Morning everyone, I've been a steady listener of the Marriage Builder's radio program and I've read His Needs Her Needs and Lovebusters. I've also been on the Marriage Builder's radio show in the past 2 months. I am struggling to get going in rebuilding our marriage. I struggle with honesty. One concept that was introduced by Dr. Harley is the concept of the man's house as it relates to intimacy. I'd like to start a discussion about how to actually begin this process of letting my wife in every "room" in my house and understand how others have done that and what the results were.

My wife sees the dishonesty in me and it is a real issue. I also understand very well what I do and the reasons for my dishonesty but I've lacked the courage to face the difficulties that we have. Therefore, I would really like to understand how others were able to open themselves up to their wives and be honest and allow them into each room in their house.

What would you describe as the barrier to your honesty? Are you scared of getting into trouble and why if so? Or is it that you don't want to change any of the rooms - do you want the freedom to shape your life without having to consider her view?

When were you on the show? What dates?

Have you told your wife about your fears in facing these problems? Honesty is a simple process; you just have to stop hiding from things and tell the truth. All it takes to let your wife into these rooms is to tell her about what is in them. Once you get in the habit of leaving the doors open to your rooms, you will find it to be a much easier lifestyle to maintain. You stop having to worry if you remembered to close the door behind you every time you exit a room. That is what radical honesty is all about.

Marriage Builders suggests three policies which are your tools for this.

First off, the Policy of Radical Honesty - reveal to your spouse everything you know about yourself. For some of us this is going to be a little bit like ripping off a bandaid. It might hurt at first. Your wife might even enter the state of conflict and come out swinging. But like ripping off that bandaid, it has to be done or the wound will never get better. Read the entire Policy of Radical Honesty to see four areas where Dr. Harley suggests you need to be radically honest.

Do you have the book Love Busters? Read the dishonesty chapter in there. Dr. Harley identifies four types of liars, or put another way, four reasons why we sometimes lie or conceal the truth from our spouse. Be familiar with each of these so you can watch for them in yourself.

Becoming radically honest will start to alter your future decisions - when you know that whatever you do you will have to tell your wife, you will start to avoid doing certain things. It turns out it's better not to do those things your wife isn't enthusiastic about than to do them and to try to hide them from her. So simply becoming honest is not all you need to do - you also need to follow the Policy of Joint Agreement.

Simply put, the POJA means that whenever you want to do something, you ask your wife "How would you feel if I ... ?" and if she is not enthusiastic, you hold off and look for something else to do instead. The POJA is really the ultimate tool for bringing your wife into every room of your life. And it really does bring her in - even questions about what you do when you are on "your own time" are subject to the POJA. For example, what you have for lunch while you are at work.

Over time you will build up an understanding of what your wife is and is not enthusiastic about. So if you learn that it's fine with your wife for you to have a sandwich for lunch and take a shower in the evening when you get home from work, you won't be asking every time. But for now, start asking. It will feel awkward at first, but once you build the habit it will seem very natural. And your wife will notice the difference immediately. She will become your partner. And you will find that you are making better decisions, because now all of your decisions will be benefiting from the addition of her perspective. Men really have a lot to gain from bringing their wives into their decision making process.

Finally, the third policy of Marriage Builders, the Policy of Undivided Attention, plays a role here. In the POUA, you bring your wife in on one of the most important parts of your life: your daily escape. Dr. Harley's position is that everybody needs to escape from the stresses of life, and that married couples should escape together. With radical honesty revealing every part of your life to your wife, and the POJA constraining the lifestyle you lead to options that are enthusiastic to your spouse, you may find that you need to replace a lot of your lifestyle activities. The things that were previously making you happy alone will need to be replaced with things that make the two of you happy, together. So, for example, if you used to go out to golf all day every Saturday, you may find that now you and your wife need to go to some other recreational event every Saturday that you both enjoy and can be together in.

