This book was written expressly to show couples how to transform their romantic love into a more permanent lasting love. It avoids the gimmicks and sexual gymnastics so common in "how to" books about love and encourages couples to consistently act on the things they already know but often fail to do. It elevates the significance of lasting love beyond just the benefits of a good relationship—to show how it enriches life as a whole. It gives practical insights into sustaining intimacy through honest communication as it guides couples in recognizing and addressing the core issues that lie beneath the surface of the nitty-gritty issues that seem to cause so many problems.

Are you frustrated by the endless stream of suggestions for magically improving your love life—like having sex in strange places or going to motels with no luggage? Are you tired of trying all the gimmicks and tricks that make you feel foolish or embarrassed—like saran-wrap surprises, wearing no underwear, or talking dirty on the phone? Are you discouraged by seeing that nothing seems to work the way you hope it will—or that it only works temporarily and then you're right back where you started?

If you're feeling desperate and doomed to a life of struggling to find and keep a good relationship, don't give up hope. You can have a lasting love. And it doesn't require any miracles. Deep down you know everything you need to know about making love last; you just forgot. What you need to do is calmly reflect on what you already know—and then act on it. That's what this book will help you do.

This is a guidebook, an instruction manual, and a source of inspiration whenever you get discouraged. You can't pick up this book and not find something you can use. And while it may not seem sexy, if you consistently follow its suggestions, it will do more for your sex life than any sex manual you can buy.

The ideas in this book come straight from our own experience—both personally and professionally. We've been married for 41 years and have spent the past 20 working with hundreds of other couples on their relationship issues. These experiences have brought us a new clarity about what's important in making love last. But you don't have to take our word for it; you can verify the ideas in this book from your own experience.

You'll see that this stuff is not "pie in the sky." It's very basic and solid. And since it grew directly out of our own struggles to make love stay, it's based on reality. We faced most of the problems that any couple faces. We didn't have insight into how to avoid them (or how to deal with them if we couldn't avoid them), but we survived—and we learned from our experiences.

Looking back, we can see how desperately we needed a book like this when we were starting out. So we've written the book we should have had, but didn't. We know a lot of you are bogged down in the same kinds of thinking we did and facing some of the same issues we faced. But you don't have to stay frustrated and disappointed about the course of your love. You do have this book and you can use it to make your love stay.

Inspiring You to Take Charge of Your Love

Falling in love is easy, but staying in love is quite another matter. Apparently it's one of the most difficult things any of us ever attempts. Because of the high divorce rate and the large percentage of remaining marriages in which couples don't have a vital love relationship, you may have come to believe it's inevitable that love will fade with time. Or perhaps you've already experienced the discouragement of seeing the love you once shared somehow slip away.

Don't settle for thinking you really can't expect more. You can and you should—regardless of your current situation. While no long-term love relationship is without difficulties, it is possible for love to survive and to be renewed and transformed over time. That's what this book is about—showing you how you can realistically aspire to something better.

Relationships can be the source of great joy or great pain. They seldom stand still; they're either getting better or getting worse. You deserve more out of love than just a few brief romantic interludes or an ongoing struggle to "get along." You don't want life to pass you by while you're waiting (and hoping) for a good relationship. You'll feel better if you're actively doing something toward that end. By paying attention to what's happening—and taking responsibility for what's happening—you can make a difference.

If you still doubt whether you can take charge of directing the course of your love, maybe you'll find encouragement that "anything is possible" by hearing a little bit about our own struggles to change the course of our love. Even where the specifics of our experiences are unlike yours, the similarity of the struggle is a connection we all share.

When we married at age nineteen we had no real concept of what was involved in making love stay. We believed our love was so special that it could withstand anything. We had the typical tendency to take our relationship for granted and "forget" all the things we really knew were important to keep our love strong. Through the years we confronted many of the standard problems that can drive a wedge between a couple if they aren't paying attention.

For instance, early in our marriage we found ourselves involved in one of the most common problems of all—losing touch with each other because of so much focus on career and children. We didn't lose touch just because we were focusing in different areas; it was because we didn't maintain the bridge between those two areas (and between ourselves) by talking straight to each other about how we felt about the situation.

We just went along, thinking this was the way things had to be. We didn't realize that you don't have to change "how it is;" you only have to change "how you deal with it." Unfortunately, we simply didn't deal with it. So we started down a path of distance and isolation from each other—and lost that special connection on a deep level that's critical to making love stay.

