Love Busters: Overcoming Habits That Destroy Romantic Love

Product Information

We cannot love someone effectively until we know them well. That takes time and it also takes some focused attention and conscious effort. It’s more than just knowing what their favourite food is, or where they went to school. We need to know what their Love Needs and Love Busters are. Love Needs… Independent behaviour is the conduct of one spouse that ignores the other’s feelings. It’s usually scheduled and requires some thought to executing. Examples include sporting events you attend or your exercise program. Solution Dr. Harley earned a Ph.D. degree in psychology from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1967 and has been a Licensed Psychologist in Minnesota since 1975. For the first ten years after earning his degree, he taught psychology at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. During those years, he was also a frustrated part-time marriage counselor with little success in helping couples.

I call all the ways that spouses are inconsiderate of each other's feelings Love Busters because that what they do — they destroy the love that a husband and wife have for each other. Finally, the sixth Love Buster, Annoying Habits, is behavior that is repeated without much thought that bothers your spouse. Marriage is a partnership of incredibly close quarters, where just about anything you or your spouse does is almost sure to affect the other. If you want to stay in love with each other, your habits, even the innocent ones, should make Love Bank deposits, not withdrawals. But how should you change your habits, so they are no longer annoying? It begins with realising that your annoying habits are damaging your relationship. So first, tell each other that eliminating annoying habits is a high priority for both of you. And then ask each other what annoys you the most, write it down, and go to work with a plan to end whatever bad habits you find. Why do you engage in Love Busters? Why do you cause your spouse to be unhappy? One of the most important reasons is that, while they may make your spouse feel bad, they make you feel good. Most Love Busters gain pleasure for you at your spouse's expense. When your spouse complains about them, you rationalize your behavior and explain away the fact that you are simply thoughtless and selfish. The fourth Love Buster, Dishonesty, causes massive Love Bank withdrawals whenever it's discovered. And spouses usually discover each other's dishonesty because of their emotional closeness to each other. If you or your spouse have a tendency to lie or distort the truth, chase that bad habit out of your marriage before it ruins everything.

I can't help it: every time I say or read the title of this book, it's always to the tune of Ghostbusters. When was the last time your spouse did something that annoyed you? Annoying habits don’t seem all that important — but they still drive us crazy! But when our behaviour annoys others, we tend to downplay the whole problem. The one part that I found really strong and actually useful is on the topic of angry outbursts, which the author correctly calls out for being abusive and incredibly damaging. The suggestions on how to work through it seems solid, but I was disappointed that there wasn't any real discussion on what to do if your partner is the one with the angry outbursts.

Disrespectful judgment is a way of presenting our problems as if they are our spouse’s faults. So we try to “straighten out” our partner to get our way. We attempt to convince ourselves that our opinion is superior to our spouse’s. I have adapted ideas in this post from the “ His needs, her needs” book by Willard F. Harley, Jr. (No affiliation, just respect for a great author).

Now what?

I've found that the most common Love Busters in marriage fall into six categories: Selfish Demands, Disrespectful Judgments, Angry Outbursts, Dishonesty, Independent Behavior and Annoying Habits. By 1988 he found himself spending almost all of his time administering his clinics, and very little time doing what he enjoyed most -- improving his marital therapy program. So he began turning his clinics over to the counselors who worked with him, and the ownership of his last clinic was transferred in 1993. Since then, he has written 16 more books and hundreds of articles. A huge part of the book is merely so-so, giving out general advice (your relationship is like a love bank, you need to make more deposits than withdrawals), which has been around for a long time.

One of the most important consequences of our emotional isolation is that we cannot feel the way we affect others. And that creates the temptation to hurt others because in doing so we don't feel the pain we cause. If we were connected emotionally to others as the aliens were, we would be far less tempted to do anything thoughtless, gaining at someone else's expense. That's because in so doing, we would be hurting ourselves as well. The fifth Love Buster is Independent Behavior, the conduct of one spouse that ignores the feelings and interests of the other spouse. If your decisions are made as if your spouse doesn't even exist, you will find yourself running roughshod over your spouse's feelings and your Love Bank account. Since it's usually scheduled and requires some thought to execute, the simplest way to overcome it is to take it off your schedule. And if you follow the Policy of Joint Agreement, Independent Behavior will never find itself on your schedule in the first place. I've designed the Love Busters Questionnaire to help you identify the Love Busters in your marriage. Two questionnaires should be completed: One for you and one for your spouse.

Before you complete these questionnaires, you should be familiar with the description of Love Busters. As a love buster, disrespectful judgements breed unhappiness, disagreement and conflicts.Therefore, you could sabotage your marriage if you regularly disrespect your spouse. Solution You'd think that doing something that causes unhappiness would be the last thing a married couple would ever want to do to each other. And yet, yet it's done instinctively and habitually in every marriage. Love Busters is heterocentric, and perpetuates old and tired stereotypes of gender essentialism. It advocates complete honesty, that a couple must enthusiastically agree on everything (including the wife asking for help with the dishes), no independent behaviour, and if you have any habits your partner dislikes you must change. Once we know our spouse’s Love Needs and Love Busters it’s pretty simple really – meet the needs and avoid the busters. But it only works if you make a plan and commit to implementing it. Good plans meet three criteria – Achievable (simple to do and reasonably likely to succeed), Specific (not open ended but detailed enough to know when you do or don’t do it) and Positive (that is, the task focusses on what you will do rather than what you will avoid).