Love Busters: Overcoming Habits That Destroy Romantic Love

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The fourth Love Buster, Dishonesty, causes massive Love Bank withdrawals whenever it's discovered. And spouses usually discover each other's dishonesty because of their emotional closeness to each other. If you or your spouse have a tendency to lie or distort the truth, chase that bad habit out of your marriage before it ruins everything.

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. Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit. Elbert Hubbard When was the last time your spouse did something that annoyed you? Annoying habits don’t seem all that important — but they still drive us crazy! But when our behaviour annoys others, we tend to downplay the whole problem. Dr. Harley earned a Ph.D. degree in psychology from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1967 and has been a Licensed Psychologist in Minnesota since 1975. For the first ten years after earning his degree, he taught psychology at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. During those years, he was also a frustrated part-time marriage counselor with little success in helping couples. You'd think that doing something that causes unhappiness would be the last thing a married couple would ever want to do to each other. And yet, yet it's done instinctively and habitually in every marriage.The fifth Love Buster is Independent Behavior, the conduct of one spouse that ignores the feelings and interests of the other spouse. If your decisions are made as if your spouse doesn't even exist, you will find yourself running roughshod over your spouse's feelings and your Love Bank account. Since it's usually scheduled and requires some thought to execute, the simplest way to overcome it is to take it off your schedule. And if you follow the Policy of Joint Agreement, Independent Behavior will never find itself on your schedule in the first place.

The following week, choose a Love Need to focus on. Again, plan the specific way you will implement that Love Need each day during the week. For example, if your spouse’s Love Need is admiration, you might plan to praise him/her each evening over dinner.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. Once we know our spouse’s Love Needs and Love Busters it’s pretty simple really – meet the needs and avoid the busters. But it only works if you make a plan and commit to implementing it. Good plans meet three criteria – Achievable (simple to do and reasonably likely to succeed), Specific (not open ended but detailed enough to know when you do or don’t do it) and Positive (that is, the task focusses on what you will do rather than what you will avoid). The best way to overcome independent behaviours is to take them off your schedule. It would help if you switched such habits with something you can do with your spouse. Whatever you decide to do, be sure you and your spouse agree. As a result, both of you are happy, making decisions with each other’s interests and feelings in mind. 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.