The Relationship Solution

How to turn any relationship into a passionate, life long love affair.

The Relationship Solution: Five secrets of lasting love

- by Gay Hendricks, Ph.D. And Kathlyn Hendricks, Ph.D

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 be-
come 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 re-
lationship. 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 ap-
pear 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 com-
mitments 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 situa-
tion 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 relation-
ships while turning on the flow of intimacy and creativity.

The Lasting Love program offers a specific set of commit-
ments we've thoroughly tested with many couples. "When cou-
ples make these commitments, their relationships thrive.

THE SECOND SECRET

If you want a long-term relationship that's both close and cre-
atively 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 hes-
itation 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 cre-
atively 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 cou-
ples simply went one full day without criticizing or blaming
each other. As a concept, the idea of giving up blame and criti-
cism is often greeted with derision. "Impossible," some say.
"How boring," say others. We have found that it's actually pos-
sible and anything but boring. The couple who is deeply ad-
dicted 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 fo-
cusing 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 cre-
ativity. 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 com-
plaint. 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 vi-
tality 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 sponta-
neously 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 ap-
preciation 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 re-
sults 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 apprecia-
tions, 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 rela-
tionship 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.
 

Spirit Centered Relationships

What is a spirit-centered relationship, and how can you bring
more genuine love into your life?

To answer these questions, tune in to yourself to find out if
this is what your heart desires in a close relationship:

1. You feel connected to your own spiritual
essence—your true self—in all the ups and
downs of daily living.

2. You and your partner feel connected on
the spiritual level, both in times of stress
as well as in times of joy and abundance.

3. You grow creatively as independent individuals at the
same time that you grow closer together in intimacy.

4. You feel an abundant flow of creative energy because
you don't squander it on conflicts that are never resolved.

5. You and your beloved learn to love so generously
and wisely that your relationship becomes a sacred
treasure to you and an inspiration to others.

If this is the kind of relationship your heart desires, then
you'll find the Relationship Solution liberating, practical, and
soul-satisfying.

More about the Relationship Solution