I don't think that's true, that MB has it backwards. The way I understand it, POJA creates compatibility, by keeping both spouses from doing something that creates incompatibility. The way I understand MB to work is kind of like FORCED compatibility and then romantic love is restored after that.

Learning to be compatible is part of rebuilding romantic love. Couples learn compatibility by eliminating independent behavior, a lovebuster, and learning to use the POJA.

Most couples ARE very compatible when they get married or they wouldn't have married in the first place. But once they get married they stop trying to be compatible.

For example, my H and I grew more and more incompatible over the years because of my independent behavior. My IB led to his angry outbursts and caused much greater incompatibility. So the solution was to eliminate the lovebusters and learn to use the POJA simultaneously. Those actions GREATLY contributed to the romantic love we feel in our marriage. It REMOVED a level of tension I had not even been aware of.

cant is right; their philosophy is that feelings FOLLOW actions. Get in the habit of behaviors that are conducive to love, and the feelings will follow.

Yes, lots of clarification for those of us who have no affair in our marriage would be great.

I don't use the term "Plan A" for what I'm doing. I'm just trying to meet my wife's emotional needs and eliminate love busters in order to permit her to be on the right side of the threshold where she is in love with me. My goal is a marriage where both of us are past that threshold all the time and are making massive love bank deposits every single day.

There is no Plan B. I will not separate from or divorce my wife; she hasn't broken our marriage vows, and I promised to take her as my wife for better or for worse.

I think that the idea of meeting ENs and avoiding Love Busters is the universal dynamic of MB and not limited to Plan A. I reference Plan A because it is where the lack of response from one spouse is most pronounced and therefore more easily dealt with intellectual.

What I think you are describing has more to do with boundaries (Townsend and Cloud and not a line in the sand) than with meeting ENs.

I don't know that the Taker is any more harmful to a relationship if uncontrolled by a renter than it is being uncontrolled by a buyer.

The beauty of MB is that it is behavioral. It seeks to change what we do rather than to seek a cause. The entire notion of enabling comes from the codependency movement and quite often it is used by someone who wants to stop providing care or protection primarily because of a renter mindset.

That's why I said that the whole process is the key rather than addressing just one piece of the whole puzzle. This really is a chicken or egg type situation here. If I am meeting my spouse's ENs properly and his or her Giver is not appearing, then something else is preventing him or her from reaching a state of intimacy where the Giver DOES begin to be let out and the Taker actually needs to step up to prevent being run over. That something that is getting in the way MUST be something other than just not wishing to be in love with us.

Around here we see the affair as the leader in this, but alcohol, drugs, resentment & other stuff can all stop the reaction dead. But another thing that can lead to this can be porn or any other type of secret "fantasy" in which there is an unfair comparison between the real relationship with the spouse and the fantasy that doesn't have to be anything but what the one who is refusing to engage is involved in whether with a real person or simply some ideal that doesn't exist.

And yes, I think that in the case of a spouse refusing to engage in any sort of process, the solution might be a Plan B type of separation where the spouse who is not engaging has to show a commitment to making the marriage work before being allowed back into the life of the spouse who has been putting forth the effort all along. But That is only addressed as the final attempt at solving the problem in MB and this is where I think Townsend & Cloud can provide other options for boundary enforcement before it has to come to separation and divorce, though divorce is really the ultimate enforcement of boundaries for a marriage relationship.

If we allow a spouse to constantly refuse to meet our ENs or allow love busters to continue, it is really up to us to determine if we are willing to keep going with the effort or if we are willing to accept our condition and adjust to it. If we are not willing to make the move toward separation and keep trying, then that is our prerogative. If we choose to simply accept our fate, then that is our choice as well. But just like those who complain about the government, if we don't do anything to change our status, or the conditions about which we are complaining, then the problem remains our problem.

Until our spouse has a problem that they have to solve, there is no incentive to solve it since it isn't their problem but ours. This is what T&C talk about, helping the problem to become theirs and not simply ours to deal with. Even in Plan A we do not have to become doormats and simply allow bad behavior to remain the standard.

Many affairs often result from one spouse feeling that they have been giving without getting much of anything in return. The moral choice is never to have an affair yet many end up heading down that road and then using the unmet ENs or love busters always present as justification for their own bad behavior. But really any time we attempt to use the action or inaction of our spouse to justify our own bad behavior we are making the same error in moral judgment.

I think if we aren't getting what we need from our spouse we really only have three options that will ever change our condition. We can try something else and see of he or she responds differently. This can be counseling, an attempt to educate them as to how better to meet our needs or a seminar, MB weekend etc. If they refuse or this has no effect then we can choose to separate leading to eventual divorce if our complaints are not adequately addressed. Or we can live with our condition as is. But then the culprit in our unhappiness is not our spouse but ourselves. We really only have to put up with what we put up with.

