On February 17th, I was interviewed on Barbara Sher’s Live the Life You Love web radio show. Barbara is a wonderful interviewer, and the hour turned out to be great fun for me. The interview is all about how to Assume Love, Expect Love, and Find Third Alternatives and why these help us Enjoy Being Married. To listen, click on the link above and look for the 2/17/2008 show. You can play it...
What an honor it is to walk into someone’s life at just the right moment. I had a chance recently to talk about assuming love, expecting love, and looking for the third alternative with a woman ready to toss in the towel on her marriage. Recent life events had created a lot of tension between her and her husband of twenty-plus years. Like me when I was 34 years old and frantic, she’d...
How to feel more loved every single day: 1 – Assume love. When your spouse’s or life partner’s behavior upsets you, stop, assume for the moment he or she is still the same wonderful person and still loves you very much. Now try to explain how he or she might have done this if this is true. You’ll stop your knee-jerk reactions long enough to see the situation a lot more...
The easiest way to feel unloved is to expect the wrong things. You live in a time and place when you can marry for love. You don’t need a helpmeet to survive. You don’t need to bolster your family’s political position or status through marriage. You can choose to marry or not, and you can choose the person you marry.
So what should you expect when you marry for love? Love.
If you, your spouse, and your kids are the only ones who care if your marriage is a happy one, count your blessings. Over a third (35%) of women in a September 2007 Ladies Home Journal survey said their vote for president in 2008 would be influenced at least somewhat by how happy they thought the candidate’s marriage was. Coming in second in perceived marital happiness, right behind John...
I am a widow who got it right the second time. I have been sharing here since February 14, 2006 what I learned from that experience and from positive psychology, marriage research, and my training as a marriage educator.