The weakening of our basic connection made us vulnerable to all kinds of other problems that can create difficulty in long-term relationships. One of the most common is simply the familiarity that comes from being together over the years. We started taking each other for granted—seeing each other primarily in terms of our roles as "husband" and "wife" instead of who we were as individuals.

This shift in our thinking was gradual—(we didn't even realize it was happening)—but we fell into stereotyping each other as one of "them," with all the negative baggage that carries with it. This included a lot of "ain't it awful" kind of thinking and talking about each other. "Men are so distant, so preoccupied with their own interests, so insensitive, so uncommunicative..." And on the other side, "women are so emotional, so smothering, so demanding, so talkative..."

Naturally, each of us thought we were right in our assessment of what was wrong with the other one. And commiserating with others only served to reinforce these stereotypical ways of reacting to each other. Slowly, but surely, we joined the masses who view the opposite sex not as individuals, but as members of a mysterious group that you don't understand and can't change—so you just have to tolerate. This attitude further increased the distance between us and decreased the strength of the loving aspect of our relationship.

These standard problems became like a cancer, slowly robbing us of the closeness we had originally felt. It wasn't that our love was gone; it's just that it was getting buried under the sense of isolation and distance created by the mounting pressure of fulfilling our roles while losing ourselves.

What finally got our attention was a crisis—dealing with the issue of extramarital affairs. It shook us to the core and forced us to learn, or relearn, a lot of the basic principles we had forgotten. We had thought we were good communicators because we did talk. We had never fallen into the trap of using the "silent treatment" to deal with differences, but it was only when we were confronted with a situation that required some really deep talk that we began to learn to communicate effectively.

Understanding how and why we had gotten to that point, working through the hurt, and rebuilding trust gave us a new appreciation of the healing power of honest communication. Since that point—almost twenty years ago—we have consistently tried to implement the ideas and suggestions we're now offering to you. We know these ideas work because our love and trust are now deeper and stronger than ever—solidly based on a shared, ongoing commitment to honesty and fairness.

We're not holding ourselves up as a perfect couple. On the contrary, we fully expect to continue the process of learning and working on our relationship. We still have high expectations of love, but they're based on experience and realistic possibilities rather than magical thinking.

We invite you to use our understandings and insights, not as the final answers to your problems but as a means of helping you find your own answers. You have the power to make your love last—and this book can help you do it.

Of course, the title of this book is misleading if you take it literally; you can't arbitrarily and unilaterally make love do anything. On the other hand, love doesn't come and go capriciously. This book is about the understandings you can reach and the specific things you can do that will make all the difference in the world in whether or not your love will stay.

Understanding Love and its Place in Your Life

Throughout the book we'll be giving you all kinds of specific actions to help make your love stay—but you really need a clear understanding of some basic ideas before you start. The first of these understandings is to recognize what's at stake. We're not talking about some little fringe issue in your life here. When all is said and done, having a long-term, loving relationship ranks toward the top of the list of the best of what life has to offer.

This book is different from most others in that it respects love's significance. We are presenting a way of looking at your love relationship in the context of your life as a whole. Our goal is to help you achieve a love that provides a solid place to stand in the world. Your love can be the kind of positive force in your life that lets you go out and face the world on a completely different basis than you could do otherwise.

In focusing on this goal, we are trying to avoid the pitfalls of the "romantic" approach to making love stay. We're elevating the meaning of a loving relationship beyond just achieving temporary pleasure. Part of our motivation for writing this book came from our growing frustration with the popular advice that's based on this short-sighted, superficial approach to sustaining (or reviving) love.

This is a book of substance for people who want the most from what love has to offer. It's simple without being simplistic and it's serious without being stuffy. We are suggesting a wide range of interconnected actions that are based on a deeper understanding of the nature of lasting love.

The Changing Nature of Love

The first step in making love stay is to understand that lasting love is not the same as the exciting, heady feelings of "falling in love." Love changes; it never remains the same—and trying to keep it from changing is sure to snuff it out.

Let's follow the course of the changes in the way you're likely to experience love. First, you fall in love. What a wonderful feeling! It's intoxicating and all-consuming. You can't think of anything else—and you can't keep your hands off each other. (Personally, we still refer to the beginning of our own relationship at age seventeen as our period of "young, hot love"—but, of course, these feelings aren't restricted to young people; they're typical of any new love at any age.)

