Love Busters: Protect Your Marriage by Replacing Love-Busting Patterns with Love-Building Habits

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I'm so concerned about the risk of you hurting each other, that before I introduce you to ways you can make each other happy, I want you to understand something. If you don't protect each other from yourselves, you may not have the opportunity to care for each other. The two go hand-in-hand and without protection, care is impossible. Sadly, flawed agreements made in the state of Intimacy can lead to our own unhappiness, and that in turn wakes the slumbering Taker. As long as we are happy, our Taker has nothing to do, but when we start feeling unhappy, our Taker rises to our rescue and triggers the State of Conflict. With the Taker now in charge, we are encouraged to follow the rule: do whatever you can to make yourself happy, and avoid anything that makes yourself unhappy, even if it makes others unhappy. The Taker also encourages us to be demanding, disrespectful and angry in an effort to force our spouse to make us happy. Fighting is the Taker's favorite "negotiating" strategy. Almost everything you do affects each other. So it's very important to know what that effect will be before you actually do it. The Policy of Joint Agreement will help you remember to consult with each other to be sure you avoid being the cause of each other's unhappiness. It also makes negotiation necessary, regardless of your state of mind. If you agree to this policy, you will not be able to do anything without the enthusiastic agreement of the other, so it forces you to discuss your plans, and negotiate with each other's feelings in mind. Without safe and pleasant negotiation, you will simply not be able to reach an enthusiastic agreement.

But that's my job — to help them fall in love with each other again. I encourage them to stop making Love Bank withdrawals, and start making Love Bank deposits. I created all of the remaining Basic Concepts to help couples achieve those objectives. Basic Concept #2: Instincts and HabitsWhy do you engage in Love Busters? Why do you cause your spouse to be unhappy? One of the most important reasons is that, while they may make your spouse feel bad, they make you feel good. Most Love Busters gain pleasure for you at your spouse's expense. When your spouse complains about them, you rationalize your behavior and explain away the fact that you are simply thoughtless and selfish. But how should you change your habits, so they are no longer annoying? It begins with realising that your annoying habits are damaging your relationship. So first, tell each other that eliminating annoying habits is a high priority for both of you. And then ask each other what annoys you the most, write it down, and go to work with a plan to end whatever bad habits you find. But when you indulge in these three Love Busters, you do more than fail to get what you need — you also destroy the love your spouse has for you. All of these instincts, and the habits they help create, cause your spouse to be unhappy, and that causes Love Bank withdrawals. If you and your spouse are to be in love with each other, you must give honesty special attention. That's because it plays such an important role in the creation of romantic love. It's one of the ten most important emotional needs, so when it's met, it can trigger the feeling of love. On the other hand, its counterpart, dishonesty, is a Love Buster — it destroys love. Have you ever thought that your spouse is possessed? One moment he or she is loving and thoughtful, and the next you are faced with selfishness and thoughtlessness. Trust me, it's not a demon you're up against, it's the two sides of our personalities. I call them the Giver and the Taker.

I've created these Basic Concepts to help you answer that question — to help you do what it takes to restore your love for each other when you are not in love, when you don't feel like doing any of them. And then once your love is restored, these concepts will help you stay in love for the rest of your lives. Basic Concept #1: The Love Bank Making demands is selfish. The partner making demands does not care if it is convenient for their spouse to honour the requests. Our spouse may be reluctant to honour our requests for many legitimate reasons. This reluctance may be due to their needs, comfort level, or sense of what’s wise or fair. Solution Respectful persuasion is the better option. It means making efforts to reason with your partner’s opinions. Even when you disagree with their viewpoint, you should do so with respect. Practise effective communication by listening attentively and sharing ideas with your partner. Don’t jump to the conclusion that your partner’s opinion is wrong.Dishonesty may “numb” some of our pain, but it compounds it later. The truth usually comes out eventually. The time of hiding the truth creates an emotional barrier and destroys trust. Solution

