Tom,

Our emotional responses to anything come from a chemical soup that is released into that portion of our brain that rules over emotions. Certain chemicals cause certain emotional content and other chemicals cause other reactions in our brains that we consider to be negative feelings. These chemicals all have names like dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin and the precursor or predicative of dopamine known as PEA.

Whenever we interact with any person, based in part on what that person might say or do but also simply in part because of circumstances at the time we interact with each other, either a positive or negative response takes place in our brain (either good feelings/emotions or bad feelings emotions). The Love Bank model comes from recognizing how these responses have an affect on us and on what is known as a directed response to a directed stimulus. That is, whenever we are with a person at a time when our emotional response is good, we tend to associate the good feelings with that person.

What happens over time is that the response to the stimulus that is always present when in their presence turns into beginning to have those feelings simply by them being present. They have become a directed stimulus and it causes us to have a directed response. What this causes to happen is that we begin to desire more contact with that person because we feel good being with them. We begin to seek out spending time with them because they provide us with stimulation of our pleasure center in our brain and we will seek to have more pleasurable experiences.

But the opposite is also true. Those people who begin to be associated with negative emotional reactions begin to become less attractive to us because they in fact become a negative directed response causing us to have negative feelings simply by their presence. Sometimes we might have a good reaction when with a person and the next time it might be more negative. In addition, some things cause a really great reaction and others a really negative reaction in our brains. The net result then becomes the deciding factor in the way we feel about that person.

Anyone with an overall positive net balance is someone we like. We enjoy our time with them enough to be willing to spend time for the net payoff of having a good emotional experience. Antithetically, if a person is generally associated with negative emotional responses then those are people we do not like. If they cause us enough of a negative emotional response enough times, we begin to hate that person but if they provide us with enough good emotional responses long enough and avoid doing anything that causes us to have a negative emotional response when with them we begin to desire strongly to want to be with them as much as we possibly can. This is falling in love�

There is nothing magic or mystical about love despite what the literature and poetry of love might lead you to believe. There is nothing that involves kismet or destiny involved and falling in love and being in love are really nothing more than a response to a stimulus. We brain wash ourselves into wanting to be with someone for the rest of our lives just because that person provides us with stimulation that causes a pleasurable experience that bathes certain receptors in our brain with dopamine and perhaps eventually in the case sexual response with oxytocin and vasopressin Sexual attraction itself is driven by testosterone in both men and women. Oxytocin and vasopressin are related to bonding and connectedness. It�s all just chemical soup produce as if by following a recipe.

Finding a soul mate is nothing more than becoming addicted to the chemicals swimming around in your brain. The beauty of Marriage Builders is that you can have that same set of emotions with the woman you are already married to, if you both strive to maximize the good emotional responses by learning to meet each other�s emotional needs and avoid causing negative emotional responses by learning to avoid Love Busters.

Often, once we are married, in part because we have this kismet type of view of love, we start to believe that we have either fallen out of love with each other or perhaps never really loved each other. This is when we become most vulnerable to an affair since if anyone triggers us to have enough good emotional responses, they rapidly build a positive balance and we enjoy their company so much that they become the source of our addiction. Even with no sexual contact and in a few cases even without ever actually meeting in person, we fall in love with this new person.

Once we are married, something changes. What changes is that we are no longer with each other only for the best of times like when we were dating. We now have to live with each other and so have much greater opportunity to be together for negative emotional responses and to generate those responses in each other. Even without intending to do so, we do things that hurt each other and when we do, it detracts form the once so positive balance we had accumulated until we begin to demand more of the relationship. This is instinctive and Dr Harley calls this our Taker. It is that part of our personality that wants us to be happy and avoid being unhappy.

Now, if someone comes along that actually makes us happy, and then we begin to gravitate toward that person. But the negative net balance with our spouse does not go away and so we start to compare the two in our emotional parts of our brain. We think we are processing real data but what we are really doing is comparing emotional responses and not really thinking at all. We are merely �feeling.�

Marriage Builders isn�t magic either. It is really more science than magic but of course science looks very much like magic until it is understood. I can assure you that if you and your wife follow the Marriage Builders, with both of you learning it, understanding it and applying it, you will end up with a marriage that will amaze you�and all without having to adjust your expectations downward.