Falling in love, or "new love," produces some of the most intense feelings you will ever experience. At its best, it seems too good to be real. It is real, but it won't last—at least, not in that form. Enjoy new love for the fantastic experience that it is, but recognize that much of the intensity of the feeling is inherent in its newness and novelty. You may wish these feelings would never end and you may go to all kinds of lengths to sustain them or to rekindle them when you feel them changing. But the popular tricks and gimmicks for maintaining that particular kind of excitement are doomed to fail.

While romantic touches are wonderful for stimulating exciting love-making and adding spice to your relationship, they aren't sufficient by themselves to build a lasting love. They may give your relationship a temporary shot in the arm—but it will quickly fade and you'll be right back where you started. This superficial approach just won't work over the long haul.

If the romantic fix doesn't work, you may wonder why there are so many books and so much advice about how to recapture the first flush of love and put the zing back in your marriage. Well, it's really not too hard to figure out. In a couple of key ways, that kind of advice about love is a lot like the books and advice about crash diets—based on the fantasy that there's a quick and easy way to do it.

Just like you can quickly lose some weight with a crash diet, you can quickly create a spark in your relationship with a sexy gimmick. Just as it's much easier to go on a specified diet for a specified period of time than to change your overall eating habits for life, it's also easier to pursue some specific sexual encounters than to change your overall ways of relating for life. But in both cases, this approach doesn't last. With the diet, you wind up regaining the weight and feeling even worse than before. And with your relationship, the temporary surge of feelings inevitably fades and things settle back to the way they were before (or worse) and you wind up feeling even more discouraged than ever.

Every failed attempt at dieting or failed attempt at reviving the feelings of "new love" leaves you feeling hopeless that anything will really work. At some point, you need to say NO to this up and down yo-yo and get serious about making real change. If you finally feel like saying, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore," then you're ready for this book and its solid, long-term approach to making love stay.

Letting Go of Myths

Myth: Love never changes.

Unfortunately, you sabotage your chances for lasting love if you think that the feelings associated with "falling in love" are the ultimate in loving. Romantic love is just the first stage of love, and it either evolves into a deeper, richer love—or it withers. Rejecting this myth is the only way to move beyond the initial stage of love to achieve the richness that's possible in a loving relationship. To make love stay, you must face your fear of losing it and consciously support the transition from new love to lasting love.

Lasting love is not a less desirable state; it's just different. It has its own unique form of intensity and excitement, both of which emerge from a deeper knowing of yourself and your partner. Eventually, in the best relationships, lasting love is based on the pleasure of full openness to another person—without anxiety, uncertainty, or fear. It surrounds you with a feeling that is both calming and deeply satisfying. In fact, it touches you at your very center and gives you a special sense of the worth of life itself.

Myth: Love conquers all.

You need to reject this myth because it takes a lot more than loving feelings to deal with the problems inherent in building a life together. Depending on love to sustain your relationship misses a crucial point. Life is not one beautiful sunset after another. Life includes some beautiful sunsets, some gray days, and some full-blown storms. You need a more solid basis for your love—one that gives you a better chance of enjoying the sunsets and weathering the storms.

Myth: We have a special love that will always bind us together.

While deep loving feelings can create a strong bond, it's an unfair burden to expect it to be sustained without being supported by your daily ways of relating to each other. A strong love is a great beginning, but building a life together takes a lot more than being in love. It takes compassion, understanding, compromise, communication, and creativity. Joint decisions have to be made about money, children, relatives, sex, time, and work. Values come into play that weren't considered at all in the decision to marry.

Myth: We were meant for each other.

It's great to feel you've found the "right" partner, but it's short-sighted to think that's all it takes. As childhood sweethearts who had known each other all our lives, we certainly felt we were meant for each other. But realistically, there is no such thing as only one "Mr. or Ms. Right" in the whole wide world. Certainly, it helps to feel you're starting off with the right person for you, but people change throughout their lives, so the right start only makes it possible to make your love stay; it's no guarantee.

Myth: We can't live without each other.

Grand passion certainly has it's place, but lasting love requires a great deal more. You need a relationship that's based on caring, commitment, respect, a sense of fairness, and a generally loving attitude toward your partner. Achieving this kind of relationship goes far beyond simply being "in love." In fact, the idea that you can't live without each other reflects a certain desperateness about the relationship that is likely to sabotage it's strength and vitality. This attitude causes any problem in the relationship to be seen as a life-or-death matter. Since all relationships have problems, this sets you up for a life of high anxiety.

