Mastering Personal Relationships

One of the characteristics of the fully mature, self-actualizing person is that he or she has the ability to enter into long-term, intimate relationships and maintain those relationships for long periods of time. Men and women with the healthiest personalities, those who are the most together as human beings, are those who seem to have the greatest capacity for these loving relationships.

The choice of a mate, and the quality of your home and family life, determines your success as a human being as much as or more than any other factor. Your relationships are a direct expression of the person you really are. The Law of Correspondence states that your outer world of relationships will correspond exactly to your inner world of thought and feeling. If your inner world is positive and loving, your outer world of relationships will be happy and satisfying.

Benjamin Disraeli, prime minister of England in the nineteenth century, once said, " No success in public life can compensate for failure in the home." Your personal relationships should take prece-dence over everything else. As you grow and become a bener per-son, your relationships should grow and improve as well, and in the same proportion.

By the Law of Attraction, you will attract into your life the kind of people who are very much the way you are, the kind of people whose ways of thinking and behaving correspond to your dominant thoughts and feelings. As you become more positive, optimistic and loving, you will naturally attract into your life more positive, optimistic and loving people.

By the Law of Sowing and Reaping you will reap exactly what you sow, and there is no area in which this is more true than in your relationships. You see it all around you, in all your interactions

You get out of your marriage or your romance exactly what you put into it. The more of yourself that you put into a relationship, the more love, satisfaction and joy you will get out of it. Men and women arc born incomplete, and need each other to become whole. They are born with complementary qualities and characteristics. Each one needs the other to fulfill his or her human destiny. Happy relationships go hand in hand with peace of mind, long life, health, happiness and abundance. Men and women with poor relation-ships, or no relationships at all, have more ill health and die younger than men and women who live happily together.

In fact, according to Ronald Adler and Neil Towne in their book Loolting Out, Loolting In, socially isolated people are two to three times as likely to die prematurely as those with strong social ties. Divorced men die from heart disease, cancer and strokes at double the rate of married men. The rate of all types of cancer is as much as five times higher for divorced men and women, compared to their single counterparts. If for no other reason than your desire to live a long and happy life, you should be very serious about building and maintaining excellent relationships with the most im-portant people in your life.

Your self-esteem, how much you like and respect yourself, deter-mines your personality and your level of happiness. High self-esteem leads to high performance and success in every area of life, while low self-esteem precedes and accompanies most failure and

The first part of self-esteem is the purdy mwtionRJ component, the way you feel about yourself, separate and apart from anyone or anything else. The second part of your self-esteem is determined by your perceived level of competence in what you do. It is how well you feel you perform in the important areas of your life. This is called peifomumu-bRSed sufesteem, and it is an essential dement of

perform well, you enjoy high self-esteem in that area. This feeling reinforces the other component of self-esteem, your sense of per-sonal value. If you do well, you feel good; if you feel good, you do well. Each is dependent on the other.

Because your relationships are so central to your entire life, for you to enjoy sustained feelings of self-esteem, you must know in your heart that you are capable of entering into and maintaining a positive, healthy and constructive loving relationship with another person.

Feeling inferior or incompetent in your relationships under-mines your self-esteem and self-confidence. Everything you do that enables you to get along better with the important people in your life improves your self-esteem. Effectiveness with others makes you feel more competent and complete and frees you to more readily become more effective in the other areas of your life.

There is a direct relationship between the quality of your rela-tionships and your level of self-esteem and self-acceptance. You can only like yourself to the degree to which you fully accept yourself, and how much you like yourself is largely detennined by how much you feel you are accepted by other people.

Most of us arc raised with a form of conditionlli acceptance, and often rejection and disapproval from our parents. As adults, we seck the unconditional love and acceptance of others, and especially one special other, to compensate for what we feel we lacked aschildren. Our mental health depends on it.

You can never fcd free to genuinely like yourself until you accept yourself completely, until you accept both your strengths IIIUi your weaknesses. And the key to ucepting ytnmelf is being accepted un-conditionally by at least one other person whom you respect and admire, and even better, love. It is only when someone else accepts you, "warts and all,» that you can relax and accept yourself as being a valuable and worthwhile person.

For you to experience self-acceptance, you must first develop self ~. You need to understand why you think, feel and act the

way you do. You need to be aware of the impact of the formative experiences of your life. You need to understand how and why you have become the person that you are today.

Only when you achieve a higher level of self-awareness can you move to a higher level of self-acceptance. You must to be more aware of who you really are before you can accept yourself. And it is only with a high level of self-acceptance that you can enjoy self-esteem-the key to a happy, healthy personality.