But I will also tell you that as long as you are in any kind of relationship that meets any of your emotional needs and has very little chance of causing any sort of negative emotional response, you are living at least very dangerously close to the place where the comparisons between this �friendship� and what it provides for you and the very real marriage that is not providing those things will prevent you from even wanting to try to save your marriage.

Around here we use the term cake eating to describe when a spouse who is having an affair doesn�t want to leave the marriage yet wants to continue the relationship with an affair partner. It is a very common occurrence, so much so that I could probably find it on twenty threads on SAA within a very short time of looking, probably within the first 30 I looked at or maybe even fewer than that.

You see, as long as someone is providing you with part of what you need to be happy and someone else is providing you with another part of the happiness package, what you are doing is not really complacency at all. It is actively choosing to get part of your needs met by this person who is not your spouse while avoiding doing the hard work it might take to get what you really want from your spouse rather than the friend.

Mark

What doesn't make sense about TomOlympus is that he claims his need for FS from his wife is not being met, but this girlfriend isn't meeting that need either. She is meeting his need for conversation. But when he is home with his wife, he says they don't spend much time together, that they are into separate (in)activities. He could be working on conversation with his wife.

That's why I don't think Tom is being honest about his needs, what he is really wanting, and what he is really doing.

To me, a lot of this reeks of laziness, of taking the path of least resistance. His FS is not Financial SECURITY for both him and his wife, but Financial SUPPORT for himself.

---- edit ------------
After posting the above comments, I happened to see this as TO's most recent comment in another thread:

Retread, whats difference are you seeing in financial security and financial support. I see 2 people, should mean 2 paychecks, which enables both of them to live with less financial worry.
And (insert your own bad word here towards you) I do not have a girlfriend. I have not even spoken to my FRIEND in the past couple weeks. Don't tell me that i am not working on conversation with my wife either. I have been trying, its not easy during this stressful time, but I am trying.

Mark,

Ok, that was a lot to read and absorb, but I will try to give a little of my perspective on it.

Your first 5 paragraphs, which seemed greatly scientific based, I do generally agree with. Not necessarily for all of the scientific reasons, but simply based on the social interactions aspect of it all. I really do understand the LoveBank idea. You do something nice for me, I like you more, you do something mean, I like you less; in its most simplistic form. It does make perfect sense.
I think there are many aspects to love and relationships. For me it is hard to put all of them under this blanket idea though. For some of the emotional needs that may work, but I don't see how it does for all of them. I also think it does depend on the reasoning behind the relationship. Sometimes it comes back to what started it all.
For me that was friendship, conversation, and financial security. These things were and still are very important needs for me. There are others that I rank as important for me, but they are not reasons that I got into this relationship, if that makes sense.

I still say the convesation aspect with my friend, is just that conversation with a friend. If it wasn't with that friend I would hope it to be with someone else. I value friendship, I am very loyal friend. I think a close friend is one that you are not worried about sharing anything and everything with.
I know some people here disagree with that idea. I still say that my wife knows me better than anyone, I am closer to her than anyone, which is good, that is the way it should be. I don't see why spouses and friends and close realtives even, can't provide that conversational need. I am not trying to be difficult here, that is just something that I still see as beneficial.

Tom,

I think one piece that may be missing from the puzzle is that we each have our own most important ENs and while those ENs typically do follow certain patterns when it comes to men and women, Dr Harley has provided a way to not only identify what is most important to us at any given time in our lives, but to identify when those priorities change for us.

What this also means, though, is that while you might not see the value in a particular EN at any given time of your life, that EN might actually be your wife's most important need at that same time. So while it seems foolish to try to cover every EN with one big blanket, as you put it, all ENs must be evaluated by each spouse and then once the most important to THEM is determined to be what they need from their spouse in order to remain fully engaged in the relationship at the level of wanting to reciprocate, it is up to the spouse to provide that EN.