Myth: Love just happens; you either feel it or you don't.

No, love is not magic. It can feel magical when things are going right. But love is actually the byproduct of all the attitudes and behaviors each of you brings to the relationship. Holding on to the idea that love exists in a vacuum only reinforces the false notion that the magical feeling of the first flush of new love is synonymous with LOVE in its full, lasting richness (the kind that provides you a firm place to stand in the world).

So why should you reject these myths? Because they bring you to a love relationship with very unrealistic expectations. Conflicts and misunderstandings are probably inevitable as you struggle to cope with a world you never imagined. Initially, new love keeps these in the background, but it won't do it indefinitely. As the initial passion of new love burns lower, the nitty-gritty issues of building a life with another person move into the foreground—and reality hits you like a boulder. By rejecting these myths you can be prepared to deal effectively with life's daily issues as they arise instead of being shocked and discouraged by their presence. So the idea isn't to avoid problems (which is impossible); it's to deal with them in a way that strengthens your relationship instead of weakening it.

What's needed is a life-long commitment on the part of both of you to deal directly and constructively with the myriad of issues involved in building a life together. Without such a commitment and without good coping skills, the anger, hurt, jealousy, and resentment that most partners collect from their unresolved issues gradually extinguish the love they believed would never die.

It need not be so. You do not have to join those who dissolve their relationships when they are unable to live together happily, and you do not have to resign yourself to hanging on in a relationship that is increasingly lifeless. You can direct the course of your love in a positive way, but you first need to rethink some of your attitudes and assumptions about love.

This is not a simple matter for most of us. The very fact that our ideas about love are based on assumptions means that we never thought through them in the first place; we just accepted them at face value. Unfortunately, most of our attitudes are based on fantasy and on the myths we've just discussed. You really can't get about the business of taking control of the course of your love until you question what it is you assume to be true—and update your beliefs to reflect reality.

Actually, if you could overcome all anxiety about making love stay and simply think clearly about what makes a difference in whether or not this happens, you'd find that deep down you already know these things. So we're not telling you anything new here. In a sense, we're giving you a "blinding glimpse of the obvious." You're sure to have a sense of "Aha, I knew that" as we identify the key insights involved in making love stay. Like many of the ideas in this books, they're things you have probably known at some point on some level, but you just forgot. So here's a reminder:

Five Insights about Making Love Stay

You entered your current relationship (or you will enter one) with a complex set of attitudes and habits regarding what love is about and the proper ways of showing your love. You learned them from the people that raised you, people you've observed, things you've read, movies you've seen, and people with whom you've had loving relationships. The same is true for your partner. Some of your beliefs and preferences are similar to your partner's and some are different, but when viewed as a whole each of you has a unique way of being in love.

It's not a question of who's right and who's wrong. No one ever has all the right answers. What's important is a willingness to look honestly at what you've already learned about love, a conscious effort to retain the good and throw out the bad, and an openness to continue learning what works best for the two of you.

For instance, one of you may think "Love means never having to say you're sorry," while the other thinks "Love means being willing to apologize for hurts and oversights—even if they're unintentional." One of you may think "The primary way of expressing love is through words, saying 'I love you' often," while the other thinks "The primary way of expressing love is through actions: showing love by way of doing loving things." One of you may think "Love means spending a great deal of time together," while the other thinks "Love means being in each other's thoughts, not necessarily in their presence."

It's disquieting to acknowledge that your views of love can be so different from your partner's, that some of your most cherished beliefs about love aren't valid, and that the absolute security promised by true love isn't really possible. The whole idea of security is actually a negative one; it reinforces feelings of fear and anxiety based on needing constant reassurance. It also takes you out of being "in the flow" of whatever is really happening in your relationship.

It's futile to try to hold on to some static condition while life is moving right along. It's very much like the old proverb about entering a running stream: "You can never step in the same water twice." By trying to hold on to security, you're holding back the exciting growth in your relationship that's not only beneficial, but essential if it's to last. As you and your partner increase your ability to care for each other and your relationship, you'll recognize that whatever discomfort you feel at discarding your attachment to security will recede into the background. You'll see that you're not really giving up anything that was real in the first place; you're simply getting rid of excess baggage that interferes with lasting love.