Self-awareness, in turn, is based on selfdisckJsure. You only truly understand yourself to the degree to which you can disclose, or share yourself, with at least one other person. Appropriate self-disclosure means that you can tell someone else, whom you trust completely, exactly what you are thinking and feeling, with no fear of disapproval or rejection.

Psychotherapy is based on self-disclosure. Psychotherapists are successful to the degree to which they can get the patient to open up to them and tell them exactly what is causing them to be un-happy or ineffective.

One psychologist said recently, "If everyone learned to really listen to other people, 75 percent of the psychotherapists in the United States would be out of work by next Wednesday." To hon-estly disclose yourself to another person, you need to trust that other person. You need to know that the other person cares for you, and that he or she will not judge you or condemn you for something you have said or done in the past.

The great emotional problem of the twentieth century is guilt-Guilt arises from a feeling of worthlessness as the result of destruc-tive criticism and mistakes you feel you have made in the past. Most of us have done and said things we regret. We have hurt other people, and we are sorry about it. We can begin to free ourselves from these negative feelings by the act of telling someone else what we did or said. This form of catharsis, or cleansing, liberates us and allows us to get on with the rest of our lives. Repentance is not only good, but essential for the soul, for long-term happiness.

Honest self-disclosure is sometimes scary. It requires that you take a chance, that you make yourself vulnerable. But it is the basic

precondition for mental health. When you disclose your thoughts and feelings openly and honestly to another person, you understand yourself better. You become more aware of who you really are. You see yourself and your life in a better perspective.

As you become more self-aware, you become more self-accepting. When you accept yourself unconditionally, you enjoy higher levels of self-esteem and self-regard. You feel better about yourself in everything you do. You liberate yourself from negative feelings that can hold you down and hold you back. With self-disclosure, you can get things off your chest and get on with your life.

One of the purposes of marriage and intimate relationships is to give you the opportunity to evolve and grow to your full capacity. In a fully trusting relationship, you feel free to tell the other person things you have done in the past and what you are thinking and feeling in the present. In sharing yourself honestly, you develop a deeper understanding of your own humanity. You become more tolerant, more accepting and more compassionate toward the human frailties of other people. You develop parts of your personal-ity that would have lain dormant in the absence of a fully loving relationship.

Much of what we do in life we do either to get love or to compensate for the lack of love. Everyone needs to be loved and accepted unconditionally by at least one other person. It is only when your need for this form of emotional security has been satis-fied that you feel free to turn your mind and heart to accomplishing what is possible for you in your cxtcma.llife. Love is like money: If you have an ample supply, you don't think about it very much. But if your supply is cut off for any period of time, you think about nothing else.

The cruelest punishment inflicted on prisoners is locking them away from all other human beings-putting them in solitary con-finement. Depriving a person of human contact, of human interac-tion, is the worst thing that can be done to him or her.

Your highest aspiration should be to evolve and develop into the kind of person who attracts an ideal loving relationship into

your life. This relationship makes it possible for you to enjoy the happiness and joy for which you were created.

Everything in · the previous chapter on mastering human rela-tionships is applicable to your loving relationships. In addition, there are many other things you can do, or stop doing, that can dramatically improve. the way you get along with the important other person in your life. Let's start off with the six rules for success in relationships.

The first rule is that similarities attrRCt. You will always be the happiest and the most compatible with another person whose: inter-ests, tastes and values are similar to yours. The Law of Attraction states that you will be attracted to a person whose: attitudes and beliefs are in harmony with your own.

The first area in which similarities are necessary in marriages and relationships is in attitudes toward money-how it is earned, how it is saved and how it is spent. The second area is attitudes regarding children-whether to have them, how many, and how to raise them. The third is attitudes toward sex. The fourth is religion, and the fifth is attitudes toward political and social issues. Attitudes toward people, social activities and how to spend leisure time are also important measures of compatibility. Similarities at-tract in spiritual areas as well, and this area can sometimes be more important than any other.

In each case, you will be most happy and most compatible with a person whose: fundamental beliefs and values in these areas are most similar to your own. Most unhappiness and disagreements in marriages and relationships come down to fundamental disagree-ments about these: basic issues of life.

The second rule for success in relationships is that opposites 1IttTIICt, but only in temperament. Nature always demands balance and har-mony. And balance is most necessary in the temperaments of two people who have come together as one.