For anything that you have to eliminate due to the POJA, it's important to negotiate an alternative, finding one that you are both enthusiastic about. Dr. Harley's guidelines for doing that are the Four Guidelines For Successful Negotiation. Negotiation will probably take a long time at first and be awkward, and you will probably have a lot of issues that need to be negotiated and are left pending for quite some time. But eventually as the list is worked through you will find that the two of you have built a perfectly compatible lifestyle. And you will find that she is in every room of your life and that, even though this makes your life more complicated, it is ultimately well worth it.

indiegirl, I've lived a second secret life for years. There are things that I like to do that my wife dislikes and rather than using the POJA to figure this out, I've just gone and done things on my own and hidden them from her. My problem, as I've learned through understanding the things taught by Dr. Harley is that I've lived independently and really neglected my wife since we were first married. I've never really incorporated her into my life in any way that I could say is intimate. She's just at the end of her rope and I'm in a daze because I've realized what i've done to her over the years with my neglect has caused this. She really has tried to live the principles that Dr. Harley teaches without ever being introduced to the marriage builders principles. She just knows these things are good and has tried to incorporate them into our marriage. I've pretty much dismissed these things all of these years because I didn't really want to deal with all of the difficulty and discomfort of trying to create an intimate marriage. Now I see where I've been wrong and I have a lot of changing that I need to do personally in order to save our marriage. My wife's anger makes it that much harder. I can't blame her for being angry because she should be considering how I've left her out of my life for so long. So now I'm trying to understand really where to begin and how to improve personally so that I can hopefully save our marriage. It scares me to death but I realize that it must be done or we'll end up divorced.

BrainHurts, I'm not sure that I have the date of when I was on the show. I did record it so that I could listen to it again and maybe the date is mentioned in that recording. I will let you know when I find it...

mrEureka, I think that you are right. I've never been 100% honest my whole life. My wife is radically honest and it has been a real adjustment for me to have someone be totally honest with me. I think that I was raised by parents who never really taught me how to accept honesty and realize that I would make mistakes and that I wasn't really the "king" but had real flaws. I'm 54 yrs old now and know that I'm totally in control of how I act and who I am but I find it extremely difficult to be totally honest in all situations. My wife and I had a great discussion just a few minutes ago about honesty and what I need to change.

markos, your "ripping off the bandaid" analogy is exactly what it feels like for me. Having lived so long not being totally honest feels like a huge barrier to get through to me personally. I fear for what my wife will think of me when I am totally honest but I also know that its necessary. I think that I fear that if she sees me for who I really am that she will turn her back on me and walk away. I think that I've always feared this since we were first married. I've been pretty much a fake my whole life and lived a life with platitudes and fakeness. I do think that being totally honest will be very freeing. I also am very much a controller. I control everything and my wife gets extremely agitated when she's being controlled. I've learned a lot of the past 3 years but now I need to do some changing and take some action or all of that learning will not help our marriage.

BrainHurts, I just found the date that I was on the radio show. It was aired on 26 Mar 2014.

Dr Harley used those words to my H when we began the online programme, and the very simple thing he had my H do was to check in with me all day. He was encouraged to tell me when he got to work, when he went to lunch, when he left for home, and to send me chatty emails in between those check-ins. Can you begin doing this today?

Another thing you can do is invite your wife to your workplace. Let her see where you sit and where you eat, and introduce her to any colleagues that you bump into. Let her meet you from work a few times a week and go on a date, and meet at work for lunch sometimes (you don't have to eat in the building if its anything like mine).

Finally, if you have any separate activities, abandon them right now. Don't go to the gym or for a run without her; either she joins you or you stop doing those things, and you only do recreational things together from now on. It should go without saying that you must not meet your guy friends for drinks at a bar, or go fishing or hunting or do ANY "guy" things that she is not invited to. In fact, the ideal is not to invite her to drink or fish with your men friends but to spend all your recreational time alone with her.

The "rooms in the house" thing is not only about surveillance and being scrutinised; it is about making your wife your constant companion and the person you'd rather spend time with than anybody else. It is amazing how, once you reach the stage of really enjoying being with each other, you'll find being with friends a bit of an intrusion.

Well, what she thinks of you will probably not be good. That's because you've been hiding things that you know she won't like. She will be upset to find out such things about you. In fact she may be so upset that at first she may threaten to leave you.

