This site is so full of good information. If my husband and I could just try to follow these ideas about building a love bank and stopping the love busters, we'd get back to being in love again. <P>I am ready to try to build up our love banks again, but I keep reading these things and thinking "if only I could get him to read this and see what his disrespect and angry outbursts are doing to me, he would stop, because I know he loves me." I have tried to tell him how much his yelling at me hurts (even though I am the one who has done something stupid or insensitive to make him angry), but he just says I'm being too selfcentered. I think he is probably right.<P>I even printed off the needs inventory, but he's not very receptive to this idea. I told him I'd like to work on it together, but he thinks questionaires are silly, and that just makes me feel more like he doesn't care. How can I get this Taker attitude of mine under control? I am making our whole family miserable (2 middle school boys) because of the fights, and I don't want to do this anymore. Maybe someone else has been through this and can offer some ideas.

Dear BBB<BR>Just mention to him that you heard from a man who has been married for >25 years, and I found some light for my marriage in Harley's books. He is much fairer for men than the therapists that I have seen. As far as I can tell, the majority are EVIL! They play so much to the idea of "take care of yourself" and that is so exclusively self centered. Many of the others are concerned about "co-dependency" if you want to give to the marriage to save it. Men must be EXTREMELY wary when going to a counselor-especially couple counseling. For thousands of years, men have been bigger, stronger, noisier--all skills that are not needed or respected, since the sabre-toothed tigers are not now a daily threat.<BR>I come from a family of pretty noisy, borderline abusive guys, and I always dedicated myself to not going anywhere that line. But I was too close to it for her. And to add to the grief, she grew up in a women only household and had NO experience addressing conflict or disagreement. So some bad stuff festered for many years. And I was too dumb to figure it out. THE COUNSELING OF THE LAST YEAR DID NOT HELP. Only my exposure to Harley did. I really appreciate his honesty in saying that the field had a dreadful record of saving marriages and he sought to do better. <BR>So, turn on your giver. Mention that you are interested in "meeting his needs" to him--ask him to explain them. You trust that he loves you, but gets too angry and doesn't know how it hurts you. Use the power of that poorly expressed love. A derailed locomotive still has a lot of power. Good luck in getting things on track!<BR>

I am going to be short and I give this advice to you. When you fight just say to him "Look I will fight for the next 10 minutes and after that I want to get back to love how about you?" Nothing is gained in fighting except that more is learned in pain than in pleasure. Pain is pleasure resisted. So if you want pleasure in your life resist PAIN. Do you remember when you are hurting that you analyse every little thing to find out what went wrong, how it happened etc. You expel so much energy in working and dwelling on the hurt and pain you feel and forget about the good times. It only over time when the pain has gone and our partner has left that we only look at the good times. Why not do it NOW. Analyse the good days and find out what happened and dwell on that. Its worth it. This way you will fill each others love buckets till there over flowing. I will say a small prayer for you and your Husband. There is no question where love is not the answer.