There is a simple test of compatibility you can apply to your intimate relationships. It is called "the conversation test." In a rcla-tionship in which you are temperamentally compatible with an-

other person, there will be an easy ebb and flow of conversation. Each person will be able to talk as much as he or she needs to talk, and each person will have the opportunity to listen as much as he or she needs to listen.

This balance is very important. Each person has a certain amount of talking that he or she must do to feel healthy and whole. If people do not get the opportunity to do aU of their talking with the person with whom they are involved, they will seek to fulfill their communication needs somewhere else:. Almost all affairs in marriages begin as the result of a need to communicate more fully with another human being.

When people are temperamentally balanced, 90 percent of the time they spend together will be filled with easy conversation, going back and forth. The other 10 percent of the time will be filled with comfortable silences.

However, if one person needs to talk 70 percent of the time and listen only 20 percent of the time, and the other person also needs to talk 70 percent of the time and listen only 20 percent of the time, there will be a clash over what is called "air time." They will be continually struggling over who is going to get to talk the most, who is going to fuJ6ll his or her needs at the expense: of the other.

In this type of relationship, there will be one person who loves more and one person who loves less. Always, the person who lovesmore will bite his or her lip and give in to allow the person who loves less to do all the talking he or she wants to do. The person who loves less controls the relationship.

However, this is only a temporary solution. It inevitably leads to feelings of frustration and unhappiness on the part of the person who loves more, and who is not getting an opportunity to express himself or herself fully enough. Eventually these repressed feelings erupt in health problems or hannful behavior.

Another example of incompatibility is when both parties only need to talk 30 percent of the time and are comfortable listening 60 or 70 percent of the time. In this case, you would have 40 percent of the time the couple is together filled with uncomfortable silences. The two people would sit there with very little to say, feeling uncomfortable but not knowing how to break the silence. This, too, is an example of temperamental incompatibility.

The conversation test can be applied to your relationships with any of your friends, on any level, and of either sex. Your very best friends are those with whom you have easy conversations and easy silences. These are the ones with whom you are most compatible. But it is most important that you be conversationally compatible with your mate or your spouse if you want to be happy in your relationship.

The third rule for successful relationships is total commitment on the part of both people. Total comminnent requires a heartfelt determination to make the relationship successful. If the two are compatible in their basic values and attitudes and are temperamen-tally balance~ it is much easier for them to make a lifelong commit-ment. A total commitment means that neither party ever considers or discusses the possibility of separating, breaking up or divorcing. Making a total comminnent requires that you burn your physical and emotional bridges and refuse to consider any other option except making this relationship successful.

Many people avoid making a total comminnent to a relation-ship, even a marriage, because they have been hurt in previous relationships. They feel that if they keep their options open, they will always have an emotional escape route. This lack of commit-ment, however, leads almost invariably to creating the exact situa-tion that the individual fears. The relationship gradually deteriorates as one or both parties continue to hold back and to think of separation as the solution to the problems that inevitably arise between two people.

W. Scott Peck, in his book The R.otu/. Less Tr4J1eled, gives a beautiful definition of love. He says, "Love is the total wmmitmmt to

another person, you want that person to fulfill his or her full poten-tial, and to become everything that he or she is capable of becom-ing. If one or the other has the slightest reluctance or hesitation in creating or supporting every opportunity for his or her mate to grow and develop, what you have might be a relationship, but it is

tionally only when we have given up all other options and commit-ted ourselves whole-heartedly to one other person. It is only then

that we are capable of developing the high-quality relationship that we need to complete our evolution as human beings.

The fourth rule for successful relationships is liking. It is more important and more satisfying to genuinely like your partner than to be in love. In a long-term relationship, people may fall in and out of love. The kind and intensity of emotion that each feels for the other will vary with the passing of time. But if the two people like and respect each other, the relationship can endure indefinitely.

When one person stops liking or respecting the other person, for any reason, the relationship is usually over. Many couples fall in love and then break up and never speak to each other again because they never took the time to fall in like, to learn to genuinely like and respect the other person as an individual rather than just as a romantic partner.

Marriages and relationships may not work out, but if they were initially based on liking and respect, the two parties can still com-municate and interact on an adult level without the negative feel-ings that go with relationships that ended in which no real liking or respect ever existed.

An excellent way to tell if you are in the right relationship is "the best-friend test." In the ideal relationship, your mate will be your

best friend. There will be no one in the world that you would rather be with, share with, talk to or spend time with than your spouse~

If for any reason you do not feel that your spouse or mate is your best friend, if you do not feel that you would rather be with him or her than anyone else, it is an indication that something is wrong in the relationship.

