and Keep Love in Your Marriage
How to Raise Children and Keep Love in Your Marriage
How to Develop Your Career and Keep Love in Your Marriage
How to Resolve Financial Conflicts and Keep Love in Your Marriage
Appendices
A The Most Important Emotional Needs
B Emotional Needs Questionnaire
C The Five Love Busters
D Love Busters Questionnaire
E The Five Parts to the Rule of Honesty
F Why Women Leave Men
About the Author

How to Use This Book
T his book is a little unusual. It’s laid out in the same way as my web site Marriage Builders. As in the web site, I suggest that you become familiar with my basic concepts of marriage before reading my answers for solving marriage problems. I have summarized my basic concepts in the next chapter of this book.
After you have read my basic concepts, you are ready to create a strategy that will solve any marital conflict you may have. To assist you in creating that strategy, you should read the letters I’ve received from those having similar conflicts and my answers that suggest solutions to their problems.
The table of contents will help you find the topics that are related to your conflict. The book contains five sections that deal with a variety of topics: infidelity, sexual adjustment, marital negotiation, living together before marriage, and keeping love in your marriage. Each section is further divided into more specific areas of concern with several letters in each one.
When you find topics that are related to your particular conflict, go directly to them and read the questions and answers regarding strategy. On the Marriage Builders web site, if a person has trouble creating a plan after reading the basic concepts and the related Q&A columns, I encourage the reader to e-mail me, telling me about his or her particular problem and I try to offer an effective approach in my response.
You are welcome to do the same thing. After reading this book, if you are having difficulty creating a plan to resolve your conflict, e-mail your problem to me at bharley@marriagebuilders.com and I will try to offer you a plan. A more interactive alternative is to discuss your problem with one of the Marriage Builders counselors by telephone (1-888-639-1639).
The goal of this book is to help you discover a plan that will guide you and your spouse in resolving your marital conflict and will restore love to your marriage. As you read about the marital struggles of others and consider the plans I’ve suggested to help them overcome their conflicts, you will be in a good position to know how to resolve your own conflicts and restore love to your marriage.
My Basic Concepts of Marriage
M y basic concepts of marriage have developed over the years as I have counseled hundreds of couples in an attempt to help them save their marriages. These concepts address important aspects of relationship and marriage building, such as why people fall in love, why they fall out of love, what they want most in marriage, what drives them out of marriage, and how a bad marriage can become a great marriage.
When I was nineteen, a married friend told me his marriage was in trouble and he asked for my advice. The advice didn’t seem to help his marriage ended in divorce. Why couldn’t I help? What was it about my friend’s marriage that made divorce seem so inevitable?
My failure to help my friend convinced me that I didn’t have what it takes to be a marriage counselor. Over the next ten years I was curious to know what would have helped my friend and countless other couples having problems. I read as much as I could and was even supervised by a professor of marriage and family therapy. What I discovered was that my approach was not the only one that was ineffective. The approaches of the experts were ineffective too!
The more I looked into the methods of other marriage counselors, the more I came to realize that marital therapy in general wasn’t working. In fact I learned that marriage counseling had the lowest success rate of any form of counseling: In one study only 25 percent of those seeking help from a variety of marriage counselors felt that it did them any good.
Now there was a challenge if I’d ever had one! By the time I was thirty-two, I had discovered why I and so many other marital therapists were having so much trouble. We had failed to understand what made marriages work. And I discovered it by simply listening to couples tell me what it would take to straighten out their marriages. Their answer: Teach my spouse to meet my emotional needs. Almost every couple reported that their emotional needs were no longer being met in their marriage. And the love that they had for each other was replaced by indifference and, in some cases, hatred.
When they first married, the couples found each other irresistible because they had been so effective in meeting each other’s needs. But over time they stopped caring for each other and were making each other miserable. Divorce seemed to be their only escape from the unhappiness of marriage and their only hope of someday having their needs met by someone else.
It became clear to me that when the emotional needs of spouses are not met, the marriage is in danger of dissolution. If emotional needs are met again, however, the danger passes. It is that simple. I began to recognize the importance in marriage counseling of attacking the emotional issues of need fulfillment rather than rational issues, such as communication or commitment.
Couples came to me with a common complaint: “I’m no longer in love.” It was hard for them to understand how their feelings toward each other could have changed so much after marriage. Before they were married, they could not live without each other; now they could not stand each other.
To help couples understand the rise and fall of their feelings of love, and how that rise and fall is related to the way they treat each other, I created the concept of the Love Bank, my first basic concept.
The Love Bank
We all have a Love Bank, and the people we know have accounts in it. When people do things that make us feel good, “love units” are deposited, and when they do things that make us feel bad, love units are withdrawn. We are emotionally attracted to, or love, people with large balances in our Love Bank and we are repulsed by, or hate, those with negative balances. This is the way our emotions encourage us to be with people who treat us well and avoid those who hurt us.
With a member of the opposite sex, when a certain threshold is reached say 1,000 love units the emotional reaction we cal