Since so much personal and familial happiness depends on the success of marriage, you’d think that couples would approach their relationship with a careful plan to ensure success. But sadly, most don’t give their marriages much thought until it’s almost too late.
About half of all marriages end in divorce, and most of the others are a bitter disappointment. Very few marriages, about 20 percent, or 1 in 5, turn out to be as fulfilling as couples hoped they would be.
I’d like your marriage to be one of these exceptions.
I’ve written this blog to help you avoid the tragedy of a divorce or even an unfulfilling marriage. I’d like to show you how a happy marriage/ relationship works.
If you are still in love, this blog will help you stay in love! But if you’ve already lost some of the passion you once had for each other, I’d like to help you recover it in a spectacular way.
My recommendations have helped countless couples replace marital pain with marital pleasure, and you can be one of them! Let’s Dive In!!
How Marriages Turn Sour
In most marriages, the love a couple once had for each other eventually turns to apathy or even hate. How does that happen? It’s something you must fully understand if you want to avoid that experience. To help you understand the rise and fall of the feeling of love, I’ve invented a concept that I call the Love Bank.
It also helps me explain how a couple can restore their feeling of love for each other after it’s been lost. Within all of us is a Love Bank that contains accounts in the names of all of the people we know.
It keeps track of the way people treat us. When someone does something that makes us feel good, love units are deposited into their account. And when that person does something that makes us feel bad, love units are withdrawn.
If someone makes us feel good more often than they make us feel bad, that person builds a positive Love Bank balance. If, on the other hand, he or she tends to make us feel bad more often, they end up with a negative balance.
Our emotions check our Love Bank regularly to determine who is affecting us positively and who isn’t. With that evidence, they encourage us to spend more time with those with positive balances by making them attractive to us.
On the other hand, our emotions encourage us to avoid people who have negative balances by making those people feel repulsive. We have very little control over these feelings, and they are based almost entirely on Love Bank balances. We like people with positive balances and dislike those with negative balances.
Why Relationships Start
Once in a while, someone of the opposite sex comes along who makes us feel absolutely sensational. That’s because they meet one or more of our most important emotional needs.
When that happens, so many love units are deposited that his or her account breaks through what I call the romantic love threshold. Our emotions are so impressed with that high balance that they give us added incentive to spend more time with that person: they give us the feeling of love—romantic love.
Recommended Reading: 27 Signs You're Falling In LoveWe don’t merely find that person attractive. We find that person irresistible! And along with that feeling goes a desire to spend our lives with whoever has that high Love Bank balance.
Marriage is an easy choice when Love Bank balances are above the romantic love threshold. That’s how you probably felt when you were first married. You were in love. You met each other’s most important emotional needs so effectively while dating that your Love Bank balances breached the romantic love threshold.
Recommended Reading: Should You Marry (Pros & Cons)Once in love, you couldn’t imagine being apart—or out of love with each other.
How A Relationship Starts Failing
Before marriage, while a couple is dating, they usually try to deposit a tremendous number of love units by doing things that make each other very happy—they want to meet each other’s emotional needs. They also try to avoid doing whatever might make each other unhappy.
If they fail to please each other and fail to avoid hurting each other, their relationship doesn’t usually make it to the altar. It’s usually only those who find each other irresistible who want to be together for the rest of their lives.
But unfortunately, after marriage, most couples fail to keep their Love Bank balances above the romantic love threshold. Their new responsibilities in life prevent them from doing as good a job meeting each other’s emotional needs.
And they begin doing things that are annoying and selfish. They don’t try as hard to be thoughtful as they did before marriage. When that happens, they lose their feeling of love for each other.
But it gets worse.
How A Relationship Goes From Bad To Worse
When a couple loses their romantic love for each other, the instincts that made it easy for them to meet each other’s emotional needs while in love seem to disappear. Now, they don’t feel like meeting those needs as they did before.
Failure to meet those needs makes it tempting to become controlling and abusive in order to get the job done; this is when spouses try to force each other to meet those needs. Such tactics not only fail to help spouses achieve their goals, but they also drive Love Bank balances below zero. What had been a feeling of attraction turns into a feeling of repulsion?
It’s not uncommon for a couple who started out feeling that they would love each other forever to come to the conclusion that their marriage was the biggest mistake of their lives. And it’s all due to Love Bank balances.