In every interview with couples who have been together for a long time, both the man and the woman describe the other as their

The starting point of a long-term romantic relationship is the feeling that you have met your best friend. One of the indications of this is the amount you laugh together. The amount of laughter in a relationship is a measure of the health of that relationship. When two people are ideally suited, they laugh a lot together, and

at the same things. When two people are unsuited for any reason, they won't find much in common to laugh about. Their senses of

attract and are most compatible. You will always be attracted to,and be most compatible with, a person who is just about as happy and as positive as you are.

The general tone of the relationship, the general level of opti-mism versus pessimism, is a good measure of the compatibility

concepts will be attracted to each other just as will people with positiw self-concepts. They will marry, settle down and be quitecontent together for many years, if not for life. Their relationship will be based on the fact that they are both largely negative person-alities. Similar self-concepts attract, whatever they are.

Give your mate a score on a scale of 1 to 100. Estimate what percentage of the time he or she is positive and optimistic versus what percentage of the time he or she is negative or pessimistic. Then give yourself the same test.

You will find that you are the most comfortable with a person who is pretty much as happy, or as unhappy, as you are. That's why it is said, "Birds of a feather flock together," and "Misery loves company."

If two people enter into a relationship and one of them is much happier than the other, there will be all kinds of conflict and unhap-piness. Most relationships and marriages that break up do so as the result of self-concepts being out of balance.

In one study, researchers found that four out of five divorces in America are initiated by women who are "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore." It's amazing how many husbands and wives feel that they are being held back because of the negativity of their spouses. This is a serious problem in relationships in America today, and there is no simple solution for it.

The sixth rule for successful relationships is that there must begOOll communic4t'ions. The primary reason for the success of marriagesisthat the two partners communicate well with each other. They are on the: same wavelength. Each can sense what the other is feeling

and thinking. They come to the same conclusions independently. They almost seem to "share a brain."

The primary reason for the failure of relationships is poor com-munication. The couple misunderstand each other and continually argue about large and small issues. Each is convinced that he or she is right and the other is wrong. They have a hard time with the idea that both viewpoints might be correct, rightly considered.

To build and maintain a high level of quality communications in a relationship, you require both a high quantity and a high quality of unbroken time with each other. Couples need to be alonetogether. They need to spend long stretches of time talking and listening in order to keep their communication channels clear. Whenever two people get so busy that they stop taking time to talk, you can be sure that there are troubles ahead.

Good communications require both speaking and listening skills, which you can learn. But excellent communications between a man and a woman also require an understanding of the major differences between them.

Men and women are different in many ways and they have distinctly different communication styles. Generally, men are tUna and women are indirect. Me:n are more focused on results and comple-tion, or closure, than women. Women are more conce:rned about relationships and the process of communication than men. This can often lead to fundamental misunderstandings.

Take the case of a man and a woman who have been driving for two or three hours. As they go past a McDonald's, the woman says, "Honey, are you thirsty?"

The man, without looking around, simply says, "Nope," and continues driving. She bites her lip and feels hun at his insensitivity. He is blithely unaware of what she was really asking, and he: has no idea that she is now unhappy.

In her indirect way, she was saying, "I am thirsty; why don't we stop and get something to drink?" However, because of the way she phrased it, it went over his head completely. He missed the point.

shopping. For a man, going shopping is a simple process with an expected result. He goes in, he purchases what he came for, and he leaves. Men in general don't like shopping; they feel uncomfortable doing it and they want to get it over with as quicldy as possible. The ideal shopping trip for a man is dashing in and dashing out, leaving his car running in the parking lot.

For many women, however, shopping is a process, even a recre-ational activity. A woman does not necessarily even have to buy anything.

Shopping is a sensory experience for a woman, and when she is shopping with another person, it becomes a social experience as well. The conversation that takes place is as important as, if not more important than, what she buys. This is something that men have a hard time understanding.

Here is another example of this difference in communication styles. Men are oriented toward closure and completion. When a woman begins discussing a problem with him, he will almost immediately respond with what he considers to be a logical solution.

He will say, "Why don't you do this or try that?" He will then go back to reading his newspaper, or tum his attention to some-thing else. He will honestly fed he has been helpful and has prop-erly addressed the issue: her problem.

What he does not realize is that the woman is usually not asking for a solution, nor does she want his advice or his recommenda-tions. What she wants is an opportunity to discuss the situation, to process the problem through a diRJogue about it with the man in her life. She probably already knows what she is going to do, or not do. What she seeks is an opportunity to communicate, using this particular situation or problem as the basis for the conversation.