[side note: At any given time of our life, what is most important is often the thing that is most lacking. If I wander around in a blizzard, my top need is to get warm. But if someone invites me inside, as I warm up, my top need might be to quench my thirst. Once that is satisfied, I might find that I am hungry and after a nice meal, I suddenly realize that I am really quite exhausted from my ordeal and what I now require most of all is a nap. So what is most important, especially if it deviates very far from the typical, is probably circumstantial and once satisfied other ENs will jump up the list to become more important.]

So while you might have ENs that just aren't important to you at all and you can't even see any worth to them, those very things might be the most important thing you can provide for your wife.

The same can be said of Love Busters. Three of these are instinctive, that is, we know how to use them and do, practically from the moment of birth. These are Selfish Demands, Disrespectful Judgments and Angry Outbursts.

Independent Behavior can be the one thing that leads to becoming roommates under the same roof but with no passion or romance left. It is living your life, for purely selfish gains, without regard to what your spouse thinks, feels or desires. I go my way and you go yours and as long as we aren't fighting about something, there must not be a problem.

But it is the very nature of living as if our spouse doesn't exist that causes the love we have for each other to begin to wane. Doing something without taking my wife's feelings about what I am doing says to her loud and clear that I don;t care about her feelings at all.

Eventually, IB does cause conflict even if you both end up caring very little about each other because at some point one of you is going to do something independently that affects the other negatively and as soon as that happens, defense mechanisms kick in that bring the instinctive parts of us to bear.

So now we decide to avoid fighting about what we are doing and the way we solve that is to lie about it. We begin to misinform each other or to simply fail to inform each other of what we are doing and before long, we avoid talking to each other all together.

And that leaves just one Love Buster left. Annoying habits are just that. They are things we do without thinking and without considering how our spouse feels about them. They annoy our spouse because of something in what we do that just drives them crazy. It doesn't even have to be rational because feelings aren't rational since they come from a part of the brain that doesn't deal in logic or reason. It simply reacts based on the chemicals triggered by whatever stimulus is provided.

In fact, it can be some of the same things that once were thought so endearing but now have become annoying because of repetition over time. Little things like piling dirty dishes in the sink or dropping your socks next to the hamper instead of into it or trimming your toenails in the living room while sitting on the sofa. Anything we do that repeats causing a negative emotional response that we do over and over without thinking becomes the overhead of the relationship. While none of those things might be grounds for divorce, the cumulative effect is that unless good emotional responses are forthcoming, the negative removes a little tiny bit of love at a time until there is none left.

The most basic premise of the entire MB concepts is that whatever we do, it affects our spouse. This can be either a positive or a negative effect and so either adds to the feelings of care and love or takes away from those feelings.

So MB doesn't just talk about meeting ENs and avoiding Love Busters, it is really a way to identify what each of you needs from the other in order to be happiest. It then helps you build a lifestyle that causes you to become more compatible as time goes on rather than less compatible. It all comes down to providing for each other's needs and protecting each other from being hurt either by our own selfishness or our thoughtlessness.

As I said before, if what I am telling you, that MB can give you a great marriage, where you are romantically in love with your wife and she with you and you don't try it, then you are right where you are now. If what I tell you is not true and you do try it, your marriage is still right where it is now. So by trying it, you will either have what you already have or you will have a great marriage. By not trying it you guarantee that your marriage will remain as it is, which is really not good enough or you wouldn't be here and we wouldn't be having this dialog at all.

Your choice, Tom. MB works because it can change feelings based on what we do. Doing nothing never made any changes (unless your name is Microsoft) and simply rebooting the same corrupted software day after day will never solve the problem.

