make the other wrong.
Gradually, our relationship became easier and warmer. To our astonishment, we were even able to recapture some of the earlier magical chemistry of Stage One. Meanwhile, our friendship also deepened. As we continued to replace our endless arguments with more acceptance, humor, and generosity, we moved into Stage Five, Wholehearted Love. Although we are not able to stay there all of the time, it is the “home base” we go back to again and again.
Love Skills will teach you the very best of the skills we learned that got us through the earlier stages of love. With the right tools, practice, and patience, you can get there too, time and time again.
A Crash Course on Love
Here’s the truth about intimate relationships: the conflicts you face right now may never disappear. You and your partner may always hold different perspectives about child-rearing, money, the best vacation spots, and how to properly clean the bathroom. But the good news is, the ways you manage these differences can change profoundly. As you develop the emotional and interpersonal skills described in these pages, your conflicts with your partner will become less painful and destructive — and your relationship can begin to thrive again.
This workbook is a companion to my first book, Love Cycles: The Five Essential Stages of Lasting Love. This first book describes the five stages of intimate relationships in detail, illuminating the behaviors associated with each stage and strategies for successfully navigating them. This companion manual, Love Skills, is a practical guide to help you design your own tool kit for creating and maintaining a loving relationship. It’s a do-it-yourself version of the Love Skills program that you can use at your leisure. Consider it a self-exploration guide, one you can work with either alone or with your partner. These pages are filled with information, exercises, activities, self-assessments, and other tangible tools to help you understand where you are in your relationship cycle now and how to foster the self-awareness, communication, conflict management, and empathy you need to weather all of love’s seasons.
Awareness comes first. This workbook begins by helping you to answer critical questions about your relationship and yourself. For example: Why do I try to change the very qualities in my partner that most charmed me at the outset? Where did easy loving and juicy sex go? Does it make sense to start all over with someone else? How do my personality type and family history affect my view of myself and others?
This book then offers specific, effective solutions to the most common struggles that couples face — both the small troubles and the more serious dilemmas of communication gridlock, betrayal, and seemingly intractable differences. I will provide a clear map for moving forward with these issues and address how to most productively approach arguments, including the importance of establishing connection before dealing with conflict. I will also offer several types of quick, well-researched practices to help keep love alive and thriving during all five stages.
A key message of many of these lessons is “The wave is not the ocean” — that is, the times that feel intolerable between you and your partner do not mean the conflict is an all-encompassing, permanent state. There will always be another wave, another opportunity. When you know how to navigate the storms, conflict can lead to understanding and even closeness that makes your relationship even better than it was before. In most cases, the Love Skills process will help you to rediscover the original promise of your relationship and offer you a road map for traveling this rewarding and challenging path.
Before you get started, keep one rule in mind: don’t make this book another war in your relationship. Anything can be used as fodder for a fight, even resources meant to assist and enrich. If you invite your partner to accompany you on this journey, make sure both of you are involved only as much as you want to be. A partner’s half-hearted or begrudging attempt to mend a relationship may only end up opening more wounds.
If you have a reluctant partner, then do the work for yourself. I believe one person’s growth can often initiate change in both people; if not, it will lead you into your own wholehearted best self. As I said, awareness comes first. With any relationship work, the vital first step is to become more aware of our own not-so-healthy behaviors — perhaps our hair-trigger reactivity, a reluctance to forgive, or a tenacious need to be right. Once we understand and acknowledge our own role in our relationship challenges, we can use this awareness to begin to practice more thoughtful and loving behaviors.
This process is neither quick nor easy. Love is a feeling, intense and joyful. But the practice of loving another person is hard work — the work of a lifetime. And of course, some relationships present more challenges than others. As we begin to learn about our own needs, some of us may find that changes in ourselves resulting from this process actually create more distance in our relationship. If this happens, this book will help you take the healthy next steps forward.
How to Use This Book
Love Skills can be completed individually, by a couple, or a mixture of both. Although this is a book about relationships, a significant portion of the work must be done by each person alone first — after all, all couples are comprised of two separate people, who each come with their own unique set of past experiences, ways of thinking, and areas for growth. (Differentiation, the fact that we are two individuals who are both separate and connected and not half of a whole, is a key tenet of wholehearted love, which you’ll soon learn.) If you choose to work on this book together with a partner, you can complete the individual exercises alone and then share your findings with each other; many activities include specific instructions for ways to share. You may each want your own copy of Love Skills, so that you can do the readings separately and have your own space to complete written exercises. Or you may choose to share one copy of the workbook and write responses in separate notebooks.
Of course, there are many couples-specific exercises throughout this book as well. If you’re working on the program alone, you can invite your partner to join you for specific joint exercises you want to try, or you can simply read through them on your own to glean the knowledge and then move on.
Love Skills is crafted to be accessible, relatable, and easy to understand no matter where you are in your self-development and relationship journey. That said, it’s no walk in the park. Completing these exercises, particularly with a partner, will push you to confront raw emotions and difficult experiences from your past, and it will require you to treat yourself with honesty, patience, and compassion. That vulnerability may come easily for some and feel challenging, upsetting, or even threatening for others. Move slowly. Be mindful of your partner’s limitations and your own.
Importantly, this book is not intended as a replacement for therapy. It will not heal domestic violence, serious breaches of trust, or severe psychological wounds. In cases of depression, addiction, affairs, trauma, and/or abuse, always seek the help of a professional.
An ideal time to use this workbook is during moments of inner quiet, when your mind is open to growing and learning. But it can also be helpful in times of relationship trouble or when you want to address bumps and snags in a largely satisfying connection. Some may gravitate toward the book out of natural curiosity and a desire to demystify the concept of wholehearted love, while others might dive into the Love Cycles approach as part of a larger ongoing effort to more consciously sustain an important relationship.
There’s no “right way” to use this manual. You might set aside a single evening for you and your partner to dig into a handful of exercises relevant to your particular relationship, or the two of you may decide to return to the material once a week to delve into the program gradually. Alternately, you might prefer to explore every section and activity on your own and complete small portions on a daily basis. Feel free to delve deeply into the sections that particularly intrigue you,
