Willard F. Jr. Harley - I Promise You: Preparing for a Marriage That Will Last a Lifetime

Other books by Willard F. Harley, Jr.

Defending Traditional Marriage
Fall in Love, Stay in Love
Five Steps to Romantic Love
Give and Take
His Needs, Her Needs
I Cherish You
Love Busters
Marriage Insurance
Moms Needs, Dads Needs (His Needs, Her Needs for Parents)
The One (Buyers, Renters, and Freeloaders)
Surviving an Affair
Your Love and Marriage

1998, 2006 by Willard F. Harley, Jr.

Published by Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.revellbooks.com

Ebook edition created 2012

The core content of this book was previously published under the title The Four Gifts of Love . Material has also been taken from His Needs, Her Needs and Fall in Love, Stay in Love by Willard F. Harley, Jr.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansfor example, electronic, photocopy, recordingwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

eISBN 978-1-58558-703-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Soon youll be standing before a minister and youll be asked to repeat very important promises to each otherpromises to love and care for each other, protect each other, and spend the rest of your lives together. Youll make those promises before God, your family, your friends, and all who have come to witness your marriage. Youll exchange rings that symbolize your commitment to those promises. But when you make them, will you really understand what they mean? And will you keep them every day for the rest of your lives?

Care. Protection. Honesty. Time. These are the four key promises I encourage you to make to each otherand to keep for a lifetime. Youve probably done these things for each other throughout your courtship. Its what people in love doand its why you fell in love in the first place. When these four promises are kept, they create and sustain the feeling of love. If you continue to keep them, youll be as much in love throughout your entire marriage as you are now and on your wedding day. But if you stopas many couples do after marriageyour love will be lost and your marriage will be threatened. If you want to experience a lifetime of love together, you need to make these promises to each other at your wedding and then keep them throughout your lives together.

As a marriage counselor, I have devoted my life to helping couples turn their marriages from tragic into sensational. Usually the couples who seek my help have done so much damage to their relationship that its hard to believe that their marriage could ever be saved. Theyve failed to provide each other with care, protection, honesty, and time for so long that their love is a distant memory. Yet if they learn to make and keep the four key promises to each other, their love will be restored and their marriage back on solid ground. But why didnt they begin their marriage the right way? Those wasted years of sadness could have been among their best years together. It didnt have to happen. And if you and your fianc(e) learn to keep those promises even before your marriage begins, it wont happen to you. Your marriage will be happy right from the very beginning and throughout your lives together.

We Marry for Love

Why did you and your fianc(e) decide to marry? Did you discuss the pros and cons of your lifelong marriage with your friends and relatives? Did you take a test to determine if you are compatible? Did you find that you each meet objective criteria that predict marital success?

You may have done some of those things, but even if you did, I doubt that they had much effect on your decision. Most couples marry each other because they are in love and cannot imagine living without each other. They marry because they find each other irresistible. Im guessing the same is true for you.

Thats how it was for me and my wife, Joyce. Long before I asked her to marry me, we both knew that we could not possibly be happy without each other. I was in love with her and she with me. We spent part of every day with each other and talked together for hours at a time.

We broke up a few times to date others, but whenever that happened, we missed each other terribly. Ultimately we realized that life without each other would be a tragic mistake, so we married much sooner than we had originally planned. Joyce was only nineteen; I was twenty-one.

Forty-three years later, with two married children and four grandchildren, we still cannot imagine what life would be without each other. And we still find each other irresistible.

But Joyce and I are not still in love because we were meant for each other. It might seem that way, but it isnt true. The reason were in love is that we have consistently done things for each other that have kept our love alive. For forty-three years we have been keeping the four promises.

Before we look at each of these promises, and how they can guarantee your love for each other and the success of your marriage, lets look first at how the feeling of love works. What is it that made you fall in love with each other? And what could cause you to lose that love?

Romantic Love and the Love Bank

The feeling of loveI call it romantic love is quite predictable. Its that predictability that makes me so successful in saving marriages. I know what creates romantic love, what destroys it, and what can sustain it for a lifetime. I use that knowledge to help married couples recapture romantic love for each other even after they think its been lost for good.

I want you to acquire that same knowledge so that your marriage will be as fulfilling for you and your partner as my marriage has been for Joyce and me. But to understand how romantic love works, youll need to be introduced to a concept I call the Love Bank .

There is a Love Bank inside each one of us. Our emotions use it to keep track of the way people treat us. Every person weve ever known has an account in our Love Bank, and their balances are determined by how we feel when we are with them. If someone makes us feel good, love units are deposited into their account. But if we feel bad around this person, love units are withdrawn. The better we feel, the more love units are deposited; the worse we feel, the more are withdrawn.

Our emotions use the balance in a persons Love Bank account to advise us as to whether or not we should spend time with that person. When someone has a positive Love Bank balancemore deposits than withdrawalsour emotions encourage us to be with that person by making us like him or her. But when someone has a negative balancemore withdrawals than depositsour emotions encourage us to run for cover by causing us to dislike that person.

The larger the positive balance in our Love Bank account, the more attracted we feel to someone. For example, if 200 love units accumulate, we feel comfortable around that person; if 500 love units accumulate, we may consider him or her to be one of our best friends.

The Love Bank

The Love Bank is the way our emotions keep track of how people treat us. Good experiences deposit love units, leading us to like or even love a person. Bad experiences withdraw love units, leading us to dislike or even hate a person.