Mark

I have read through and understand the premise for much of this Mark. I get the idea of En's, I undesrstand what it is thats important to me. I know of those which I expect out of my relationship and the ones that I would like, but don't expect.
For the most part I understand that idea of LoveBusters as well.
The annoying habits aspect though, to me you marry someone and their annoying habits as do they marry you and yours. If you can try and break them of some that is great, if not, well, you learn to live with them. You try and try and change them, but if it doesn't work, its apart of who they are. I do understand the idea of, choosing to change to make the other person happy. But if your own annoying habit makes you happy and theres makes them happy, then why not just keep happiness that way.
Ideally yes, some things people will be willing to change for the other person, but I would not expect everything.

"Independent Behavior can be the one thing that leads to becoming roommates under the same roof but with no passion or romance left. It is living your life, for purely selfish gains, without regard to what your spouse thinks, feels or desires. I go my way and you go yours and as long as we aren't fighting about something, there must not be a problem."

This seems like an extreme example of Independent Behavior. I would never want a marriage that became this. I would never want to have a roomate where we lived like this.

Overall I guess I am not completely clear on what the purpose of that last post was Mark, besides trying to convince me to work MB completely into my marriage.

As I have said before; some things seem good, others, not as much. Radical Honesty, that one I still can not wrap my head around. POJA is another one that I have a hard time with as well.
Understanding each others EN's is good, having UA time together is good as well, and understanding how the LoveBank and LoveBusters work, I get that. Some of that is basic understanding of interacting with other people spelled out for a marriage.

Radical Honesty and POJA are very difficult for a lot of people to accept. You have stated that you don't want to tell your wife how you're feeling about the financial situation because you're afraid she will get emotional over it and you'll have to deal with her emotions.

Maybe this will appeal to your 'choose the easy way' nature:

Scenario One: You tell your wife that you really expected that she would work full-time and contribute financially. You felt it was an implicit understanding from the very beginning, because she WAS working full-time and contributing. You tell her that now she's not doing that anymore, you're growing resentment and that concerns you, and you ask for her help and ideas on resolving the matter--the matter being your resentment over her not contributing a full-time paycheck to the household. There will likely be some high emotions, but in the end, the problem is aired and addressed.

Scenario Two: You don't tell her. You become increasingly resentful over time, to the point where you don't even want to be in the same room with her. You get angry over every dollar she spends, and she falls under the false impression that if she spends less money, you'll treat her better. So she gets crafty, because all she really wants is your love, so you end up with a wife who is wearing thrift-shop clothing and cutting her own hair (some people can do that really well, don't mean to knock thrift shops either, I shop some too), and now you're hating on her for not only not working enough, but being unattractive as well. But she has no clue. You make some comment about something she's wearing, "You paid a dollar for that dress?" and she starts thinking no matter what she does, you will never be happy. You never touch her anymore, and you're always grumpy, so what does she do? She goes out and gets a full-time job and leaves your grumpy hateful butt.

The way I see it, the only way you can have your problems addressed is to share them, through RH. Scenario two gets you a wife who is working full-time, too bad there's that ex- in front of her.

POJA will never be reached without it, either.

Tom,

Can you describe or explain your reticence concerning PORH and POJA and why you find them hard to grasp or see the need for in a marriage? Perhaps if we address specifics rather than the generic, you might find that it makes more sense.

The thing with annoying habits is that many of those habits were not known at the time of the marriage. Additionally, new habits get formed after marriage that can also fall into that category and in either case, or even with the ones you DID know about before marriage, they eventually take a toll on the relationship.

When we marry, we promise to have an exclusive relationship where each of us is providing certain things for the other. Some of this results in unmet expectation that was never really reasonable to begin with and adjustments need to be made to expectations as well as behaviors.

But the problem is that once we are married, we are together not only when we are at our best, but when we are at our worst. If love were this magical thing that happens in some sort of void then true love would be forever no matter what happens. But love is fleeting, (I'm talking about romantic love here, or the FEELING of love and not the action or caring love) and it can come and go based on our current feelings and emotional state.

