Hi, thank you for joining today’s podcast episode. Today’s episode is 227, “How to make date nights special”, an interview with Dr. Bill Harley.
Before we get started, I wanna take a moment and just center into the intention of the Empowered Relationship Podcast… And that is that the conversations, the episodes are all intended to support you in navigating long-term intimacy with success, with authenticity, and with growth. Because as we negotiate challenges, oftentimes the initial experience of it can be painful, threatening, activating, and also can cause question and doubt. So really I’m hoping to support and guide and offer lots of research and theories and tips and stories for you to consider as you contemplate how to approach these challenges… Again, with the ultimate goal of having greater intimacy, closeness, connection and love.
If you would like access to today’s show notes, you can visit DrJessicaHiggins.com and click on the tab at the top titled Podcast. There you’ll find all of the episodes. Again, today’s episode is 227, “How to make date nights special”, an interview with Dr. Bill Harley.
It’s interesting, for some couples date night can be such a special, sacred time, to have that undivided attention on each other, and to do something fun and special, to nurture that love bond. For other couples, it can feel like pressure. We have to get dressed up, or we have to go to a nice restaurant, or spend lots of money, and really what we’re gonna learn today is that there’s some elements to making a date night special, and as Dr. Harley would say, that actually constitute a date.
So I’m hopeful that this will be helpful to you as you are considering how to nurture your love and relationship… And I wanna say that Dr. Harley has been in the field for a while; he’s got a more traditional approach and he’s super-structured around what he’s offering. I realize, as I’ve said in previous podcast episodes, that sometimes I have guests that come from a different perspective, and I realize not everything’s gonna resonate, so I encourage you to just have an open mind and take what fits and leave the rest.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Willard F. Harley, Jr., Ph.D. earned his Ph.D. degree in psychology from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1967 and has been a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in Minnesota since 1975.
Dr. Harley is best known as the author of the internationally bestselling book, His Needs, Her Needs: Building An Affair-proof Marriage. He’s gonna share a lot more about he’s been up to in his career. He has written over 19 books and hundreds of articles, and that’s one of the reasons why I felt he could be a really great resource, particularly for people who resonate with his message.
He and his wife are also the hosts of a daily one-hour call-in show, Marriage Builders Radio.
Dr. Harley, thank you so much for joining us today.
Dr. Bill Harley: I’m glad to be with you.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes, and I am really excited to support listeners on the topic of how to date your significant other. I know many people in marriages and in long-term relationship tend to get into routines and struggle sometimes with really prioritizing date night, or even feel intimidated by how to create a real support for that experience, so I’m excited about getting your perspective. But before we do, I would love for you to talk a little bit about what got you into supporting people in relationship and in marriage, and for people who maybe aren’t acquainted with your work, if you could tell us a little bit about what got you even into this expertise and field.
Dr. Bill Harley: Yeah, I’m a clinical psychologist. I got my Ph.D. in 1967. I taught graduate and undergraduate level for ten years, and then in 1977 I began opening up mental health clinics in Minnesota. And by 1986 I had 32 locations and 200 counselors. It was a big operation, the largest in the state. And one of the things that I was very much aware of was great marriages create great mental health. And a lot of my emphasis in the clinics – I did not only work on marriage, but I also did work on chemical dependency. We had ten chemical dependency centers. And all of this kind of went together to recognize that if you have a great marriage, you’re not likely to be chemically dependent, you’re not likely to have mental health problems… But if you are chemically dependent and you do have mental health problems, it’s really gonna impact negatively on your marriage.
So I went to work, trying to figure out how I could put together a program that would help people save their marriages with mental health in mind. So I wrote the book “His needs, her needs” in 1986, it became a national best-seller… It still is selling like crazy after all these years. I’ve written 23 other books, and I have a website, and we have a daily radio show; my wife and I work on it together. I do seminars every month… And at my age, I’m still kicking; we’re still doing things.
But that’s basically my story… I’m focusing most of my life now on saving marriages, and I know how to do it; I know how to save people’s marriages, and I try to explain that to people whenever I get a chance.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Gotcha. Okay, and as we’re gonna be talking about (more towards the end of the show) how people can get in touch with you; I’ll make sure to have all of those links on today’s show notes.
Okay, Dr. Harley, what are we looking at when we’re thinking about dating our significant other, our spouse? Can you give us some context here around what does that involve?