One of the things that men can do to improve their communica-tions with the women in their lives is simply to refrain from giving advice unless it is clear that this is what she wants. Instead, listen attentively, pause, ask questions, feed back and paraphrase what she is saying to ensure you understand.

One of the best things a man can do when he comes home at night, or when they get together in the evening, is to ask her about her day.

Most men consider their workday to be the most fascinating experience since the dawn of civilization. However, when a man asks his mate about her day before he volunteers anything about his day, he is often amazed at how much more interesting her day was than his.

The first time a man asks the woman he cares about to tell him about her day, she will probably be shocked, and she may give a brief, dismissive answer. She won't really believe that he is really inrerested. She'll think he's just being nice. So he must persist. When she says, Well, I went to work and I had lunch with so-and-so and then I came home, he must ask her, like a detective, What did you do this morning? Where did you go for lunch? What did you do after that? What did you do this afternoon? How is every-thing going with that person at your work? and so on. If he pries a little bit into her day, he will find that it is often as interesting as anything he did.

An advantage of this approach is that he spends less time talking about his work after she has had a chance to talk about her day. Remember, it is not the content of the conversation that is im-portant. It is the process. Expressing a genuine interest in your mate or spouse and then listening carefully to the other person when he or she speaks, deepens understanding and improves communica-tions. It is only in this way that you can keep the relationship alive and growing.

The most important question for you to ask and answer continually to maintain a successful relationship is, "What's important herd"

What's important is not winning the argument, or being right, but maintaining the quality of the relationship. What's important is that you continue to love and respect each other and live together in peace and harmony.

things more clearly and you will be guided to do and say what is most appropriate.

Practice the golden rule of relationships. Ask yourself, regularly, "What would it be like to be married to me?" Or "What would it be like if my mate treated me the way I treat him or her?"

If you do to your mate what you would like to see done to you, and if you refrain from doing or saying anything that you would not like your mate to do or say to you, you will be far more aware of the impact of your words and behavior.

Awareness is really the key. Life is the study of attention. If you pay attention to the small things in your relationship, the big things will take care of themselves.

There are a thousand reasons why relationships don't work out, but you can probably boil them down to six major problem areas. These six problems lie at the root of most arguments, disagreements and divorces. All of them have to do with the self-esteem and self-image of one or both of the parties in the relationship.

The first major problem in relationships is I.Rdt of commitment. This is evident in the "go halfway" rdationship or marriage so conunon today. Instead of full commitment, there is only partial or half commitment. One or the other says, "You go halfway and rll go halfway." However, as soon as one party decides to go only 49 percent of the way, a split opens in the rdationship. And this kind of split tends to grow wider rather than narrower. The parties dig in. One or the other then goes only 48 percent of the way, then 40 percent, then 30 percent and so on until he or she stops trying altogether.

You see an example of this when a couple gets married but each keeps a separate bank account. The household expenses are divided equally. Every dollar is counted as belonging to one or the other. They even lend each other money and keep accurate tallies of who owes what to whom. I saw one case in which household expenses were divided down to the penny, even including the cost of a postage stamp to mail the utility bill!

Two friends of mine, let's call them Mary and Joe, lived to-gether for eleven years. They always talked about getting married, but they never seemed to be able to make a decision. However, from the time they moved in. together, each person purchased and paid for furniture and fixtures for the apartment separately from the other. On the back of every item in their aparnnent was a little sticker indicating who it belonged to. They never commingled their funds or their property. At the end of eleven years, when they decided to separate, they were able to divide all their possessions in less than two hours. They had unconsciously been planning to go their separate ways for eleven years by their very act of never fully committing to the relationship.

Another example of partial commitment is a marriage contract or a prenuptial agreement. These agreements make interesting read-ing. The first paragraph of one of these contracts states, ''The two parties, being very much in love and planning to live together happily for all the days of their life, are hereby entering into this agreement. "

The rest of the prenuptial agreement details at great length how the property will be split when they separate. They are, in effect, planning the details of the separation even before they get into the marriage.

When one party is not willing to commit totally to the rdation-ship, this holding back triggers feelings of rejection and unworthi-ness in the other. It makes one person feel that he or she is not good enough. He or she feels that this is the re~n the other is not willing to commit totally and unequivocally to him or her.

When Barbara and I got married, the minister showed us the various marriage vows that we could take. We could choose our own wording for the ceremony. As we went through the various vows, I asked him, ''Where are the words, 'Tilldeath do us part'?"

