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Introduction

What makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane and often boring non-profit business. And I mean this in a good way.

— LORI GOTTLIEB, Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough

I made an important discovery thirty-eight years ago while working at a local agency as part of a counseling internship. I was sitting with a married couple whose love and commitment were strong, yet they couldn’t stop arguing about how to manage their money. Paul saw money as a ticket to freedom and pleasure — a chance to buy the sports car he wanted, enjoy the best restaurants, and purchase the latest climbing gear. Amy, whose priority was financial security, wanted to live frugally and put away as much money as possible. Each partner was scared of the other’s style. Amy was frightened of what she viewed as her husband’s recklessness with the checkbook, and she worried they wouldn’t have enough money socked away for the future. Paul, for his part, believed his wife was trying to leach all the fun and adventure from his life.

Their arguments were fierce and unrelenting. By this point, the blame and anger they were hurling at one another had become a bigger problem than their differences in spending styles. Even as a relatively new therapist, I could see these two weren’t going to resolve their conflict by just talking it over.

Meanwhile, I was teaching a class on interpersonal communication at Oregon State University and had recently introduced my students to “pillow talk,” a process in which two people discuss an issue they differ on. They begin by sitting on a pillow and stating their position. Then they move to the other person’s pillow, talking about the same topic from the other’s point of view. This gave me an idea. What if Paul and Amy didn’t need traditional couples therapy? What if they would benefit more from the simple practices I taught in my introductory communications class?

In our next session, I suggested that Amy and Paul try the pillow-talk exercise. I asked them to describe their feelings, beliefs, and concerns about their money issue, then shift sides and describe their partner’s perspective with as much conviction as they could, as though it were their own. Next, I suggested they think about how each side was right and how each side was wrong. In the last part of the exercise, I asked both partners to verbally acknowledge the truth in both positions.

Amy and Paul dove in willingly. Within a short time, I saw them make extraordinary progress. For the first time in their twelve-year marriage, they’d gained a genuine understanding of what it was like to be the other person. Although they still didn’t agree about money, something between them had softened; they were gentler with one another and had fewer arguments. Over time and with practice, the couple learned how to allocate money in a way that at least partially accommodated both of their needs and how to be a little more tolerant of their partner’s different way of doing it. Despite their ongoing disagreement, they managed to stay connected. In short, they were developing and honing their love skills.

The truth is, most couples don’t lack love; instead, they lack the skills to communicate compassionately while hurt, upset, or holding a different perspective. It’s usually the way we manage our differences — not the differences themselves — that causes pain.

Improving your communication skills is a familiar concept in the work world, but we tend to practice it less often in our love lives. After all, most of us “fall in love.” “Falling” doesn’t require competence, intention, or practice. It just happens. The necessary elements of a healthy relationship — making time to be together, pleasure in pleasing and listening to one another, acceptance of differences — come naturally at the beginning of a relationship. But over time, as the dopamine high of infatuation fades, we begin to experience our differences in a new way. Increasingly, they feel painful, more glaring, and sometimes impossible to navigate. We start to think something is terribly wrong. We may believe we’ve “fallen” out of love and conclude that we’ve chosen the wrong person.

The heart of my teaching — and the heart of Love Skills — comes from the Love Cycles model, which explains that relationships develop in predictable stages, each of which presents its own challenges. With knowledge, commitment, and practice, we can usually work through these challenges, even when they initially feel insurmountable. Contrary to conventional wisdom, people don’t meet, fall in love, overcome a few trials, and then live happily ever after — nor do conflict and dissatisfaction between partners necessarily mean a couple is headed for Splitsville. According to the Love Cycles model, lasting love develops in five stages: The Merge, Doubt and Denial, Disillusionment, The Decision, and Wholehearted Love.

Amy and Paul were stuck for a long time in the Disillusionment stage and were almost ready to give up on their marriage. With just a few skills, they were able to find their love for one another again and move on to a new and happier stage of their relationship.