Dr. Bill Harley: Okay, a romantic relationship is a relationship which is affection, intimate conversation, recreational companionship and sexual fulfillment. I came up with that idea, while I was still teaching, and I had lots of people to use as subjects, students of mine that were falling in and out of love all the time… And I became very much aware of what were the essential ingredients of what they would call a romantic relationship, and what they would call being in love, and how they functioned as a couple under those conditions.
I did a lot of research back in the ’70s on the whole topic of being in love, what is being in love, how can you be in love, how can you fall out of love, how can you get it back again… So I just did a lot of studies on that. That basically formed the basis of my whole program.
Now, a date, in my definition, is a time that you spend together, meeting these four intimate emotional needs: affection, intimate conversation, sexual fulfillment, recreational companionship. When you’re doing all of that, I call it a date.
Now, people would argue with me, “Look, if I take my wife out to dinner and we don’t do any of the other things, isn’t that a date?” I said “Well, you can call it whatever you want, but a date in a romantic relationship combines those four things”, and most people that are in love and are dating whenever they get a chance would agree with me that that’s what they’re doing. They’re doing these four things when they date.
So what I do with a couple that are married now and have four kids and they don’t have any privacy and they’re working like crazy to pay their bills and they don’t have time to date, I also notice that they’re not in love anymore. They’ve lost their feeling of love. And so what I try to do is I get them back to dating again, and I encourage people to do what seems for many people to be the impossible, which is 15 hours of undivided attention every week, where you’re actually dating your spouse every week, in 3-5 hour sections of time; five 3-hour dates, or three 5-hour dates, or anything in between, where every date you’re being affectionate, you are engaged in intimate conversation, which I can define a little bit later if you’d like… You’re engaged in recreational activities that are mutually enjoyable, and also you’re fulfilling each other sexually, all at the same date. Everybody agrees with me that when they’re in love and they are in a romantic relationship, that’s what they end up doing; so I just get them back to what they were doing when they were in love, and sure enough, within a short period of time, they end up being in love again.
The series that I’ve written talks about four couples. One just had a child, and they’ve lost the passion; the second one – they become independent, they don’t do much with each other anymore. The third really hate each other, and the fourth never were in love. And I show how each of these four couples learn how to date and learn how to create romantic love, learn how to be in love again in their marriages. I think that it’s a very important lesson for people, no matter what their state of marriage is, that they can be in love with each other.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: And how do you take these four examples of couples and their different phase or circumstance, and they’re in such disconnect, or even having some destruction to their love bond, or their real romantic feeling for one another, and they’re hating each other, that type of thing – what are some of the things that you recommend to start incorporating? I mean, 15 hours, like you said, if we’re having jobs, and little ones, and all the domestic commitments – that can feel like a pretty big…
Dr. Bill Harley: It is. Well, the first couple, that were recently in love, but lost their love after they get a three-year-old child – all we had to work on was finding the time. And for a dual career family, that’s not an easy thing to do, having babysitting… How do you get away from this three-year-old child…? And in some cases, they’ve got three children by the time I work with them… So in their case, all we worked on was scheduling. I just had to get them to put in the time; they knew how to do it, they knew how to be affectionate, they knew how to be in an intimate conversation, they knew how to have great recreational experiences, they knew how to make love… And within three weeks, they were in love again. So it’s just a matter of scheduling time.
Now, the couple that were independent of each other, they couldn’t start dating right away. Basically, what they had to start working on was learning how to live their lives mutually. They had to be thinking about each other when they made decisions, and I took away a lot of their independent choices, and helped them learn how to become interdependent. So for that couple it took a little bit longer for them to get back together again and actually start dating. Maybe six months before the dating actually began.
The couple that hated each other – we focused almost all of our time for the first year on love busters; things that they do that hurt each other. Demands, disrespect, anger, dishonesty, independent behavior, annoying habits… And we got them to eliminate all of those. Then we went to work teaching them how to meet those four emotional needs – intimate conversation, affection, recreational companionship, sexual fulfillment. It was a two-year project. Eventually, they were in love with each other.