The minister, a very fine man, explained that those words had been deleted from most marriage ceremonies today. Most young people did not want to have something so clear and unequivocal put into their marriage vows. They wanted something that allowed

I asked him if we could put it back in. He said that we could do whatever we liked. So I insisted that the words "Till death do us part" be part of our marriage ceremony. I felt that a wishy-washy marriage vow such as one he showed us, "As long as we both shall

love," was the sort of marriage vow that suggested that they were probably not really serious about the long-term survival of their marriage.

The way to overcome a lack of commitment is to commit your-self completely to the relationship. Get into it with both feet. Never consider the possibility of the relationship failing. If, through no fault of your own, the relationship does not work out, at least it will not be because you were half-hearted about it.

The second major problem in relationships is trying to change the otherpmon or expecting the other person to change. This is anothersubtle fonn of rejection. It is another way of saying, "You are not good enough for me the way you are. "

Whenever you try to change another person you imply that he or she is unworthy, and you ignite feelings of anger and resentment.

The fact is that people do not change very much. As the come-dian Flip Wilson said, "What you sees is what you gets." If the person you are considering marrying is not what you want to get, the time to do something about it is before you get married, not afterward.

The solution to the problem of trying to change the other, of trying to get the other person to lose weight, quit smoking, exer-cise, become more positive or anything else, is to simply accept the person as he or she is. If you cannot accept the behavior and the personality of the other person, that should tell you something. Acceptance is largely determined by compatibility. Acceptance is a good indicator of whether this is the right relationship for,you. Nonacceptance before the marriage is vasdy superior to having to deal with it afterward.

Sometimes, when you stop trying to change the other person and just accept him or her unconditionally, he or she will begin to change as a result of his or her own choice. Human beings can be perverse. Often they will persist in behavior that irritates you just because you arc continually trying to get them to change. When you stop trying to change them, they will often change their behav-ior voluntarily. '

The third major problem in relationships is jeRlousy. Jealousy is always experienced in the mind and heart of the person feeling the emotion. Shakespeare called jealousy the "green-eyed monster." It

is a terrible negative emotion that arises from feelings of low self-esteem and personal inadequacy.

The person who feels jealous has doubts about his or her value as a person. He or she feels, "Nobody could ever really love me, being the kind of person I am."

This type of individual probably suffered from destructive criti-cism in childhood and negative experiences with the opposite sex as an adult. If a person never received the unconditional love of his or her parents or, even worse, if the parents rejected or disapproved of the child during the time he or she was growing up, when that person becomes an adult he or she will be very vulnerable to not being fully loved and accepted by others.

The antidote to jealousy is to realize that it has nothing to do with the other person. It has to do only with the low self-esteem of the person suffering from it. The way to get over jealousy is by working on self-esteem, by saying over and over, "I like myself, I like myself, I like myself."

When your self-esteem is high enough, when you like and re-spect yourself sufficiently, nothing that anyone else does or does not do will make you doubt your own personal value. You will be emotionally self-reliant, independent of the behavior of others for how you fed about yourself.

It is never a smart or clever thing to deliberlJtely make another person jealous. Jealousy is a painful, destructive emotion, and it is not the sort of thing that one friend inflicts on another. Each of us needs to feel safe and secure in the relationship to which we give ourselves, and the deliberate provocation of jealousy shakes our security. Jealousy makes us feel miserable and unhappy.

The fourth major problem in relationships is self-pity. This occurs when you feel sorry for yourself for something that your partner has either done or not done to you or for you. Usually people who feel self-pity learned it from one of their parents who practiced self-pity as a method of interaction at home.

Often people indulge in self·pity- ''Woe is me!"- when their partners are so busy or happy with work that they feel left out. The solution to self-pity is not to get your partner to do or stop doing something. The antidote is to get so busy with your own goals that you don't have time to feci sorry for yourself.

of your own happiness or unhappiness. Nobody makes you feel anything. If you experience self-pity, it is because you choose to feel sorry for yourself. And you can choose another reaction if you want to. The basis of self-pity is the mistaken notion that someone else is responsible for making you happy.

Self-pity is a form of weakness and insincerity that stops you from becoming a completely fulfilled human being. If you are in a relationship in which the other person is feeling sorry for himself or herself, be as compassionate and as understanding as possible and then encourage him or her to get busy doing something that he or she enjoys.

The fifth major problem in relationships is negative expeaations. These occur when you constantly expect the other person to do something to disappoint you. The fact is that your expectations tend to be fulfilled. If you expect good things to happen, you will seldom be disappointed. If you expect your partner to let you down, you will seldom be disappointed in that either.