And that's what I always seem to be battling when I try to encourage one spouse to avoid doing anything that would hurt the other spouse. I cannot seem to trigger empathy. Each spouse complains about how thoughtless the other spouse is, without much awareness of his or her own thoughtlessness. These two primitive aspects of our personality are usually balanced in our dealings with others. But in marriage they tend to take turns being in charge. And that leads to most of the problems that couples encounter. If we take the advice of our Giver, we are willing to suffer to make our spouse happy, and if we take the advice of our Taker, we are willing to let our spouse suffer to make us happy. In either case the advice we are given is short sighted because someone always gets hurt. Basic Concept #10: The Three States of Mind in MarriageBut there's another reason that honesty is crucial in creating love: Honesty is the only way that you and your spouse will ever come to understand each other. Without honesty, the adjustments that are crucial to making each other happy and avoiding unhappiness cannot be made. Starting with the Love Busters, choose one to eliminate this week. Think about when you are most likely to do a Love Buster and plan how you will replace it with a more positive action. For example, say your spouse’s top Love Buster is breaking promises. Maybe you are most likely to do this because you get caught up at work and then are late home. Maybe you can change that and maybe you can’t. What you can change is the promise. Resolve to only make promises you are absolutely confident you can keep. Plan what you will say when your spouse or child asks, before you leave home, so that you don’t get tempted into making a promise you can’t keep. Before you complete these questionnaires, you should be familiar with the description of Love Busters. The fifth Love Buster is Independent Behavior, the conduct of one spouse that ignores the feelings and interests of the other spouse. If your decisions are made as if your spouse doesn't even exist, you will find yourself running roughshod over your spouse's feelings and your Love Bank account. Since it's usually scheduled and requires some thought to execute, the simplest way to overcome it is to take it off your schedule. And if you follow the Policy of Joint Agreement, Independent Behavior will never find itself on your schedule in the first place.

When you are in love, your emotions help you meet each other's emotional needs. They provide instincts that you may not have even known you have — instincts to be affectionate, sexual, conversational, recreational, honest and admiring. These all seem to come naturally when you are in love. Guideline 4: Choose the solution that meets the conditions of the Policy of Joint Agreement best - mutual and enthusiastic agreement. Whenever a conflict arises keep in mind the importance of finding a solution that will deposit as many love units as possible, while avoiding withdrawals. And be sure that the way you find that solution also deposits love units and avoids withdrawals. Basic Concept #8: The Policy of Radical Honesty Ground rule 2: Put safety first. Do not make demands, show disrespect, or become angry when you negotiate, even if your spouse makes demands, shows disrespect or becomes angry with you. But we also want the best for ourselves. We want to be happy, too. When we feel that way, our Taker is influencing us. The Taker's rule is do whatever you can to make yourself happy, and avoid anything that makes yourself unhappy, even if it makes others unhappy. If that rule ever makes sense to you, it's because your Taker is in control. I've found that the most common Love Busters in marriage fall into six categories: Selfish Demands, Disrespectful Judgments, Angry Outbursts, Dishonesty, Independent Behavior and Annoying Habits.

Dr. Harley earned a Ph.D. degree in psychology from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1967 and has been a Licensed Psychologist in Minnesota since 1975. For the first ten years after earning his degree, he taught psychology at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. During those years, he was also a frustrated part-time marriage counselor with little success in helping couples. Instincts and habits can make Love Bank deposits, so it is imperative to know how to create those habits because once they are learned, deposits are made repeatedly and almost effortlessly. We cannot love someone effectively until we know them well. That takes time and it also takes some focused attention and conscious effort. It’s more than just knowing what their favourite food is, or where they went to school. We need to know what their Love Needs and Love Busters are. Love Needs… In my struggle to learn how to save marriages, I eventually discovered that the best way to do it was to teach couples how to fall in love with each other — and stay in love. So I created a concept that I called the Love Bank to help couples understand how people fall in and out of love. This concept, perhaps more than any other that I created, helped couples realize that almost everything they did affected their love for each other either positively or negatively. And that awareness set most of them on a course of action that preserved their love and saved their marriages.