�Take this pill and lose weight� is a very WEAK selling story that would not work with anyone. Brevity and a lack of information does not sell a product. A customer needs to know complete and full facts in order to determine if the product will benefit them. The less facts, the less likelihood he can make that determination. What you are describing is spinning the truth,[glossing over, maybe?] a form of dishonesty. A good sales person only has his credibility and those that are not honest don�t make it. If you are dishonest in my industry, your career is destroyed because word gets around quick.

The way to sell a product is not by spinning the truth, but by telling the FULL truth always; by presenting a product truthfully and accurately and looking for win-win solutions. Spinning is not an effective sales technique, it is the domain of sleazy politicians and door to door salesmen.

From Effective Marriage Counseling, pg 36, Dr. Willard Harley:

Sometimes I�ve even felt that I�d rather work with successful used car salesmen than certified marriage counselors. The salesmen already know how to motivate people � all I would need to do is teach them the program. Certified marriage counselors, on the other hand, rarely know how to motivate people. It�s not included in their training. But it�s possible for anyone to learn how to motivate others, and it should be basic training for all marriage counselors, because motivation is the key to success in marital therapy. It�s a skill that�s difficult to learn but it�s absolutely necessary.

AND pg 39

The program I offer emphasizes radical honesty, and if I were to be the least bit dishonest, it would destroy my credibility and my ability to motivate them to follow the program.

And yet the common "wisdom" is that most couples who go to a MB weekend have at least one reluctant spouse.

And then there's the banner on the MB website that poses the question (rhetoricallly) "Can one spouse save a marriage?"

Personally, I do NOT believe that one spouse can save a marriage.

One spouse can change their own behavior in the hopes that it creates the environment in which BOTH partners are willing to save the marriage, and then fix the marriage, and then maintain the marriage.

Ya know, it's pretty hard to have a screwed-up marriage when both parties are enthusiastically involved in protecting the marriage. Anybody know of one?

I have some other thoughts brewing, but I need to let them simmer first!

Just to summarize:

The original theory we started with is:

Romantic Love is created by meeting EN and eliminating LB. Meeting EN and avoiding LB being the actions or "cause" and Romantic Love being the emotional response or "effect." I think most of us would agree that this is the cornerstone of the MB program, whether or not we believe that this theory is in fact true.



We added to that theory:

The other tools of the program, such as POJA and Radical Honesty, are equally as important, but they are more about maintaining romantic love rather than establishing it.

Ideally, these tools are introduced and used concurrently by both spouses, which is why going to a MB weekend would probably end up being more successful that doing it on your own.

The degree of success is determined not simply by the meeting of EN and elimination of LB, but by the degree of WILLINGNESS on the part of each spouse to commit to the program and each other. MB won�t work against someone�s will.



We have not talked at all about 15+ hours of UA, which is probably the biggest determining factor of success, and also why Harley won�t even consider working with couples who won�t agree to it . . . it would skew his success statistics.

I know that sounds cynical, but, well, . . . .

I think we are all operating under the assumption that romantic love is a feeling we have about another person.

What if romantic love is NOT a feeling about someone else, but rather a feeling about how we experience OURSELVES when we are with the other person?

This would explain why simply meeting EN and eliminating LB wouldn�t always get the same results each time.

We are �in love� when we experience ourselves as loving, when our Givers are at the helm. As long as the Taker is in charge, we will not feel romantic love.

If I am a single person casually dating two people, which one will I fall in love with? The one with whom I am the most giving. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be. I�m not talking about treasure being money, but the wholeness of oneself � dreams, fears, beliefs, body, mind.

As the clich� around here goes, �Feelings follow actions.� But I think what we started out saying at the beginning of this thread is that a wife�s feelings follow her husband�s actions of meeting EN and not LBing, or the husband�s feelings follow his wife�s actions of meeting EN and not LBing. Actually, I believe MY feelings follow MY actions (and reactions). My spouse�s actions may contribute to my feelings ONLY when I react to them (and this process is subconscious) or choose to respond to them. And there is a difference between reacting and responding.

Reactions are instincts and habits which cannot necessarily be predicted consistently from person to person because they are tinged by the individual�s beliefs and experiences. Reactions are not acts of will as much as they are subconscious pre-programmed responses which can be unlearned only when they rise to the level of conscious control. Then I change from a person who reacts based on subconscious, unknown motives to someone who CHOOSES to RESPOND (which is different than reacting) after examining my motives.

