Build a Life Long Love Affair
Bloomsbury Publishing, February 2011 Buy
Love can not only last forever but be just as vibrant five, fifteen and fifty years after you first meet. The secret is to not only understand how love changes, deepens and grows but to learn to head-off any problems. Although we give our car or boiler regular services – because these are things that we rely on and know it is better to fix minor glitches than wait until they become major problems – when it comes to something as important as our relationship, many people close their eyes and hope for the best.
In this practical book, I draw on twenty-five years of counselling couples to design a programme that gives your relationship the once over, tightens up any niggling problems and keeps it running smoothly.
Discover the six stages of love and their particular challenges and rewards.
Learn how to speak each others special love language.
- Boost real intimacy and keep passion alive.
- Discover how small changes can have a truly big impact.
- Test how many of the six skills of successful couples that you and your partner
possess.
Who will find this book useful?
Anyone just starting out together will discover all the information they need to keep their relationship happy and healthy. It is also helpful for couples who have been together for many years and have a ‘good enough’ relationship but want to be closer. Finally, I think it will help anyone who has been single for a long time as they often have no idea what a happy relationship would look like – especially if their parents rowed a lot or split up – and therefore have no yardstick to measure what are ‘normal’ every day problems and what are fundamental flaws.
Full disclosure
The majority of this book has been drawn from ‘I love you but I’m not in love with you’. Many readers told me the knowledge, exercises and case histories would help their friends or family members even if they hadn’t fallen out of love but thought the title would them off. So if you’ve read ‘ILYB’ and would like to pass on the learning this book could be the answer. Apparently, the title also caused rows in some households when the other half thought it was a declaration that the relationship was over – while in reality the purchase was an attempt to improve it. I hope this new title will avoid these problems. So this is a warning, I suppose, if you’ve read ILYB this book could be a disappointment. There is new material about keeping sexual desire alive – that I added to the US edition which came out a year later than the UK one – and if you rushed through ILYB in a moment of panic, it might help to read ‘Build a life-long love affair’ as new things will leap out that perhaps you didn’t register first time round. (I think we generally get the learning we need at the time.) However, if you’ve kept ILYB by your bed and read it several times – you will be better getting another in the Seven Step series.
‘None of our myths is stronger than ‘love conquers all’ but this is
only part of the story – determination, courage and investing time are equally important’ Andrew G Marshall