BTW, often times we miss an important piece of the equation when it comes to meeting ENs or getting rid of love busters. We can easily spot our own AOs, DJs, IB, dishonesty and SDs. But the annoying habits are the ones that do the most damage to our spouse's feelings of love toward us because these are things we do over and over again, without thinking about them and without knowing they are the problem unless our spouse has the tools to express them to us in a way we can address. Dropping socks on the floor, putting dirty dishes in the sink instead of the dishwasher, falling asleep on the sofa instead of going to bed, wearing a ratty old tee shirt that should have been thrown out when you were 17 can and do make withdrawals from our accounts in our spouse's Love Bank if they are something that annoys them.

The ten basic concepts seem so simple at first glance but each one is like peeling an onion. As we examine the outer layer and think we have it figured out we find that there is another layer underneath and another beneath that one. The ten simple ideas really do account for just about anything you can come up with as possible in real life relationships and if we don't see how it is covered the fault is likely in our understanding and not in the concepts themselves.

I'm not sure if meeting ENs and avoiding love busters does enable the continued manifestation of the Taker or if it is our inability to address the real problem in a way that will change the dynamics so that continuing the problem as-is becomes unacceptable to the one always taking. I can tell you that when one spouse is in Withdrawal and the other withdraws in response, nothing gets better for either of them. I also know that if we are really doing things right and one of the mitigating factors is not present our spouse should not be in withdrawal and if they are, there are really only two possible situations. Either there is something we don't know about that IS one of those exceptions or we aren't doing it as right as we think we are.

I have a situation I can talk about that I think can further address this but I need to make sure I am not stepping on anyone's toes before I post it. It will hit several threads and posters on these forums right where they live so let me make sure I don't just blurt things out. I might try later or might decide that I need to stay off the topic.

Mark

Let's see if I can post single point posts to address specific questions...

Compatibility comes from doing things that cause compatibility rather than things that make us incompatible.

Trying really hard to not expand that further...

Mark

A spouse in withdrawal with the proper meeting of ENs and no love busters in the relationship must be the result of one of the mitigating circumstances. Can't be making deposits into an open account and getting nowhere forever.

You can however have to overcome conditions of resentment from years of neglect before seeing any improvement. This happens when instead of telling us that we have overdrawn our account our spouse floats us a loan and we end up paying serious interest later when they finally decide they have had enough of our neglect and abuse.

ETA: Depressed Spouse
Alcoholic Spouse

Markos,

In Fall In Love Stay In Love Dr Harley discusses one spouse leading the other back from withdrawal through conflict and into intimacy by putting his or her Taker on hold and making an all out Plan A type effort to meet ENs and avoid love busters. When successful, the one who was being led always has to become the leader in order for both to reach that point since it takes a toll on the love bank account of the one being led for the leader to give up their own ENs in order to accomplish the goal.

This is one of the few instances where Dr Harley even hints at sacrifice as being something we should try to do. But it has to be short term or it will ultimately fail. Short term sacrifice for long term goals can accomplish much. Long term sacrifice for short term gain will break us in no time.

Mark

ETA: Can a Marriage Be Saved By One Spouse?

POJA

Thanks, Mark; I really appreciate all the commentary, and will be appreciative for any more you can provide.

This is not a recipe, like baking a cake, or a puzzle where you connect the dots to draw a picture. It is a development process, like developing a new product, or developing a new computer application. Everything is interrelated, you have to keep working on most of them at the same time, revisiting things you already did, experimenting, keeping what works, discarding what doesn't work, hopefully in a spiral that becomes broader and broader with every cycle through all the pieces. The faster you cycle around and do all the things that need doing, the more cycles you make, and the faster things should improve.

But just like developing a new product, we are dealing with the unknown. We might want to expect one thing to happen, but another might happen. Don't throw it away. Look for the gem in it. Maybe you are meant to be walking a different path than the one you wanted to take. Maybe you are meant to reach a different destination than the one you envisioned, or no destination, but a better journey than the place you were sitting before.

Here's something I was thinking about in terms of compatability. I don't know where to categorize it in terms of the MB program. Maybe annoying habits? Not sure.

What happens if your spouse, whom you do love and whom you want to work with you (and it's reciprocated) to rebuild romantic love into your marriage....what happens when you realize after all these years, that there are really one or two personality attributes you really DON'T LIKE? Does one simply chalk it up to AH and try to POJA it away? Be radically honest and tell your spouse that you don't like XYZ about him/her? I suppose that's the answer but perhaps since we're still in the beginning stages of marriage building, I haven't got a clue how to approach this.