So the theory I�m proposing is that Romantic Love isn�t a feeling someone else gives me. Romantic Love isn�t a reaction; that would be too superficial. Rather, Romantic Love is a feeling I evoke in MYSELF when I DECIDE and CHOOSE to act in a loving way toward the object of my affection (ideally my spouse!).

So to go back to the question on our original threadjacking . . . .

Romantic Love IS a decision, a choice, and being oneself, one�s best, most true and authentic self.

I don�t know about the rest of you, but I would rather be married to someone who CHOOSES to RESPOND out of love rather than someone who simply REACTS to my stimulus of meeting EN and not LB.

Mark, I�d especially like to hear your thoughts on this twist (after ice fishing, of course!). I�d love to hear what Loving Anyway has to say on this, because I�ve derived much of this idea from what she has posted to others.

Sadly, I don't know any marriages IRL where both parties are enthusiastically involved in protecting the marriage. Most of the lasting marriages I know are operating under the assumption of unconditional love and struggle with bitterness, resentment, and frustration to greater or lesser degrees.

All true! But Marriage Builders does not claim to be able to force someone to participate against their will. They have had great success in motivating reluctant spouses, though. Most couples who show up for MB weekends contain ONE reluctant spouse.

Romantic love is BOTH. It is based on how we FEEL when we are with that person.

A Summary of
Dr. Harley's Basic Concepts

OK. Let me take a shot at this and see if I can make any sense.

I think this is a chicken or egg question here. Do we fall in love and then invest in someone or do we invest in someone and fall in love with him or her?

Remember that Dr Harley talks about two kinds of love in his basic concepts, romantic love and caring love. Our investment in another person is caring love. The way we feel toward them is romantic love.

Meeting ENs and avoiding love busters can cause the second but not the first. Caring love must come from a decision but when we are in a state of Intimacy, that is, our Love Bank has been filled to the point of feeling romantic love and at that point our Giver wants to reciprocate and make the other person happy as well. We want to protect them, show them how we feel by being their greatest source of happiness.

The choice to show caring love is ours even when we don't feel romantic love. That is what a BS does in Plan A.


But if romantic love were simply a decision or choice, then we could choose who we fall in love with and could choose not to fall in love no matter what another person does. It is the demise of all of MB since if our feelings are not the result of what someone else does but of a choice that we make. It means that when our spouse chooses not to love us we are helpless to do anything about it. And if he or she falls in love with someone else, that decision is not something we have influence over.

Romantic love comes from how we make him or her feel when with us. Caring love is wanting to make them feel the same way.

Where the decision to allow another person to meet (or continue to meet) our ENs takes place is where we can stop them from doing so. For a spouse in Withdrawal, I think that this is very likely and usually comes from not getting ENs met and not being protected from Love Busters. This is the resentment factor I mentioned before.

When another person has been allowed to meet ENs to the point where the romantic threshold has been passed, that is, they have fallen in love with that person; this becomes extremely difficult to overcome. For most it becomes a case of one spouse doing things that they don�t want to do at all since there is no logical sense in trying to make a person happy when they desire only to make you feel miserable and want to destroy you. Yet this is exactly what is required in these cases. The BS must step up and do things they have no wish to do in spite of not just getting anything in return but with nearly every attempt being thwarted.

This is why I always try to point out that Plan A is in fact a PLAN that is followed rather than continuous response to what the WS does. And I keep coming back to Plan A because I think that an affair is the worst possible scenario, not only is your spouse not in love with you but he or she is actually in love with something else. Their ENs ARE being met, just not by the BS. ANY effort to break up the affair, and I think the more outrageous the fantasy the more this applies, is seen as a gigantic Love Buster of the first degree.

This is why Plan A needs to be organized, precisely executed and short in duration. This must of course be within the ability to ignore what is happening with the WS rather than in direct response to it since if we allow ourselves to begin to constantly respond to what the reactions of the WS to our efforts then this becomes a directed stimulus for us and we end up with a self defeating situation where we are unable to show the �caring love� we need to show the WS in Plan A and actually cause our Taker to become even harder to overcome, thus ending up actually hating the WS rather than generating any feelings in the WS for us other than disgust for us becoming a weaker person.