The most challenging was the couple that never were in love with each other, and had no idea how to meet any of these emotional needs. It was beyond them. The reason they got married was to have kids. They decided to have kids without any of the romance, any of the human interaction… And that was the greatest challenge that I had of all. But my point was that no matter where you are in your marriage, dating can create a great marriage for you. It can solve all of your communication problems, it can solve all the struggles that you’ve been having trying to make decisions, and I just challenge couples to recognize that 15 hours a week of undivided attention is the answer.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: As you’re talking, Bill, it’s as if you’re inviting people into an experience together that so often everything is alive in that moment; so it’s not like we don’t have all the other aspects of ourselves, if we’re holding a grudge, or perhaps we’re longing for something. It’s usually present, so if you can focus on an initiative, like a date, or an exercise that invites them into this practice, I think all the curriculum or all the material for the relationship is present.
Dr. Bill Harley: Yeah, the problem that a lot of couples have is that they’re so far away from dating that they really have to create an environment where a date would actually be a mutually enjoyable experience. Many of the couples that I’m counseling at this time hate each other. I get a lot of that. I get a lot couples hating each other. And the question is how can a couple like that have a date? Well, they can’t, really… So what we work on first is getting them to stop hurting each other. I focus mostly on love busters, trying to get them to stop doing things that are really disgraceful.
I’m working with very intelligent people, that know much better than what they’re doing. Disrespect is something in our culture that we’ve learned to avoid, and yet in marriage you see it in spades. People talk to each other in their marriage in a way they would never talk to anybody else. So we have to get them to quit doing that, and then little by little they start developing a better feeling toward each other… And as that feeling increases – I use the concept of a love bank a lot to describe getting above the hate threshold, which is where you’ve lost a lot of love units, way more than just being in the red… And then you just get to dislike each other, and then finally you get to feel kind of neutral; then you get to like each other, and then finally, you end up getting to love each other.
The process can be quite lengthy. I can’t save a marriage in a week with a couple that hate each other. But for a couple that really have been getting along really well, but just haven’t scheduled time, and they notice that the passion just isn’t there anymore – I can take care of them in a few weeks. So it depends on where the person is in their journey, and how bad their love bank accounts are…
Dr. Jessica Higgins: How deficient, right…
Dr. Bill Harley: …you determine how long it takes and what do you have to do to get the thing to work out for them.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Right. I’d love to break this down a little, so people have some perhaps tools, or something that they can take away from this conversation… So for the first couple, it sounds like part of it was just helping them carve out the time. And once they had designated that time, was it literally that explicit, of like “We’ve gotta hit all of these marks”? Or what did you do to help them–
Dr. Bill Harley: They already knew how to do it.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Okay…
Dr. Bill Harley: See, when a person’s in love, I don’t have to teach anybody anything.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: [laughs] Right, right.
Dr. Bill Harley: So basically, their automatics are all there, their impulses are helping them out, and all I’m trying to do is get people that are not in love to do the things that people that are in love are doing.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Okay. So for the first couple, how did you help them carve out that time? Because people listening are “Sure, carve out time. That sounds good in practice”, but if they have all of these demands… Is there something that you do to help them recognize the priority and the long-term benefit of carving that time out?
Dr. Bill Harley: Yeah, most of my job is motivational. Basically, if people do what I tell them to do, they have great marriages. I could have gone into weight loss and I would have been successful there too, because I can motivate people to do things.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: And how do you motivate somebody to carve out the time when it feels like their young child — you know, all the demands that feel so important in the moment. How do you motivate?
Dr. Bill Harley: Basically, I have to explain to them that their future depends on them creating romantic love in their relationship… Because if they don’t have romantic love, their marriage is at great risk. And I work with a lot of religious people who feel that they’ve made a commitment, there’s no way they’re ever gonna get a divorce, and yet we’ve seen in national statistics that religious couples have the same rate of divorce as couples that are not religious. And commitment really isn’t that important when you get to the point of hating each other. You get to that point simply because you’re not making the adjustments that are necessary to accommodate each other, and the more you hurt each other, the more you hate each other.
So my basic approach is I take a person that is in love, or has been in love recently – it’s 2-3 weeks, and all I have to do is talk them into a new schedule… And I can do that. I’m a salesperson at heart. I’ve sold all kinds of things in my life, and I can talk people into it.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Well, it sounds like you’re painting a picture that’s very accurate, that you know from your vantage point “Here’s what we’re looking at. I get that it seems important to focus on all of the other things and not your marriage, but let me help you look at this down the road.”
Dr. Bill Harley: Yeah, we look at infidelity, which is extremely common in marriage, and it’s generally with couples that are not in love. They end up falling in love with somebody else, and that feeling is so incredibly powerful that they end up making fools of themselves just to have that feeling. And the point I make is “Wouldn’t you rather have that feeling in your marriage, to be in love with the mother/father of your children?” I present a very convincing point that it’s sure worth a try, isn’t it? Let’s see what we can do with your schedule.