I love the onion idea, that the whole MB thing seems so simple, yet is really not so simple. And great thoughts Retread!

I really like your question too, OH.

I think there are a lot of couples who are very immature when they marry, think that their romantic love is all they need for marriage, when in fact they may have some fundamental incompatibility to start with. Either cultural issues, religious issues, beliefs about childrearing or money. Then when the romantic love fades they are left looking at the incompatibility that was there all along and simply ingored because of rose colored glasses. Clearly romantic love was part of the equation on the day of the wedding, but compatibility never was.

Can you really POJA a major difference in religious faith or a fundamental decision about childrearing, when the agreement must be agreed to ENTHUSIASTICLY by both parties? Or if it is a personality trait that simply CAN'T be change by a force of will?

I definitely acknowledge that POJA is what creates the compatibility. But a reluctant spouse who is in withdrawl is probably VERY happy with their own independent and is unlikely to want to accept the POJA at all. For one thing, it runs very counter-culture to what our society teaches us about marriage. I think most people believe that some independent behavior is OK in marriage, even if their spouse is not enthusiastically in favor of it. Most of us are taught that we should compromise and sacrifice in marriage, ideally in a mutual way. MB teaches us that this thinking is wrong. But a reluctant spouse isn�t going to accept it. Even if the EN and LB stuff makes sense to a reluctant spouse, they will often balk at the POJA, so it may not be possible for the couple to maintain romantic love, if they are able to re-establish it at all, especially if �compatibility� is a �condition� which must be present for romantic love for that particular spouse. I don�t think compatibility is a prerequisite per se (see above post). But it might be for some people.

I would love to know what the �success� numbers are for those who follow Harley�s program broken down by category: those who do the MB weekend together, those who use MB coaches or counselors, those who do counseling with a pro-MB counselor, and those who try it on their own with the support of the boards and books. I suspect his published high rate of success is just those who have been part of the MB weekend or phone counseling. And in those cases, the couple is addressing the issue TOGETHER in the same place, getting all the tools at once rather than piecemeal.

As I�ve said before, it seems to me that this is not a �take what you like and leave the rest� program. In order for it to work, BOTH parties must use ALL the tools for long-term success.

Of course the reluctant spouse is not happy to give up their IB. The *trick* is for them to learn that this incompatibility that they are complaining about was self-inflicted. They created incompatibility with their IB. Second trick is to learn that they'll do it again, with someone else, unless they learn how to protect compatibility to begin with. So it will be a repeated problem in their life, no matter who their partner is, unless they address it in themself.

You tell him about it so he can CHANGE it. The goal is to NEVER be the source of your spouses unhappiness. So if those traits interfere with your love for him, he would want to stop them and learn new habits.

Behavior can always be changed. I have a very independent personality and if I can change, anyone can. People do it every day. But you can't FORCE a spouse to do anything. Even my biggest pistol could not stop my H from having angry outbursts if he wanted to have one. [well I suppose I could shoot him]

Being married is entirely voluntary so nothing here is about FORCE. It is about CHOICE. A choice to have a great marriage and a CHOICE to change my behavior.

Issues about child rearing are resolved using POJA. Dr Harley has some articles about how to resolve differences of faith: ]here

You are correct, it is not a cafeteria plan. It must be used in its entirety to be successful. However, Dr Harley told me at the MB weekend, and I have noticed this is usually the case from talking to couples on the board who go, that MOST couples who show up for the weekend have one reluctant spouse. Rarely are they reluctant after they understand the program. Once they understand that they stand to reap great benefits, they usually buy in.

My H thought MB was a pack of bullcrap until he learned about the POJA.

There is no denying that there are personality types, fixed at birth. We can all see it in little babies. Ancient people studied this and ascribed it to the positions of the stars and planets at birth. Modern scholars study birth order, or try to match up different classifications of personality types.

But personality types are not a the problem. People with 'incompatible' personality types and zodiac signs fall in love and get married, often happily ever after.

Bad habits, which are irritating or big love busters, are the problem. These habits were cultivated over years, and facilitated by parents, spouses and others who ignored the behavior or responded to it in the wrong manner.

Habits can be broken, and quickly. That is the good news. And people will make the effort to break bad habits and reform behavior when they realize they must do so if they are to please someone else that is important to them. They will break the habits even before they want to be loved by that other person, or before they want to be in love again, if they know it is wrong, and they are politely notified that they are doing it again, so please stop.