Plan A is not a weak thing to do. It may be the single hardest thing you ever do in your life because it goes against every single thing you have believed in most cases (that romantic love is somehow magical and special, that we should be able to get what we need to be happy from our spouse and that the problem is simply that the WS refuses to do what he or she should do because they have chosen to not love us and promised that they would when we married) and is totally counter to our instincts which require that we be getting something in return and when we don�t we resort to the instinctive tools of our Taker, SDs, DJs and AOs to get what we want.


But PORH and POJA are about eliminating Love Busters and meeting Emotional Needs. We have not ADDED anything at all since these things are part of the process which seeks to meet ENs and avoid Love Busters. This is how we prevent our Taker from behaving independently, lying to ensure getting our own way and demanding selfishly from our spouse, which is actually the way we ended up in the situation we find ourselves in most cases. POJA also prevents our Giver from allowing us to become unhappy in an effort to make our spouse happy and so creating resentment that fosters later Withdrawal.

Meeting ENs et al is not the cause and romantic love the effect. Meeting ENs is the stimulus that stimulates the pleasure center of a person's brain until the person proving the stimulus becomes a directed stimulus that results in a directed response. That is, I can become the only stimulus needed to trigger my wife to feel good, happy, etc. That is the romantic threshold. It requires repetition until that point is reached.

Love busters are things that provide the opposite stimulus, that is, things we do that make another person not feel happy, good etc. We need to avoid Love Busters because when we repeat these types of things we become a directed stimulus that causes the response in someone and so they begin t dislike, even hate us.


What Dr Harley can provide that few others seem to be able to provide is motivation to keep doing the right things while attempting to motivate the reluctant spouse to respond and begin returning the efforts. The people he has trained all seem to be able to do this as well and there are many cases on these forums where Steve or Jennifer was able to help the committed spouse to provide that motivation even for a spouse who did not directly talk to them themselves.

Whether as the result of an affair or not, when one spouse is in Withdrawal it can be possible for the other spouse to provide sufficient stimulus to get that spouse back to Intimacy, or at least to Conflict where they are at least willing to allow ENs to be met and reciprocate enough that the one who started out on the Plan A type of course can continue and not burn out.

But what I think happens in some cases is that the spouse attempting to save the marriage is able to get the other spouse into conflict but for some reason not far enough for the reluctant spouse to get on board. This is where motivation comes in more than anything else, I think, for both the one leading and the one who is refusing to follow.

Dr Harley does not ask the question, �Can one spouse save a marriage?� rhetorically. His answer is not �No� or �Never� or �seldom� or �With luck�� His answer is a qualified �Yes.�

See the two part series Can a Marriage Be Saved By Ones Spouse for how he says it is done.

If the basic premise of the Love Bank model is correct, that what we do does affect others, and make no mistake here that we are talking about how those people FEEL toward us, then it is a matter of finding the proper stimulus and avoiding the negative stimulus so that we become the directed stimulus that results in the feelings that we are trying to cause in our spouse.

Yes, in some cases people have some factor that prevents their brains from reacting in the way the model suggests, but having seen marriages in which an alcoholic spouse or a depressed spouse or spouse who was the victim of child abuse or any of a host of other typically detrimental conditions turn around and fall in love with their spouse again I can tell you that it usually boils down to lack of motivation because the spouse who did not check out first can decide that the marriage is not worth saving anymore long before the process plays out in its entirety.

When after 20 years of abuse by one spouse, even well meaning actions that become abuse out of ignorance, it is the resentment that must be overcome first. But it cannot be overcome in a conversation, or a day, a week or even a month. It may in fact take two or more years of doing everything right to overcome the resentments of the past.

Dr Harley also points out in the series I mentioned that when one spouse is not motivated to fix the marriage yet does not really want to end it; the problem is not really that they don�t love you. It is more often a case of they don�t need to fix anything because they are getting what they want and expect from the marriage. They basically do not have a problem and they do have feelings of love for you. It is the caring love that is missing and that is a condition of his or her own choice. They have no motivation to fix it because in his or her eyes it isn�t broken. The problem now becomes a case of finding what will motivate him or her to want to fix what they do not feel is broken.