The Merge

Doubt and Denial

Disillusionment

The Decision

Wholehearted Loving

Love Skills will teach you how to stay connected even when you’re feeling hurt, angry, or distant. You will acquire a tool kit to navigate the thorniest issues and learn how two imperfect people can love one another as perfectly as possible.

The Case of the Dirty Dishes

Over the three decades that I’ve worked as a therapist and couples coach, I’ve participated in countless training programs and acquired numerous certificates and degrees, but my primary source of knowledge — especially when it comes to the cycles of love — is my own thirty-five-year marriage.

When Tim and I began our relationship, we never expected that the qualities we most loved about each other would become the ones we were most determined to change. I was infatuated with Tim’s strong moral compass, his idealistic commitment to living a meaningful life, and his reliability. He, in turn, was charmed by my spontaneity, my bubbling enthusiasm for life, and my relaxed attitude toward time and money (my motto: “Don’t sweat either; there will always be more”). We had no idea this initial magic was a euphoric but temporary state caused by a biochemical cocktail. We had no clue we were in Stage One of the Love Cycles model: The Merge.

Five years after we rekindled our relationship, he had sold his veterinary practice and his boat and arrived at my house with a well-packed trunk filled with clothes, books, and two silver candlesticks from his grandmother. We got married and adopted our dream child: an Alaskan malamute we named Sylva. We had pulled it off: we were together forever now. We believed we were off to Soulmatesville and a lifetime of magic and wonder.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, within a short time, I began to see his reliability as rigidity, his moral compass as self-righteousness, and his idealism as ridiculously naive. He began to accuse me of being impulsive and financially irresponsible; on dark days he reclassified my enthusiasm as infantile, pie-in-the-sky optimism. We argued over everything: how to celebrate Christmas, how to spend money, and — the original power struggle — how to do the dishes. I didn’t know it at the time, but we were entering Stage Two of the Love Cycles model: the Power Struggle, also known as Doubt and Denial.

When Tim and I first met, I was living in an old New Zealand farmhouse. We met in a sheep paddock and immediately began to talk easily and with a sense of familiarity, as though we’d known one another forever. He’d followed me inside to the kitchen, still talking, where I began to wash dishes. After watching me for a moment, he asked why I was washing them “excessively” under hot water before putting them in the dishwasher. Lightly, I countered that even the best dishwasher wouldn’t remove all the food. He grinned while informing me that I was “wasting hot water.”

At the start of our relationship, we thought the other’s dishwashing practices were charming, however misguided. We teased each other about our differences and laughed about them good-naturedly. But once we started living together and washing the dishes daily, side by side, we quickly moved from annoyed to exasperated to righteously indignant. It may sound like a small and even silly problem, but it quickly escalated into a major one. At first, we tried to win over the other with somewhat calm logic, but before long we were hurling insults at one another. The dishwashing problem encapsulated a situation in which the qualities we loved about one another had become the very traits that drove us crazy.

The conflict came to a head one night when we had dinner guests we barely knew. After Tim and I cleared the table, we started to load the dishwasher and quickly spiraled into a spiteful argument in front of them. We went so far as to individually present our own dishwashing points of view to our guests and demand they be the judges. Our voices were hard, unyielding, and self-righteous. Our guests looked stricken. At that point, our problem had nothing to do with the dishes and everything to do with our intensely negative reactions to each other’s differences. Blame and anger had become our default strategies in the face of conflict, and now we were performing them in front of other people.

We walked away from the dispute feeling hurt and angry. Both of us began to wonder whether our relationship was the biggest mistake of our lives. This is a classic symptom of Stage Three of the Love Cycle, when disillusionment sets in and connection is replaced by ongoing disenchantment.

Here’s the good news. Today, Tim and I generally stay out of each other’s way when one of us does the dishes, and we (usually) end up laughing when we bump heads over this. Tim still does them wrong in my opinion, and he feels the same about my style. However, I no longer show him dried dishes that have some nasty pieces of food stuck on them to prove my point, and he has ceased leaving statistics about wasting hot water on my dresser.

