Pepperband posted this excellent article over on MB101 and I thought it needed a run over here too. It is a reminder that the main goal of Marriage Builders is to RESTORE ROMANTIC LOVE. That is what this program does. It does not strive to create peaceful co-existance, but romantic love:


How to Create Your Own Plan to Resolve Conflicts
and Restore Love to Your Marriage

Willard F. Harley, Jr., Ph.D.


Without an effective plan of action, it's unlikely that you will achieve your objectives in life -- and that's particularly true of marital objectives. Yet, marriage is an area of our lives where effective planning is often regarded as unnecessary. Couples usually believe that they should be guided by their instincts whenever they have a conflict.
Regarding emotional needs in a marriage, most spouses believe that couples should do for each other what they "feel" like doing. If there is no interest in meeting a particular need, it should simply go unmet. The idea that a spouses should create a plan to become experts at meeting each other's most important emotional needs, whether or not there is "interest" in meeting those needs, seems to go against marital intuition.

Intuition also prevails in most couples' efforts to resolve conflicts. Instead of resolving their marital conflicts by creating and implementing a well conceived plan, they revert to their primitive instincts -- demands, disrespect and anger -- to try to resolve their conflicts. These instincts not only fail to provide them with long-term solutions, but they also destroy the feeling of love. Because couples don't know any better, they keep using demands, disrespect and anger to try to resolve their marital conflicts until their love for each other turns into hate.

The purpose of the Marriage Builders; web site is to help you to create and implement a plan to resolve your conflicts in a way that will restore and sustain your love for each other. While many of my suggestions run counter to intuition, hundreds of thousands of couples have found that they work if they are willing to create a plan using my Basic Concepts. My Basic Concepts introduce you to my perspective on marriage, and how I go about creating plans that help make marriages successful. Then, my Q&A Columns give you examples of how to use my Basic Concepts to help create plans that solve a variety of marital problems. I also offer a Forum where you can discuss your situation with others who are creating plans that resolve conflicts and restore love to their marriages. Finally, if all else fails, I provide telephone counseling to those who feel they need special help with the creation and implementation of a plan to overcome their marital problems.

Ultimately, I hope you will create a plan to resolve your conflicts and restore love to your marriage. And then, of course, I hope you follow that plan so that you will actually experience the marriage I believe all couples should have. Without such a plan and its implementation, it's unlikely that you will achieve these important objectives. Insight into your problem is an important beginning, and my Basic Concepts will help give you that insight. But without action, insight is useless.

Restoring Love versus Resolving Conflicts
Before I discuss with you some of the details of a well-conceived plan to resolve conflicts and restore your love for each other, I will focus attention on the highest priority of such a plan -- restoring love.

I know of no marriage, including my own, that is free of conflict. That's because every couple is made up of two distinctly different people, with different experiences, interests and emotional predispositions. Regardless of the compatibility a couple creates in marriage, a husband and wife will always have somewhat different perspectives, and those differences will create conflict. Conflicts over money, careers, in-laws, sex, child rearing, and a host of other common marital issues are part of the experience of being married.

Some couples feel that if they could only rid themselves of certain conflicts, they would be happy together. But I've discovered that marriages can be terrific in spite of conflicts, even when some of them are never fully resolved. The difference between couples who live in marital bliss and those who regret ever having met each other is not found in whether or not they are free of conflict -- it's found in whether or not they are in love with each other.

From my years of experience trying to save marriages, I have come to the conclusion that the goal of restoring and sustaining love in marriage is much more important than the goal of resolving conflicts. Ultimately, of course, both goals are important, but by making love my highest priority, I found myself rejecting many popular approaches to conflict resolution because they tend to sacrifice a couple's love for each other. The way I now encourage couples to resolve their conflicts is to only use procedures that will also build their love.

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If you have seen a marriage counselor, and have been disappointed with the results, it's probably because you've spent all of your time trying to resolve your marital conflicts instead of restoring your love for each other. Even if you made progress in resolving some of your conflicts, you still may have been unhappy with your marriage. I receive letters regularly from those who find that they want to divorce in spite of a peaceful relationship. Even when a husband and wife are each other's best friends, they often divorce when the passion is gone.

That's one of the most confusing aspects of popular approaches to martial therapy, and it should raise a red flag to those who use them. When the goals of conflict resolution are achieved in counseling, why does the couple often divorce anyway? There seems to be something more to marriage than just resolving conflicts successfully.

Don't get me wrong, though. I believe that conflict resolution is important in marriage, and I go to a great deal of trouble to help couples resolve their conflicts. But couples who are happily married do more than resolve their conflicts, they also preserve their feeling of love for each other. And without being in love, marriage just doesn't seem right.

When a couple asks me to help them with their marriage, unresolved conflicts usually abound. And they present their marital problems to me as a litany of failures to resolve those conflicts. But as I probe the depth of their despair, conflicts are not usually the greatest source of their hopelessness. One spouse, and sometimes both of them, tell me that it is their lost feeling of love and passion for the other that bothers them the most. They don't believe that feeling will ever return, and without that feeling, they do not want to be married to their spouse. Their greatest feeling of hopelessness is about their lost love, not their inability to resolve conflicts.

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