The rule is to always expea the best of your partner. Perhaps the most wonderful words that one person can say to another are, "I love you, and I believe in you." Always teU him or her that you have complete confidence and faith in his or her ability to do any-thing that he or she puts his or her mind to.

It feels wonderful to go off to work in the morning knowing that the most important person in your life believes in you com-pletely. And it is wonderful to come home at night to a person who has complete faith in your ability to succeed, no matter what the obstacles. Many of the most successful men and women who have ever lived owe their success to the unshakable positive expectations of their mate.

The sixth major problem in relationships is incompllhbility. Incom-patibility is a very sensitive subject, which many people do not even like to discuss. However, it is one of the most common problems that arise in relationships, and perhaps the most common reason why people are unhappy in their marriages.

Usually, when two people meet and fall in love, they arc at-tracted to each other by things they have in common. However, as the years pass and they change, they often grow in different direc-

tions. They develop new interests, new tastes and new opinions. What was imponant to them when they first met no longer means as much, and it loses its power to bond the two together.

The most common time for incompatibility to occur in mar-riages seems to be between the ages of twenty-eight and thiny-two years. During their twenties, people grow and change at the most rapid rate of their adult lives. If a couple gets married during their early twenties, by the end of their twenties they may find that they have very little in common. They may find that they have become incompatible.

The first sign that a couple is no longer compatible is that the laughter goes out of their relationship. They don't joke together or find a lot of funny things in common.

The second sign is that the conversation dries up. They seem to have little to talk about. The home becomes a functional place where the couple just happens to live, rather than a place of shared wannth and harmony.

Each person preoccupies himself or herself with work or the children or something else. Each goes through the motions. Each puts on a good front for their neighbors and friends.

Many people who are unhappy in their marriages plunge into their work, working twelve and fourteen hours a day, so they do not have to go home. And the less time they spend with the other, the worse the relationship becomes. They have less and less in common.

If you find that the laughter and conversation are going out of your relationship, it's time to take action. If you feel that you and the other person have very little left in common, you should make every effort to rebuild the relationship. You should recognize that you have a serious, life-disrupting problem and sit down together and discuss it. You should make every effon to recreate what you once had.

Perhaps you need to take some time off and go on a trip. Perhaps you need to start taking an interest in each other's activi-ties, or to develop new common interests. If you have invested several years and a good deal of emotion in building your relation-

ship, and especially if there are children, you must do everything possible to save the situation.

One of the most powerful ways to put love back into a relationship is to realize that love is a verb: !me is an action word. ''To love" requires that you do the things that a loving person would do if you wish to feel the emotion that a person in love would feel. You may be able to act your way back into loving the person you have fallen out of love with.

You learn to love another person by doing loving things with and for that person. Small attentions, little favors, kindnesses, gifts and other things that make the other person happy actually make you love the person more. When you stop doing these little things, you can begin to fall out of love. The emotional ties begin to unwind. The fires begin to die down.

The Greek word for this process of rekindling love through action is called Praxis. The Principle of Praxis states that you gener-ate emotions in yourself by doing things consistent with those emotions over and over until they kindle into flames. You act your way into feeling, very much as we discussed in Chapter Three, The Master Program.

You can put the love back into your relationship by once more doing the things that you did during courtship. You can start to be more caring, more attentive, more understanding and more sympa-thetic. As you act the part of a loving spouse, you may find your feelings toward the other person beginning to change for the better. You can act your way back into love.

By thinking loving thoughts about the other and by talking to the other in a loving and courteous way, you can often rekindle the feelings that once brought you together. Look into the other per-son for the good qualities you once admired. Forgive and forget mistakes that the other person may have made. More than any-thing, acting your way back into love requires that you really want to stay with this person, that you really want to rebuild and preserve this relationship.

It may happen, as it often does, that the fire has gone out of your relationship completely. There is no longer any desire to make the emotional sacrifices that are necessary to save the relationship. The two parties have, in effect, become incompatible.

Incompatibility is the most common reason for the breakdown of any relationship. The average adult goes out with many members of the opposite sex to find even one with whom he or she is compati-ble. Why should it be so surprising that two people would evolve and develop into two dissimilar people? Why should it be so sur-prising that two people become incompatible?

Often you see couples sitting in restaurants eating quietly and not talking to each other. Or you will see people driving along together staring out into the traffic without conversing. These are indications that the couple has become incompatible.

The best thing to do when two people have become incompatible is simply to accept it. William James of Harvard said, "The first step in dealing with any difficulty is to be willing to have it so."