How did we get there? After an unusually vicious argument with Tim, I reflected on the craziness of it all. I remembered Amy and Paul from my counseling internship and how something as simple as the pillow-talk exercise had helped them. Like Amy and Paul, my husband and I needed love skills.

When I told Tim the story of Amy and Paul, he got it — to my great relief. We didn’t want to lose each other. Yet neither of us had the slightest idea how to escape our agonizing arguments. So we set out to learn. That’s when we entered Stage Four — making a decision to stop the pain. We began to seek a new relationship road map while letting go of the old one, which had insisted that in the face of differences someone had to win — and therefore someone had to lose.

Tim and I attended relationship workshops all over the country. We participated in Dr. Lori Gordon’s renowned PAIRS psychoeducation program in Washington, DC, which teaches that all couples have unresolved issues — about ten on average! — that are resistant to change. The key to relationship happiness is learning conflict-management skills that preserve love and respect. We also trained in Imago relationship therapy with Dr. Harville Hendrix and Dr. Helen LaKelly Hunt, who teach couples how to use arguments and differences as opportunities for healing and growth. We soaked up all we could from educators, psychologists, and interdisciplinary teachers about how to make a relationship thrive, how to manage differences productively, and how to discover empathy when it seems impossible.

Wanting to share all we learned with others, I created a curriculum that included the best information, skills, and practices from our finest teachers. Once Tim and I learned how to manage our own conflicts and move toward mutual compassion and, eventually, delight (at least most of the time), he and I began to teach a Love Skills class to other couples. The program, which we’ve taught for the past twenty-five years, draws from many sources: my longtime counseling work with couples and individuals; our training with the pioneers of interpersonal therapy; wisdom found in ancient mythology, poetry, music, and spiritual traditions; and, of course, our own marriage.

When we started the Love Skills class, I began by teaching long workshops and added weekend seminars for individual couples later. Currently, I travel around the country offering two-day intensives that combine love coaching and psychoeducation for individual couples and families, and I also work online with people around the world. Passing my knowledge on to others has brought me great joy. I have been amazed and heartened at how education and coaching can free people from destructive patterns and help them rediscover a relationship filled with mutual love, understanding, compassion, and just plain fun.

For Tim and me, learning love skills was an enormous undertaking. We practiced, failed, and tried again. Each of us worked hard on taking responsibility for our own parts in the conflict — the stubborn need to be right, the underlying triggers stemming from events in our past, and our individual personality traits that tended to escalate our disagreements. Practicing acceptance, learning to be kind to one another even when we were upset, and letting go of self-righteousness made a huge difference in the texture of our relationship. Eventually I could feel us softening, just as I’d witnessed with Amy and Paul. We still disagreed, but most of the time we remained openhearted in the face of conflict.

We also experienced a second, surprising benefit: in the process of healing and enhancing our relationship, we were becoming healthier, more wholehearted human beings. Each of us developed more self-respect, needed less validation from one another, and could manage our differences without feeling threatened or seeking to make the other wrong.

Gradually, our relationship became easier and warmer. To our astonishment, we were even able to recapture some of the earlier magical chemistry of Stage One. Meanwhile, our friendship also deepened. As we continued to replace our endless arguments with more acceptance, humor, and generosity, we moved into Stage Five, Wholehearted Love. Although we are not able to stay there all of the time, it is the “home base” we go back to again and again.

Love Skills will teach you the very best of the skills we learned that got us through the earlier stages of love. With the right tools, practice, and patience, you can get there too, time and time again.

A Crash Course on Love

Here’s the truth about intimate relationships: the conflicts you face right now may never disappear. You and your partner may always hold different perspectives about child-rearing, money, the best vacation spots, and how to properly clean the bathroom. But the good news is, the ways you manage these differences can change profoundly. As you develop the emotional and interpersonal skills described in these pages, your conflicts with your partner will become less painful and destructive — and your relationship can begin to thrive again.