Popular songs tell us that true love overcomes everything and that it lasts forever. It ain't necessarily so. The danger in believing that true love has an omnipotent quality is that you may sit back and fail to do the ordinary day-to-day things that are needed to sustain love. A love relationship does not have a life of its own; it has the life you and your partner give it.

While this is a complex undertaking, it's quite manageable when broken down into the specific actions you need to take to sustain the quality of your love. Those actions are detailed in the individual entries that form the core of this book. The entire book is made up of simple, straightforward actions you can take to make your love stay.

This is the best news of all: the actions we're suggesting are within the capabilities of virtually everyone. Viewed one at a time, they are simple and easy to do. That doesn't mean you can simply memorize these suggestions and go through the motions of doing them in a rote kind of way. The actions will only be effective if they are part of a pattern and if they are performed with genuine caring, understanding, and sensitivity.

Most of us sense whether our partner is "being real" versus just acting in whatever way they think we want them to act. A superficial effort to do and say the "right" things without first getting your heart in the right place is likely to backfire. As the comedian George Carlin says in one of his routines, "You gotta wanna..." It's not enough to begrudgingly do these things; you've really got to want to do them by virtue of understanding their importance and their benefit—if you're really serious about making love stay.

So as you go through the book, you'll notice that ideas on any given issue appear in many different places. While we've organized the items according to general themes, the same theme shows up in many places. For instance, early in the book we talk about a basic issue for most couples: finding a workable balance between needs for commitment and freedom. A little further over in focusing on time and the need to respect individual needs for time alone, we point out how some people are suspicious of their partner's commitment if they spend much time apart. And still later on in discussing feelings of jealousy, we describe the way possessiveness can feel like an infringement on a person's freedom. So no one page says all there is to say about a given issue. Each entry is like a small snapshot; taken all together they form the bigger picture of what's involved in making love stay.

You may feel that work absorbs a disproportionate amount of your time, attention, and energy, leaving too little of these precious resources for love relationships. Many of you are no doubt living in circumstances where you don't know your immediate neighbors, and the community support for marriage and family which existed for many of your parents is noticeably missing.

The sheer complexity of life today forces you to make more decisions about how to live than previous generations. But the key to effectively dealing with these outside forces is to see yourselves as a couple, facing these pressures together. The pressures don't have to place a wedge between you; they can, in fact, strengthen your bond. For instance, we're fond our reminding each other whenever the going gets tough that it's "It's you and me against the world."

So the daily battles of life can be more easily fought when you're clear about where you stand in your relationship. Placing a high premium on the condition of your love doesn't mean not functioning in other areas of your life. Instead, it means having a "place" (like a port in the storm) to take yourselves to continually.

We hope you're getting a clear sense that the ultimate payoff of working to make love stay is much greater than just the quality of your relationship. It affects the way you relate to the world at large. Lasting love tends to broaden your focus instead of restricting you, allowing you to function more effectively in all areas of your life. As we mentioned earlier, it's gives you a special strength from which face the world at large.

4.	The likelihood of sustaining love in a relationship is much greater when you both participate.

In our society, women have traditionally been expected to take care of relationships. As long as women accept this as their role, there's little incentive for men to do their part. Unfortunately, this creates a lot of misunderstanding. A woman may get pretty discouraged at the condition of the relationship if she feels she's the only one trying to sustain its quality. And a man whose partner is assuming this responsibility may think there's no problem with the relationship as long as she's taking care of it. Meanwhile, the relationship is going downhill fast.

Both you and your partner need to be responsible for the life you're creating together. It is not sufficient to leave it to either one alone. If you're the only one actively involved in attending to your relationship, you can't force your partner to participate; you can only encourage them by continually improving your own loving skills. But you also can't expect that your partner will automatically reciprocate just because you are committed to relating in a loving way. You can wait a very long time if you assume they'll eventually respond to your one-sided effort to have a good relationship.

This book can be the vehicle that allows you to cut through the standoff and clarify what's important to each of you—then concentrate on those specific things. It's a lot easier to focus on a few key issues one at a time than to tackle the whole big issue of "the condition of our relationship." You can't get by with a once-a-year report like the State of the Union Address the President gives each year on the condition of the country. You need to have an ongoing sense of how things are going so they don't get so far off track that it feels impossible to get them back.