And that's her choice. In a sense, every married person lives at risk that their spouse might choose to leave them. But usually that is not in anyone's own best interest. If you consistently demonstrate honesty over time, and consistently demonstrate thoughtfulness over time (by thoughtfulness I mean never doing anything without an enthusiastic agreement from your wife), it is likely that your wife will feel that it is safe to be married to you and, since it is in her best interest to stay married to you, she probably will. You can make staying married a delight for her.


You and me both, Jim. Since I noticed from your signature that you attend church, let me offer you some religious comments: there is a God - and I'm not Him, and neither are you. By that, I mean that God is in control, and we are not. Look how God has made everybody and set them at liberty: He put Adam and Eve in the garden and gave them the choice to do right or wrong. He left them the freedom to make mistakes. And He does that for every human being in the world. Surely neither one of us deserves to stand up and "correct" that "mistake" on God's part, to try to control other people and protect them from themselves. If God Himself will not step in and control people in that way, how much more should YOU AND I humble ourselves and accept our place in life, in control of ourselves but not others?

From a totally different direction, you might benefit from reading Dr. Harley's article "How to Negotiate When One of You is an Emotional Person" on this site and following the recommendations in it. Dr. Harley explains how to follow a therapeutic approach to managing the anxiety that rises for you over emotional issues - the anxiety you feel when you are worried that someone might not do what you want them to do or feel they should do. Learning to keep that anxiety in check will help you to be much more rational in your behavior.

So Sugarcane, having your husband call you during the day and send emails and show you his workplace helped you. What did it do for you?

Markos, it sounds like you found the courage to own up to who you are and reveal who you are to your wife and allow her into your "rooms". Did you do this all at once or over some time? I feel the urgency to change immediately but I lack the confidence in myself that I will stick to it and not turn and run when things get difficult. All I know is that I'm miserable right now and have been for many years. If I don't change, the misery will continue until my wife decides to leave or forces me out.

If you aim for doing it gradually, you will never do it at all. In the words of William Lloyd Garrison, an abolitionist of the 1800s, "Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice. ... Urge immediate abolition as earnestly as we may, it will, alas! be gradual abolition in the end. We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow; that it ought to be, we shall always contend."

You should aim for doing it all at once. You won't hit that mark, but if you don't aim for it, you will always be holding something back. Ideally, you should put every principle here into practice, immediately, perfectly. Of course we know that that cannot be done, but start shooting for perfection, because if you only shoot for "good enough," it won't be good enough.


So - why should you let that stop you from doing the right thing now, to start?

Giving yourself a license to be dishonest is a bit like giving yourself free reign with a credit card.

From what I can make out, your attitude seems to be you're happy to start spending wisely from now on - but you're terrified about revealing the back debt to your wife. Perhaps the amount is too high a price for her to pay.

I'd say that's up to her. If she has no trust in you that's just your consequence to accept. However as a woman whose top need is openness and honesty, and who lived in a deceitful marriage, I hope my viewpoint will be of help.

My XH had no regard for openness and kept his financial accounts private as well as social and email accounts private so he could spend as he pleased and do as he pleased. The result was he got us horribly in debt and into an affair. He too, thought his viewpoint and intellect - even his money sense - was superior to mine. In some ways it was, but anyone who chooses to act alone is immediately more subject to foolishness, temptation and mistakes. Two heads really are better than one.

So there we were, financially ruined and I was betrayed by an affair yet I still would have forgiven, if he had been willing to pay off his debt to me. For every lie told, I wanted the truth. Nothing less will pay it off - and it would have felt good.

With o&h as a top need, I actually prefer people to tell me the worst. When people show me their dark underbelly, I trust them. It's the people who pretend to have no flaws that I distrust.

The bigger and braver the revelation, the more of a love bank deposit the o&h need receives. That's how it works for me anyway. I think: "Well if he can tell me that, then he can and will tell me everything".

So pay your honesty debts, starting with the biggest one and don't stop. Don't trickle truth her with scraps of truth - that's just another attempt to control, manipulate and patronise. She's a big girl and this is annoying her.

When you say these lies have made you miserable, I believe you - and I don't make a habit of believing people on these forums. It just has that unmistakable ring of truth and sincerity to it.

I think your wife will believe you too and you should pay her the respect of trusting her with the truth the full truth, holding nothing back.

Particularly that thing you are most scared of her knowing. Especially that.