If the assumption that everything we do will either have an affect on our spouse emotionally, that is, it will either make Love Bank deposits or withdrawals, is correct, then no matter what we do, it will cause love to either flourish or to whither and eventually die. Specific actions on our part that cause our spouse to feel unloved or that causes them to have a negative reaction to us will eventually be associated with us and not just our actions. This means that even being with us will be causing harm or hurting our spouse.

Assuming that you promised at the time you married that you would love, honor and cherish your wife, I would guess that you were agreeing that you would do what you could to try to make her happy and avoid doing anything that would make her unhappy. The point of eliminating behaviors that we refer to as annoying habits is that these are things that make our spouse unhappy and once we know that they make them unhappy, it is something we need to address in order to stop being their source of unhappiness.

If we KNOW that what were are doing is hurting our spouse, why would we willingly continue doing those things? While it might at first seem that since they already knew we might be doing these things it is up to them to adjust to our continued behavior, since that is who we are, these things are habits and not genetic qualities and as such are things we learned to do over time be repeating them until they became a part of who we are. This means that we can learn to replace these things with other habits that do NOT hurt our spouse and so do not take away from our balance in her Love Bank. We do this by doing the new behavior, even though we might struggle at first, until the new behavior becomes a habit and the result is that our spouse's love (the feeling) for us grows rather than being diminished over time.

ENs are easy to grasp I think when it comes to understanding our own needs. But the problem is that what we need from the relationship is not what our wife needs. In fact the very things that we instinctively do because we know that they are things that lead to our own needs being met can sometimes have little or even no affect on our wife. Even worse is that if we continue working on getting our own needs met we tend to begin to use instinctive methods that can actually become hurtful to her. These are the tools of our Taker which wants us to be happy even if she is unhappy as the result. SDs are usually the first choice (Do what I want or else) followed by DJs (If you really loved me you would do what I want you to do.) When those fail to get us what we desire, we resort to showing our anger over not getting what we want with AOs and try to punish our spouse for not giving us what we NEED. We NEED it, after all, so it isn't just some minor whim or spur of the moment thing.

The problem with all of these things is that they seldom get us what we want in the long run. What they do instead is cause our spouse's Taker to come to their defense, since it is their Taker's job to ensure that they are happy and to protect them from becoming unhappy.

I'm at work, so I'll be back when I get a chance.

Mark

I would come at this from a different place. Tom, MB will make you a better person. A better husband. A better contributor to your workplace. And overall a more effective member of society.

That may result in your wife stepping up her efforts to become a better wife. Or maybe not.

But you will reap the benefits of being a better person whether she responds helpfully or not. So while a happy marriage is not guaranteed. A better you is. Perhaps you find that a more enticing "ad" for MB.

Or maybe you are like me, and at this point you just don't care. I for one will not condemn you. But I do hate to see anyone else joining my "club".

Radical Honesty was the thing that turned my marriage around. Without it we would still be slowly drifting apart, not doing a very good job of meeting each other's needs and like most of society assuming that was the inevitable course of marriage.

Its not. You really can be head over heels in love for life.

Radical Honesty alone won't make everything wonderful, but its vital to the rest of the marriage builders program. Without it you are both blundering around in the dark trying to meet needs you don't fully understand. Its impossible.

Mark- my reluctance to both RH and POJA come from not wanting my wife to know some of the things I think/feel. To me it would be more hurtful for her to hear/know them. It is just easier to keep them to myself and not have to deal with the aftermath of letting the cat out of the bag; with some big issues and even little ones.

Hold- For the most part that "ad" doesn't really work for me. I see myself, for the most part, good just the way I am. I am happy with the person that I have become. Do I think I could be a better person? Yes, nobody is perfect. I just don't see it as a necessity.

Let me translate this.

"Mark--I am a conflict avoider. I justify this to myself by saying that I think it is kinder to others. I haven't quite figured out yet that I am still hurting them with my thoughts and deeds, and that keeping the truth from people is far crueler than telling them. I have not yet embraced the notion that it isn't hearing the truth that hurts, but the actual truth itself. Maybe if I ever get to the point where I avoid thoughts and deeds that HURT people, I'll be honest; but for right now, I'd just not like to have to deal with the consequences of my behavior, and I kinda like being able to justify that by saying that I'm afraid that I'll hurt someone else with the truth.