This workbook is a companion to my first book, Love Cycles: The Five Essential Stages of Lasting Love. This first book describes the five stages of intimate relationships in detail, illuminating the behaviors associated with each stage and strategies for successfully navigating them. This companion manual, Love Skills, is a practical guide to help you design your own tool kit for creating and maintaining a loving relationship. It’s a do-it-yourself version of the Love Skills program that you can use at your leisure. Consider it a self-exploration guide, one you can work with either alone or with your partner. These pages are filled with information, exercises, activities, self-assessments, and other tangible tools to help you understand where you are in your relationship cycle now and how to foster the self-awareness, communication, conflict management, and empathy you need to weather all of love’s seasons.

Awareness comes first. This workbook begins by helping you to answer critical questions about your relationship and yourself. For example: Why do I try to change the very qualities in my partner that most charmed me at the outset? Where did easy loving and juicy sex go? Does it make sense to start all over with someone else? How do my personality type and family history affect my view of myself and others?

This book then offers specific, effective solutions to the most common struggles that couples face — both the small troubles and the more serious dilemmas of communication gridlock, betrayal, and seemingly intractable differences. I will provide a clear map for moving forward with these issues and address how to most productively approach arguments, including the importance of establishing connection before dealing with conflict. I will also offer several types of quick, well-researched practices to help keep love alive and thriving during all five stages.

A key message of many of these lessons is “The wave is not the ocean” — that is, the times that feel intolerable between you and your partner do not mean the conflict is an all-encompassing, permanent state. There will always be another wave, another opportunity. When you know how to navigate the storms, conflict can lead to understanding and even closeness that makes your relationship even better than it was before. In most cases, the Love Skills process will help you to rediscover the original promise of your relationship and offer you a road map for traveling this rewarding and challenging path.

Before you get started, keep one rule in mind: don’t make this book another war in your relationship. Anything can be used as fodder for a fight, even resources meant to assist and enrich. If you invite your partner to accompany you on this journey, make sure both of you are involved only as much as you want to be. A partner’s half-hearted or begrudging attempt to mend a relationship may only end up opening more wounds.

If you have a reluctant partner, then do the work for yourself. I believe one person’s growth can often initiate change in both people; if not, it will lead you into your own wholehearted best self. As I said, awareness comes first. With any relationship work, the vital first step is to become more aware of our own not-so-healthy behaviors — perhaps our hair-trigger reactivity, a reluctance to forgive, or a tenacious need to be right. Once we understand and acknowledge our own role in our relationship challenges, we can use this awareness to begin to practice more thoughtful and loving behaviors.

This process is neither quick nor easy. Love is a feeling, intense and joyful. But the practice of loving another person is hard work — the work of a lifetime. And of course, some relationships present more challenges than others. As we begin to learn about our own needs, some of us may find that changes in ourselves resulting from this process actually create more distance in our relationship. If this happens, this book will help you take the healthy next steps forward.

How to Use This Book

Love Skills can be completed individually, by a couple, or a mixture of both. Although this is a book about relationships, a significant portion of the work must be done by each person alone first — after all, all couples are comprised of two separate people, who each come with their own unique set of past experiences, ways of thinking, and areas for growth. (Differentiation, the fact that we are two individuals who are both separate and connected and not half of a whole, is a key tenet of wholehearted love, which you’ll soon learn.) If you choose to work on this book together with a partner, you can complete the individual exercises alone and then share your findings with each other; many activities include specific instructions for ways to share. You may each want your own copy of Love Skills, so that you can do the readings separately and have your own space to complete written exercises. Or you may choose to share one copy of the workbook and write responses in separate notebooks.

Of course, there are many couples-specific exercises throughout this book as well. If you’re working on the program alone, you can invite your partner to join you for specific joint exercises you want to try, or you can simply read through them on your own to glean the knowledge and then move on.

Love Skills is crafted to be accessible, relatable, and easy to understand no matter where you are in your self-development and relationship journey. That said, it’s no walk in the park. Completing these exercises, particularly with a partner, will push you to confront raw emotions and difficult experiences from your past, and it will require you to treat yourself with honesty, patience, and compassion. That vulnerability may come easily for some and feel challenging, upsetting, or even threatening for others. Move slowly. Be mindful of your partner’s limitations and your own.