Much unhappiness and psychosomatic illness is caused by tIe-nUU, refusing to face the fact that something is wrong in yourrelationship. Denial, or internal resistance, causes stress and ten-sion. The unwillingness to deal with something so embarrassing and so threatening to one's self-esteem as a failed relationship is a major cause of illness, insomnia, headaches and expressions of nega-tive emotion such as irritability, anger and depression. These are all symptoms of an underlying cause, which may be incompatibility in

One of the most useful ways to deal with any difficulty in life is to ask yourself, "Is this a fact, or is this a problem?" If it's a problem, it is amenable to a solution. There is something you can do about it,

and you can apply your intelligence to finding a way to resolve it. However, if it is a foa, the smartest thing to do is to accept it.

Facts are lli the weather: There is nothing that you can do about them except to incorporate them into your world view and make

proVIsIon for them. Many people cause themselves enormous amounts of unnecessary unhappiness by confusing the fact of in-compatibility with the problem of incompatibility. When the fire goes out of a relationship, when the ashes go cold and incompatibil-ity sets in, it is time for one or both parties to face the fact squarely and honestly and then do something about it.

The reason you enter into a relationship with another person is so that you can be happier inside the relationship than you would be outside of it. Many people enter into relationships in order to be happier and more fulfilled, and they instead find themselves unhappy and less fulfilled. Then they mistakenly cling to the rela-tionship, forgetting the reason for entering it in the first place.

The reason that you choose to be with another person rather than to be alone is to make your life better, richer and more enjoy-able. It is not to suffer and be miserable. An unhappy relationship robs you of your happiness and undermines your potential more surely than any other single factor.

Many people stay in bad relationships because they are afraid of what othm mitJht say. They are afraid of losing face with their par-ents, their friends and the people they work with. They force them-selves to keep up appearances for the public while, behind closed doors, they are bitterly unhappy. They often feel trapped in a rela-tionship that they cannot get out of without suffering intense em-barrassment with the people they know.

The fact is that no one else ruUly cares about your relationship as much as you do. In most cases, you will find that the people you thought would be the most distressed to learn of your failed mar-riage are not really concerned at all. Most people have so many problems of their own that they have very little time or energy to thirIk about you and your problems. In fact most people spend the majority of their time, all day long, thinking about themselves. Even if you are very close to another person- a son, a daughter or a best friend-that other person really spends very little time think-ing about you in the course of the day.

Your whole life could be falling apart, but to most other people, what they are going to have for lunch today is more important to them than your problems. Many people find that when they finally decide to leave an unhappy relationship, their decision has vinually no effect at all on the people around them. Others simplydonotcare. They may express a little sympathy and ask a few questions,

mostly out of curiosity, but then they have to get home for dinner and get on with the rest of their lives, leaving you alone.

The bottom line, based on my seminars and workshops with thou-sands of individuals and couples, is that the most foolish thing you can do is to stay in a bad relationship because you think that some-how it is going to hurt or upset someone else if you leave it.

The smartest thing you can do is to be perfectly selfish emotion-ally. If you are not happy and you cannot save the situation, then at least please yourself. Do what makes you happy. You can never make anyone else happy by being miserable yourself. Only happy people can make others happy. Never sacrifice yourself on the altar of someone else's happiness. You end up achieving neither your own happiness nor the happiness of the other person.

The most important thing in life is love. The security and joy of a loving relationship is perhaps the most wonderful thing that a man and woman can experience.

You should do everything possible to build and maintain a loving relationship with another person, including listening, ex-pressing gratitude and appreciation, treating the other person with kindness, courtesy, gentleness, patience and especially compassion. You should make every effort to build a loving relationship within which you can live indefinitely.

But if it doesn't work out, have the courage and character to accept that nothing in human life is either perfect or permanent. Have the honesty to accept that the kindest thing that you can do for someone else is to achieve your own happiness. If you face life as it is, and not as you wish it would be, you will be true to yourself and true to the most important people in your life.

Since happy relationships are central to your self-esteem and happi-ness, make the decision to get your primary relationship in order. Resolve to sit down with the other person and ask him or her,

Change your order of priorities, of values, if necessary and make your relationship more important than anything else. Be willing to make sacrifices, changes, if necessary to ensure the quality and sta-bility of your home and the emotional health of the person you care about more than anyone else.

A solid, supportive, totally loving relationship serves as the foundation upon which you can build a wonderful life. It is the true manifestation of the excellent person you are becoming. It is your key to health and happiness. Your relationship is a reflection of the person you really are and your assurance of a great future.

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