If a couple can simply keep their Love Bank balances above the romantic love threshold, they will have a marriage full of passion for the rest of their lives. But because they allow their balances to drop below that threshold, they lose their feeling of love for each other. And then, in a misguided effort to address the problem, they often hurt each other, driving their Love Bank balances into negative territory.
Recommended Reading: What Your Partner Needs From YouHow A Relationship Goes From Worse To Hatred
Of all the people you know; you are more likely to hate your spouse than anyone else. And your spouse is more likely to hate you than anyone else. Since you may not believe me or may think I am exaggerating; I will use the Love Bank analogy to help me explain to you why this is such a common experience in marriage.
Most of our personal relationships are voluntary. That is, we choose those we spend time with, and they choose us. And the primary basis for that choice is usually how we feel about that person, which, in turn, depends on their Love Bank balances.
Those people with positive balances feel attractive to us, so we want to spend time with them. The more deposits they make, the more we like them and the more we choose to be with them. On the other hand, our emotions encourage us to avoid those whose Love Bank accounts are in the red. These are the people who make us unhappy.
So, by avoiding these people, we prevent them from making even more withdrawals. Since we don’t give them an opportunity to withdraw as many love units as they might, we usually don’t dislike these people very much—we “close their account” before things get that bad.
But there are some people who are not easy to avoid. At work, at home, in our churches, clubs, or community activities, we have to deal with certain people whether we like them or not. These are the ones we can grow to hate because we give them an opportunity to keep making Love Bank withdrawals until their account reaches the hate threshold.
That’s the negative balance that our emotions use to trigger an intense feeling of repulsion toward someone who has consistently and repeatedly made us unhappy. Just as our emotions give us added incentive (the feeling of incredible attraction) to be with those with accounts over the romantic love threshold, our emotions give us added incentive (the feeling of incredible repulsion) to avoid those with accounts under the hate threshold.
You might find another job or switch churches to avoid someone who treats you badly enough. Uncles, aunts, cousins, and other extended family members can be avoided, at least for most of the year.
It is possible to avoid brothers and sisters, or even parents, with greater effort. But a spouse is almost impossible to avoid, especially if you have children, un- less you separate or divorce. So it should come as no surprise that the person in the best position to make massive withdrawals from their account in your Love Bank is your spouse.
And you are in the best position to make massive withdrawals from your account in your spouse’s Love Bank. For that reason, you and your spouse are more likely to hate each other than anyone else.
You are each other’s hardest person to avoid—regardless of how miserable you make each other feel. Day after day, month after month, year after year, you and your spouse can withdraw love units by making demands of each other, criticizing each other, being angry with each other, lying to each other, engaging in thoughtless activities, and annoying each other with disgusting habits.
And what can you do about it? What can you do to get each other to stop? You do what most people do: Dish it back as fast as it comes. If you’re miserable, then, by golly, you’ll both be miserable.
Your instinct is to destroy the one who is upsetting you, and almost all couples respond that way when Love Bank accounts fall into the red. When a married couple’s relationship starts on a downward slide, Love Bank withdrawals usually gain momentum.
Recommended Reading: Solutions To The Endless FightingInstead of caring for each other, spouses devise increasingly painful strategies to pay each other back for the last thoughtless act. As negative Love Bank balances increase, the feelings of anger and disrespect increase.
Because they live together, a couple cannot avoid each other, and withdrawals continue unabated.
The end result is often the violence that comes from a deep and pervasive hatred. By that time, their only choice seemed to be either a divorce or to have as little to do with each other as possible. They give up on trying to care for each other and decide instead to ignore each other and live as independently as possible.
While that may minimize Love Bank withdrawals, it makes marital fulfillment impossible. They give up on ever having the marriage that they had once hoped to have. The best way to avoid this tragedy, of course, is to keep Love Bank balances above the romantic love threshold.
Recommended Reading: 19 Actions To Show Your Spouse You Love ThemOr, if they fall below that threshold or even fall into the negative range, do what it takes to bring those balances back up again. And what it takes, of course, is to affect each other positively and avoid affecting each other negatively.
Conclusion
All the best intentions, sincere vows, and honest efforts cannot substitute for a substantial Love Bank account. The Love Bank determines who we marry, and it usually determines whether or not we’ll be divorced.
Therefore, it is tremendously important to understand how to build Love Bank accounts and how to avoid withdrawals once deposits have been made.
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