Importantly, this book is not intended as a replacement for therapy. It will not heal domestic violence, serious breaches of trust, or severe psychological wounds. In cases of depression, addiction, affairs, trauma, and/or abuse, always seek the help of a professional.

An ideal time to use this workbook is during moments of inner quiet, when your mind is open to growing and learning. But it can also be helpful in times of relationship trouble or when you want to address bumps and snags in a largely satisfying connection. Some may gravitate toward the book out of natural curiosity and a desire to demystify the concept of wholehearted love, while others might dive into the Love Cycles approach as part of a larger ongoing effort to more consciously sustain an important relationship.

There’s no “right way” to use this manual. You might set aside a single evening for you and your partner to dig into a handful of exercises relevant to your particular relationship, or the two of you may decide to return to the material once a week to delve into the program gradually. Alternately, you might prefer to explore every section and activity on your own and complete small portions on a daily basis. Feel free to delve deeply into the sections that particularly intrigue you, jump from chapter to chapter, or regularly return to the same instruction page because it’s the one that really works for you. If you get stuck on something or if it’s simply not clicking with you, move on to another section.

Finally, remember that the guidelines contained in these pages are just suggestions. They’re based on decades of experience and training, but they are not a science. Love never is. Although all relationships may journey through the same cycles, every union is unique, and the people within them are constantly changing. The particular skills that work for some will not work for all, and the skills that work sometimes won’t work all the time. Choose the exercises that create positive movement between your souls. Save the rest for when the seasons change.

The Quest for Wholeness

In addition to reestablishing intimacy with our partner, we will explore the barriers and the bridges to becoming wholehearted as individuals — a necessary personal journey we’ll each need to take alone in order to eventually access a place of wholehearted love together.

As you move through this book, never forget that we are in this world to become more whole ourselves. Although our intimate relationships can be a powerful catalyst for the development of that wholeness, it is our connection with ourselves that matters most, no matter how much we might love another. This isn’t about indulgence or self-preoccupation; it’s about being determined to become the best human we can. Renowned vulnerability researcher Dr. Brené Brown describes wholeness (or wholeheartedness) as having the courage to be imperfect, embracing our story as the right journey for us no matter how difficult it may be, practicing empathy for ourselves and others, and authentically connecting with those around us. All of this book’s teachings on love are grounded in developing and deepening these qualities.

The truth is, the quest to create a thriving relationship is inextricably intertwined with the individual’s quest for wholeness. In her book Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow, Omega Institute founder Elizabeth Lesser tells us, “When there is nothing left to lose, we find the true self — the self that is whole, the self that is enough, the self that no longer looks to others for definition, or completion, or anything but companionship on the journey.”

A New Way to Love

A few decades ago, when people began to talk about “soulmates,” unconditional love was considered a permanent state of being rather than an ever-evolving one. Many of my clients wonder if their relationship problems stem from not feeling “in love with” their partner all of the time; instead, they sometimes feel bored, annoyed, or outright fed up. Based on inaccurate beliefs about the normal progression of relationships, many people feel that if they have conflicts, power struggles, and times of unhappiness in their relationships, they have failed.

The Love Cycles model encourages us to see those troubles as normal seasons in a long-term relationship. I am optimistic that some of us are beginning to move toward this more generous, compassionate, and realistic view of what healthy relationships look like — one that is less linear and more cyclical. Falling in love is never a straight line to “happily ever after.” Like all parts of nature, we go through seasons of change, renewal, darkness, and light. Always remember that temporarily losing our way or failing to respond with our best selves to a challenging interaction is simply a reminder that we’re all human. We have the opportunity to heal ourselves of old wounds that began long before we met our partner and to grow into our best selves emotionally and spiritually.

By following the guidelines in this book, we can learn how to keep our inevitable relationship troubles from overwhelming us (because they really don’t have to) and make the times between the trouble as rich, delightful, and loving as possible.