Not my actions.

Not my thoughts and feelings.

Just telling them.

Yeah."

Tom, you are a LIAR. Plain and simple.

CW- I can't rely deny what you wrote. I guess I have always lived by the ideas of "what you don't know, wont hurt you" and "ignorance is bliss"

Yes some of those things you eventually learn about, but you can usually look at it and say you were happier or had more peace of mind when you didn't know.

Not me. There's not a thing I know that I wish I didn't. And the beautiful thing, Tom, about being honest, is that you don't do things that you wouldn't want anyone to know anymore.

It's a glorious freedom.

It gets you closer to who you are supposed to be, the REAL you, which is a beautiful and amazing thing.

I highly recommend it!

Tom, that attitude is going to leave you with a lot to apologize for someday. There won't be enough time to do it, or enough people still around to hear it.

You make it seem like I set out to hurt people, that is just not the case.
What about the phase "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all"

We have thoughts and feelings about/towards people all of the time and they arent always good.

This just makes me sick to my stomach. I can understand this attitude to maybe a work colleague - do they really need to know you don't like their tie? But to your wife?

This woman has agreed to share her life with you. To build a future together. This woman has agreed to let you see her, good, bad and ugly - day in and day out for the rest of her life.

And this is what she gets? Half truths, lies by omission and dishonesty. Just so you don't have to 'deal' with the discomfort of her maybe getting upset.

You say FS is a top need, you say your wife isn't meeting that need, but you wont tell her how much it damages your love for her. You'll just let her keep on, day in and day out, letting your love for her slip little by little, all the while she's wondering why things aren't right. Make no mistake, she will be able to feel your lessening love for her, but she will have no idea why or how to fix it - she will assume it is something she is doing but wont be able to do anything about. So you leave her with the loss of your love and lost in confusion.

When if you'd just man up and tell her what your problem is she could actually DO something about it.

But no- your way she wakes up one morning and you're telling her you want a divorce because you just can't live like this anymore. You can't deal with the lack of love (you may think it's ok now, but years of living like you are will eventually take its toll) and you're leaving to find that romantic love you've always wanted.... when you never even gave your wife the chance to provide it for you...

Oh but you can talk about your bedroom problems with your oh-so-friendly OW....

You are sowing the seeds of the destruction of your marriage in the long run, for the sake of a little 'peace' now. All masked in the farce of 'protecting her feelings' because 'she would rather not know'.

Is she an infant? Is she a dog or pet? that you should so demean and invalidate her? Who are you to decide what is 'too hurtful' for your wife to know?? Who are you to say that these details are not relevant to her life?

Do you see how profoundly disrespectful and infantalizing this attitude is?

I don't think you're being noble, protecting her feelings. You're protecting yourself.

Tom - it is the Policy of RADICAL Honesty, NOT the Policy of BRUTAL Honesty.

Being Radically Honest does not exempt you from avoiding Love Busters.

Honesty should never be couched in terms of LBs.

If you remember in another thread I shared a story about my husband often telling a story about our engagement that really hurt my feelings.

I never told him it hurt me.

I realized it was damaging my love for him. So I told him:

"My feelings are really hurt when you tell _____story."

I didn't say "It is disrespectful when you say ____"
I didn't say "You don't love me because you tell ____ story"

There is a right and a wrong way to be honest.

You seem to be under the impression that we are encouraging honesty in a hurtful way.

That is not the case.

a) not every phrase that has been repeated a million times is Gospel truth

b) you seem to have no problem saying unkind things about your wife here, so it doesn't appear that you are living by this phrase, anyway.

(Actually, I don't think you've been unkind about your wife here, for the most part. There is a kind way to speak truths that may be unwelcome. And what I'm getting at is that it is entirely possible to let your wife know how you feel in a kind way.)