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Five Secrets of Lasting Love
Here's the bottom-line truth we discovered from our decades of
work with couples in long-term relationships: People can endure
long-term relationships in many ways, but they will only thrive if
they do five things. In other words, you can grow older with your
partner in many ways, but you will only grow closer and more
creative through the steady practice of five actions.
We believe these five actions should be taught in every classroom
in every school, every day. They most definitely should not be
secrets we have to seek or stumble onto by trial and error. Yet
they are. Almost none of us begin our love relationships knowing
how to do these simple things, and our relationships are
disastrous as a consequence.
Let's permanently remove the veil that has covered these secrets
and begin a new era of intimacy in close relationships.
The First Secret
If you want a close, vibrant love relationship, you need to become
a master of commitment.
We teach couples how to make real commitments to each other. There
is an art to commitment, but almost nobody knows how to practice
it. The first step of this art is to spot and acknowledge the
unconscious commitments that cause us to sabotage the harmony of
our close relationships. For example, suppose a politician were to
be caught having an adulterous relationship. Imagine how it would
change that person's life, as well as the lives of the
constituents, if the politician identified and acknowledged his
unconscious commitments by saying, "From the evidence, I'm slowly
beginning to realize that I'm committed to philandering, sexual
betrayal, and lying. I also appear to be committed to getting
caught. I'm committed to finding out if people will still like me
after they find out I'm a bad boy." In practical reality, the act
of claiming ownership of an unconscious commitment changes a
troublesome dynamic in a relationship faster than anything else.
The second step of the art of commitment is to make commitments
you can stand by. Real commitments can be made only about things
you have control over. Real commitments are verifiable. If you
make a phony commitment -- such as, "I promise to love you
forever" -- you set up an impossible situation by promising an
illusion. Nobody can commit to loving someone forever because some
days you won't even wake up feeling loving toward yourself. Love
is a mystery -- part feeling, part spirit, part mind -- and
mysteries by their very nature are outside our control. A real
commitment would be to commit to telling your partner the truth
about when you're feeling loving and when you're not. This type of
commitment saves relationships while turning on the flow of
intimacy and creativity.
The Lasting Love program offers a specific set of commitments
we've thoroughly tested with many couples. When couples make these
commitments, their relationships thrive.
The Second Secret
If you want a long-term relationship that's both close and
creatively vital, you have to become emotionally transparent. To
go all the way to ultimate closeness and full creative expression,
you must eliminate all barriers to speaking and hearing the truth
about everything.
We teach couples how to listen to the truth about everything from
their partners, and we teach them how to speak the truth about
everything to their partners. Everything means everything:
feelings, deeds, hopes, dreams. We ask them to consider any
hesitation about telling or hearing the unvarnished truth to be a
symptom of resistance to greater love and creativity.
We know this move is radical because it produces huge bursts of
creative energy in everyone who tries it. As a practice, it has
awesome power. As a concept, it quickly polarizes people -- we've
seen talk show audiences erupt in cheers and boos when we've said
couples need to tell the truth to each other about everything.
After twenty-plus years, though, we've still found no exceptions
to the truth rule.
The Third Secret
If you want a long-term relationship that's both close and
creatively vital, you must break the cycle of blame and criticism
-- it's an addiction that saps creative energy as surely as drugs
or drink.
We invite couples to turn their relationships into blame-free
zones. We teach each partner to take full responsibility for
everything that occurs in the relationship, especially if it looks
like it's the other person's fault. Radical responsibility -- and
the powerful creative energy it unleashes -- comes from catching
yourself in the midst of saying, "Why did you do that to me
again?" and shifting to, "What am I doing that keeps inviting that
behavior?"
We ask couples to go on a strict no-blame diet and stick to it. As
a practice, this move liberates tremendous energy. In fact, we've
seen life-altering breakthroughs come about when couples simply
went one full day without criticizing or blaming each other. As a
concept, the idea of giving up blame and criticism is often
greeted with derision. "Impossible," some say. "How boring," say
others. We have found that it's actually possible and anything but
boring. The couple who is deeply addicted to blame and criticism
has usually come to mistake the adrenalized drama of conflict for
the flow of connection. The idea of life without the adrenalin may
seem dull and empty at first, much like a lifelong flagellant must
feel that first day without the self-administered whip.
The Fourth Secret
If you want a vibrant long-term relationship -- one in which you
feel close as a couple and creative as individuals -- you have to
do something radical about your creativity. You have to take your
attention away from fixing the other person and put it on
expressing your own creativity. Even one hour a week of focusing
on your own creativity will produce results. More than that will
often produce miracles.
Nothing will sap your vital energy faster than squelching your
creativity. Often, couples stifle their individual creativity in
order to focus on fixing and changing the other person. Since this
seldom produces tangible results, they devote more energy to the
other person as a fixer-upper and less to individual creativity.
When results are not forthcoming, they complain about the other
person to third parties. They enter a dangerous cycle of complaint
that has addictive properties -- the more you do it the more
things there are to complain about. Ultimately this leads to
dissipation of creative energy and inner despair.
By contrast, fully creative people don't have time for complaint.
Even if you're not fully engaged in creativity (even, as our
research indicates, if you're doing only an hour a week of
creative expression), you will see quantum enhancement of vitality
within the relationship with every increase in creative
self-expression.
The Fifth Secret
If you want to create vital, long-lasting love, you must become a
master of verbal and nonverbal appreciation.
We teach couples how to appreciate each other spontaneously and
frequently. Although this may sound like a simple thing, it most
definitely is not. In fact, it's the last thing we teach in the
program because it's the hardest to learn. To utter a clear,
heartfelt appreciation to another person is radical partly because
it's so rare. To receive such an appreciation from another person
is equally challenging. Most of us have never seen or heard a rich
flow of spoken appreciations in relationships. In fact, many
people cannot recall a single instance of clear appreciation in
their families of origin.
The simple solution is to speak a heartfelt ten-second
appreciation to the other person, for no reasons other than to
signify a commitment to appreciation and to open the flow of
appreciation. In other words, the spoken appreciation is not to
get a particular result from the other person. In reality, it
produces powerful results very quickly, but it is important that
the appreciation not be spoken as a manipulation or in expectation
of a reward.
We teach couples how to say simple and complex appreciations,
ranging from "I like the way you did your hair today" to
"Throughout our lives together, I have been repeatedly amazed by
how generous you are." Although most couples can learn the art in
an hour, they tell us that it takes the better part of a year's
daily practice to savor its full value.
These five secrets have a revolutionary effect on any relationship
in which they're practiced. The five secrets move people quickly
through the stuck places so that they can enjoy the profound
beauty of genuine love. We will have a great deal more to show you
about these five secrets when we explore them in the chapters to
come. First, though, let's go a little deeper, into what we mean
by genuine love.
Copyright © 2004 Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks
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