This is where the work of Townsend and Cloud can help. The solution is to stop allowing the problem to be your and to make it your spouse�s problem to fix. As long as there is nothing wrong from his or her POV there is no reason to fix anything.

Rest assured that SDs, DJs and AOs will seldom fix the problem. IB will not fix it either. Emotional dishonesty won�t correct it and moping around the house in a passive aggressive way won�t get the job done.

At some point each of us must decide if the problem is serious enough to walk away from the marriage, deciding that being alone and unhappy and single or separated might be better than being alone and unhappy and living in the same house with a spouse who does not show care toward us.

Lots of stuff on this site addresses this and not just the series about one spouse attempting to save a marriage. Separation is always dangerous to a marriage but if the marriage is making you miserable, how is that better than separation. I do not mean run out and have an affair to get your needs met or to run down and file for divorce and close the door to reconciliation. I mean simply to separate, legally if necessary until the problem is addressed.

As I have said numerous times in recent days, we pretty much only have to put up with what we put up with. If we are being hurt by someone we don�t have to hurt him or her in return but we don�t have to stand there and get beat up emotionally or otherwise. As long as we continue meeting ENs and avoiding Love Busters, our spouse will be willing to let us keep doing that assuming they are not in a state of Withdrawal at the time. Once they are feeling happy and content it then becomes a case of finding the motivation for them to reciprocate. If they refuse to reciprocate the choice needs to be made to continue as is or to change the dynamic in some way to make the problem go back to the one who is causing the problem and quit making it our own problem.

First address what is broken in you. If you are certain that you are doing everything right, then the problem does lie with your spouse and that is where you need to decide what you are willing to do to get what you need from the relationship in order to remain in the marriage. If you decide what you have is good enough then that is your decision and not something you need to change. But if you find yourself complaining constantly about how your spouse acts or does not act than you need to make the reason to fix it greater than the reason to not fix it or it will forever remain just like it is.

Mark, I think I�m going to have to respectfully disagree with you and Harley on this one. As I said before, one spouse ALONE can create the CONDITIONS in which a marriage can be saved, fixed and maintained, but without TWO motivated spouses, efforts will fall short.

Harley's �qualified yes� is dependant on the eventual cooperation of both spouses.

Without the eventual cooperation of both spouses on ALL facets of the MB program, the answer is an unqualified NO.

Just my opinion

So are you saying that if I show CARING love for someone of the opposite sex, as long as their EN are met and I don�t LB, they will feel Romantic Love in response?

If someone of the opposite sex shows CARING love for me which meets my EN and doesn�t LB, that�s all it would take for me to feel Romantic Love in response?

I struggle with believing it's that simple. I think our beliefs and preprogrammed responses that we are taught in our family of origin play pretty important roles. Why else would people choose to marry someone who has a proven record of not meetin EN and LB like crazy because they are "in love" with that person?

Generally PORH and POJA are NOT in effect when couples originally fall in love. In fact, there�s usually a lot we DON�T know about our spouse before we get married due to lack of radical honesty, and prior to marriage there is often plenty of independent behavior, especially in cases where the couple does not live together before marriage.

This is also the case in affairs. No radical honesty, no joint agreement about changing lifestyles in order to stay compatible over time. Yet even without PORH and POJA there is romantic love, or as I prefer to think of it, addictive infatuation. And what makes this addictive infatuation SO addictive? It is not the continued, regular stimulus of meeting EN and avoiding LB. Actually, it is the INTERMITTANT stimulus that makes the affair so addictive.

The only way for an addict to break through their addiction is to make a conscious free-will decision to break it, whether it�s drugs, alcohol, food, porn, or an affair. The intermittent stimulus will always win out over the steady stimulus unless the situation rises from the subconscious to the conscious level, the level of making a free-will decision.

This is EXACTLY what I am saying. Can�t make someone fall in love with me against their will, no matter what stimulus I provide.


Influence, yes. Control, no. A wayward doesn�t return because of what the BS does or doesn�t do. WS return because they CHOOSE to. We can assume it�s because we changed our behavior in our attempts to meet EN and eliminate LB, and our spouse may even confirm that this contributed to their decision to return. But it was still their DECISIOM. The changes in our behavior didn�t CAUSE them to return. Their CHOICE is what caused them to return.