There is a proper place for exchanging formal vows such as those in a public wedding for those who choose to do it, and periodically renewing such vows can also be helpful, but putting a promise in writing and reciting it in public are not enough to make love stay. That's like buying a beautiful plant and never watering it. It may have cost a good bit and you may profess to value it. You may even have every intention of taking care of it. But you're busy, you're distracted by other things—and you still see the plant through the image in your mind's eye of its initial beauty when you bought it. Meanwhile, it's gradually losing its vitality—and if you wait too long to notice what's happening, it may be too late.

Love is not so different from a plant in that it too needs nourishment and ongoing attention in order to grow. Consciously doing loving things in a timely way is essential to making love stay. This kind of attention doesn't have to take a lot of time, a lot of money, or a lot of energy. It can be as quick as a smile or a kiss hello. It can be as inexpensive as the gift of caring demonstrated by an unexpected offer to run an errand or make a phone call. It can be as simple as sitting together watching a sunset or watching your children at play.

You can open this book to almost any page and get a sense of something you can do to enrich your love. Most of the ideas arise out of a loving attitude. It's not so much the specific act as the attitude with which you do it that keeps your love alive. Love can't be frozen in time and put on the shelf. So enjoy the memory of whatever initial vows or promises you made to each other, but remember that was only the beginning—not the be-all, end-all of your love.

The Payoff is Well Worth the Effort

If you have some resistance to working to make your love stay, it may be based on feeling that love should be effortless—not something you have to work at. But it's really not work in the way we usually think of work. Actually, it can be a tremendous source of energy, joy, and satisfaction, but only if you reframe the way you think about work and love—and only if you reorder your priorities to give it the place it deserves.

Yes, it takes time and energy, but once you get a sense of the incredible payoff for your effort, you won't be able to imagine living any other way. It's a little like the experience you may have had with exercise. If you start by seeing exercise only as something you ought to do, you're likely to dread the time and energy it takes. Many people never get past their negative attitude toward exercise to experience the true benefits. If you're a person who values fitness and knows from firsthand experience the benefits of exercise, you know that the positive results outweigh the time and energy it takes—and whatever resistance you may have had gives way to wanting to do it.

Of course, just as you need to start with an exercise you enjoy, you need to start with a person you genuinely love. It figures that you can't "make love stay" if you don't start with a real love in the first place. But assuming you start with the raw material, then you're ready to build on that beginning. That's what this book aims to help you do.

Reading sections of it aloud with your partner and discussing your reactions can provide a way to talk about some issues that you may not have found a way to address previously. This can also enable you to nip some problems in the bud and avoid others altogether. Above all, use these ideas in a positive way—to find better ways of relating to your partner—not to show them their attitudes or behaviors are wrong.

This book can be used in several other ways, according to your mood at the moment and your goal. You can use it as a handbook, picking it up and reading it at any point and referring to it at random. You're likely to discover ideas that you had forgotten or lost sight of and be reminded to focus on them again.

Or you can use it as a reference, going directly to whatever points that deal with the particular issues you see as most relevant to your current (or past) relationship. In fact, we've indexed it so you can quickly find the ideas that are most relevant to some specific issue. But, of course, no issue exists in isolation; everything is connected to everything else.

Or you can read it all the way through from front to back to get an overall perspective. In fact, you'd miss a great deal of the benefit of the book if you don't do this at some point. So we recommend that you get your own sense of the way the various points in the book fit together by following the way we describe the stages of the process involved in making love stay.

Since this is a complex undertaking, it's impractical to lay out a precise guide that fits for everyone, but there are some fundamental processes that apply to everyone, and the order in which you work on these processes can make a significant difference. So we've organized the book in a way to make sense of that process. Each of the seven chapters addresses one of the steps involved in this process of making love stay.

This first chapter focuses on the importance of getting a basic understanding of the nature of love and its place in your life. In Chapter 2 we will show you "the path to making love stay"—which happens to be honest communication. Chapter 3 addresses the critical issues, which we call "core issues," that lie beneath the day-to-day stresses, strains, and joys of your relationship. In Chapter 4, we discuss the nitty-gritty issues of daily living that stimulate most of the differences you will face as a couple. Then in Chapter 5 we talk about ways to handle the negative reactions to your differences. Chapter 6 describes the strategies and processes you can use to sustain your love. And the last chapter reinforces what you've learned by showing you the benefits of following this path.

So we're taking you step by step through the building blocks of making your love stronger and better with every passing day. By the time you're finished, you'll have a realistic perspective of lasting love and some tools to help you achieve it. But, of course, we can only make suggestions; it's up to you (and your partner) to make it happen.