Make your time to be alone with each other your highest priority — that way it will never be replaced by activities of lesser value. Your career, your time with your children, maintenance of your home, and a host of other demands will all compete for your time together. But if you follow the Policy of Undivided Attention, you will not let anything steal from those precious and crucial hours together. As a love buster, disrespectful judgements breed unhappiness, disagreement and conflicts.Therefore, you could sabotage your marriage if you regularly disrespect your spouse. Solution You need a rule to help you override your shortsighted instincts. So I've created a rule to guarantee that no one gets hurt, and that's the ultimate goal in fair negotiation. I call this rule the Policy of Joint Agreement: Never do anything without an enthusiastic All of us want to make a difference in the lives of other. We want others to be happy, and we want to contribute to their happiness. When we feel that way, our Giver is influencing us. The Giver's rule is do whatever you can to make others happy and avoid anything that makes others unhappy, even if it makes you unhappy. It encourages us to use that rule in our relationships with other people.

Acts of anger include ridicule, sarcasm, punishment, threatening or physical violence. There is nothing to gain from rage. Solution

Love Needs…

When you fall out of love, everything that had helped your marriage seems unnatural. Your instincts turn against marital recovery, and toward divorce. What had once seemed effortless, now seems awkward. How can you restore the love you once had for each other when you no longer feel like doing what it took to create that love? The first three of these Love Busters are instinctive, yet thoughtless, ways to try to get what you want from each other. When a request doesn't work, a spouse will often revert to a demand ("I don't care how you feel — do it or else!"). If that doesn't get the job done, a spouse will try disrespectful judgments ("If you had any sense, and were not so lazy and selfish, you would do it"). And then, when all of that fails, an angry outburst often represents the last ditch effort ("I'll see to it that you regret not having done it"). When you are in love, your emotions help you meet each other's emotional needs. They provide instincts that you may not have even known you have — instincts to be affectionate, sexual, conversational, recreational, honest and admiring. These all seem to come naturally when you are in love. If you and your spouse are in the habit of being demanding, disrespectful, angry, dishonest independent and/or annoying, your marriage is being ruined by Love Busters. I call them Love Busters because they destroy the feeling of love that spouses have for each other. By 1988 he found himself spending almost all of his time administering his clinics, and very little time doing what he enjoyed most -- improving his marital therapy program. So he began turning his clinics over to the counselors who worked with him, and the ownership of his last clinic was transferred in 1993. Since then, he has written 16 more books and hundreds of articles.

Instincts are behavioral patterns that we are born with, and habits are patterns that we learn. Both of them tend to be repeated again and again almost effortlessly. They are important in our discussion of what it takes to be in love because it's our behavior that makes deposits and withdrawals from Love Banks, and our instincts and habits make up most of our behavior. But when you indulge in these three Love Busters, you do more than fail to get what you need — you also destroy the love your spouse has for you. All of these instincts, and the habits they help create, cause your spouse to be unhappy, and that causes Love Bank withdrawals.There is a description of a rather horrifying marital rape scene in one of the firsts chapters which, while deemed abusive, should've been handled much much better.

When fighting doesn't work, and we are still unhappy, the Taker encourages us to take a new course of action that triggers the State of Withdrawal. Instead of trying to force our spouse to make us happy, our Taker wants us to give up on our spouse entirely. We don't want our spouse to do anything for us, and we certainly don't want to do anything for our spouse. In this state of mind we are emotionally divorced. But there's another reason that honesty is crucial in creating love: Honesty is the only way that you and your spouse will ever come to understand each other. Without honesty, the adjustments that are crucial to making each other happy and avoiding unhappiness cannot be made. I've found that the most common Love Busters in marriage fall into six categories: Selfish Demands, Disrespectful Judgments, Angry Outbursts, Dishonesty, Independent Behavior and Annoying Habits.

Disrespectful judgment is a way of presenting our problems as if they are our spouse’s faults. So we try to “straighten out” our partner to get our way. We attempt to convince ourselves that our opinion is superior to our spouse’s. And that's what I always seem to be battling when I try to encourage one spouse to avoid doing anything that would hurt the other spouse. I cannot seem to trigger empathy. Each spouse complains about how thoughtless the other spouse is, without much awareness of his or her own thoughtlessness. You should do whatever it takes to protect each other from these cruel, yet common, habits that cause untold unhappiness in marriage. By eliminating Love Busters, you will not only be protecting your spouse, but you will also be preserving your spouse's love for you. Basic Concept #4: The Most Important Emotional Needs To create and sustain compatibility, you must practise radical honesty. It would be best if you came clean about your personal history, daily activities and plans for the future. Communicating your thoughts, feelings, habits, likes, and dislikes is advisable.

Starting with the Love Busters, choose one to eliminate this week. Think about when you are most likely to do a Love Buster and plan how you will replace it with a more positive action. For example, say your spouse’s top Love Buster is breaking promises. Maybe you are most likely to do this because you get caught up at work and then are late home. Maybe you can change that and maybe you can’t. What you can change is the promise. Resolve to only make promises you are absolutely confident you can keep. Plan what you will say when your spouse or child asks, before you leave home, so that you don’t get tempted into making a promise you can’t keep.

At the end of the questionnaire, you are asked to rate the Love Busters according to the unhappiness they create. While all Love Busters should be eliminated, it makes sense to work on the most painful Love Busters first. But we also want the best for ourselves. We want to be happy, too. When we feel that way, our Taker is influencing us. The Taker's rule is do whatever you can to make yourself happy, and avoid anything that makes yourself unhappy, even if it makes others unhappy. If that rule ever makes sense to you, it's because your Taker is in control.