I thought romantic love was conditional, while caring love is unconditional. To say, �Caring love is wanting them to make them feel the same way,� implies an expectation that they feel the same way we do, thus making in a conditional love. In my book, real caring love means acting in a respectful way regardless of how it makes the other person feel. Sometimes being �respectful� and �taking the high road� actually makes a selfish person feel VERY uncomfortable because of their own unrecognized guilt, shame, anger, and/or inability to reciprocate or respond in the �expected� manner.


If we can decide to STOP another person from meeting our EN, then we can also decide to START. It can�t work in one direction and not in the other.

I think a lot of people are confused about Caring Love.
They think of it as a feeling, as in, "I care about you."
That is just part of it. You have act on those feelings to care FOR them, and take care of them. When you demonstrate your caring love for them by meeting the emotional needs, they are certainly more likely to feel romantic love in response.

ML, I think this segment that you quoted contains the one potential �flaw� in the whole Love Bank theory. Harley says:




The problem with this is that human beings don�t usually know who or what will make them happy, and prove this time and time again by engaging in the very behaviors that will most certainly make them unhappy in the long term, even if it brings a feeling of temporary happiness in the short term.

I believe based on my observations of myself and other people that our emotions do NOT encourage us to be with people who make us happy, but rather with people with whom we feel COMFORTABLE, regardless of their ability to meet our EN or protect us from LB.

Comfortable is not the same thing as happy, and it certainly isn�t the same thing as healthy. In fact, comfortable more often than not is NOT healthy.

Go back to what I said above about how �addictive infatuation� works because of the intermittent stimulus. My partner pulls me in, my partner pushes me away. I do the same. This is NOT healthy, but it is extremely common, and a lot of people will get married in this state because they THINK they are in love, then finally have enough of it, and wonder how to save their marriages. MB says they can recover their romantic love. But they never were in romantic love, at least not as MB defines romantic love. They were in addictive infatuation.

Often we see reluctant spouses and waywards say they were �never in love� with their spouses, and we call this rewriting history. Yet they may very well be telling the God�s honest truth. They were in addictive infatuation, they were comfortable in spite of the obvious warning signs, they got married because they mistook being comfortable and infatuated for being in love, and then when they finally �hit bottom� in their marriages they go into SERIOUS withdrawl which usually ends in divorce, sometimes preceeded by an affair, which complicates things further.


OK, so where I�m going with this is that
1) if a spouse they are simply subconsciously reacting to a stimulus rather than making a conscious decision, and
2) we REALLY wanted to see cause and effect work, then
3) we would do everything we could to make our spouse �comfortable� rather than �fulfilled� because
4) a human being will always choose comfortable/familiar over happy,
5) even if what they are �comfortable� with is abusive, neglectful, dishonest and manipulative.

Clearly that�s not healthy, and I am not at all advocating that!

I�m merely pointing out that the cause/effect of meeting EN=happiness is NOT the equation that creates feelings of attraction. Attraction as an unconscious reaction, all attraction, whether it be romantic, platonic, familial, etc. is all about gravitating toward the people who are the most familiar and comfortable, regardless of their ability or willingness to meet EN and contribute to our long-term happiness through caring love. And romantic love as MB defines us cannot be created without the spark of attraction.


ML, I know you have regular conversation with the Harleys and would love to know what his thoughts are on this potential pitfall of the system. I know it probably seems like I'm trying to be difficult, but I do my best learning when I question a thing to death

Many a wayward would say, "Because I'm not willing to change, the best way for me to show "caring" for my spouse is to stop abusing him/her and end this broken marriage. I'm protecting him/her from ME."

Pretty awful justification, but one we see all the time unfortunately.

I am going to have to disagree with you on this one. I don�t fall in love with someone who �makes me feel comfortable,� I fall in love with someone who makes me happy AND comfortable. I feel �comfortable� with my neighbor man, but I am not in love with him because he does not meet my most important emotional needs and thusly, make me happy. Feeling comfortable is very different from being in love.

For example, I am encouraged to be with someone with whom makes me feel comfortable, but the thought of being with someone who makes me happy is irresistible. That person becomes irresistible to me. And the method that person uses to make himself �irresistible� is meeting my top emotional needs and avoiding lovebusters.

thinkin, if you look at the article Why Women Leave Men, you'll see that folks don't stay in situations where they feel neglected. In fact it's the #1 cause women, who file for more than half of divorces, file.