We’re living here in Minnesota right now, under a siege. We are fighting the Coronavirus right now, as we speak. And in that situation, we’re all at home. The time for undivided attention is everywhere. In other words, you can do it if you want to. You can do it. The question is “What’s the incentive? What’s the reason for spending time together?”
Right now I’ve got lots of people here in Minnesota and in other states in the United States where they have plenty of time to be together. So the point is that the time is always there. The question is “What are your priorities? What are you going to do with the time that you have?”
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Right, which is sounding very much like the second couple – helping them recognize their deeper values, and perhaps some of maybe what they’re turning away from, and maybe not recognizing…
Dr. Bill Harley: I had to talk that couple into giving up poker on Thursday night, giving up golf…
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Wow… Really?!
Dr. Bill Harley: Giving up, in her case, choir…
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Wow…
Dr. Bill Harley: Giving up the things that they didn’t do together. If they didn’t do it together, they couldn’t do it.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Now, are you okay with any individual time, or what–
Dr. Bill Harley: After we’re done.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Okay.
Dr. Bill Harley: When we’re done with the project, you can go back to what you were doing. But generally speaking, what ends up happening is that she ends up playing golf with him, he ends up singing in the choir with her. That’s what usually happens in the final analysis. But basically, I tell them – for the independent behavior people, where they’ve got all these things – what you have to do is all your recreational activities have to be with each other. Again, the question is how good am I at motivating people to do things that they don’t wanna do? Because that’s the definition of a coach. A coach is somebody who makes somebody do what they don’t wanna do, so they can be what they wanna be. That’s Tom Landry.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: So in your experience, do these individuals end up liking golf, or do they end up liking choir? Or is it they like the benefit of the couple bond more than–
Dr. Bill Harley: Not necessarily. Some of them just give up golf, give up choir altogether and find that the new activity that they’ve learned to do is much more enjoyable than any of that. So again, the counselor has a job of motivating people to do the right thing. Without that — if people are left to their own devices, it’s true that some people will follow a plan. But most people basically don’t.
So my job is to teach people, to coach people to do something they don’t wanna do, with the promise that once you’ve done it, you’re really gonna be happy you did. And then it work out just fine, and I end up having another disciple, another couple out there preaching the word.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Right. And some people, like in your position, in a leadership role, or a facilitator/counselor/coach role can really invite people to engage in the experiment… And then if they really do the deeper dive, and then they wanna go back, like you’re saying, they perhaps can go back to some of their independent behaviors… But they’ve had an opportunity to learn the principles, and it sounds like in your experience most people get the benefit and the reward so much so that they are really devoted to the practice.
Dr. Bill Harley: Yes. And like I say, there are several different ways of that happening. My son, who has a great marriage, is a hunter. Every fall he hunts. He does bow hunting, he does rifle hunting, and he is and his wife are thoroughly in agreement on that. So just because she’s not with him when he hunts doesn’t mean he can’t do it. But they are each other’s favorite recreational companions, and they have a wonderfully romantic relationship.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: And that’s the point. That’s the real encouragement and the goal that you’re helping people restore, reconnect, or perhaps in the fourth couple to learn to connect, and learn to really build that bond, and that that’s to be nurtured.
So let’s move to the third couple, because I think this is probably largely where your work lies – the couple that are in such contempt or disconnect with one another and hating each other. You did lay that out, but can we go a little more specific around eliminating love busters, and then also turning towards this identifying the deeper needs, to help people get into a way to help each other in getting those needs met?
Dr. Bill Harley: There are really two primary concerns that I have – what is abuse and control? And the other is independent behavior. So abuse and control is demands, disrespect and anger, where you’re trying to force the person to do something you want them to do. So here’s a couple that hate each other – that is what they’ve been doing, and they’ve been doing it for some time. They’ve been trying to make each other do things that they don’t wanna do, to their detriment.
The other thing they’re doing is they’re engaging in behavior that doesn’t take the other person’s feelings into account. So the process that I have with the couple that hate each other is I have to focus on each of the individuals, to encourage them to be kind and patient with each other. Now, that may sound silly, it may sound — sure, everybody knows you’re supposed to do that, but again, being the motivator, to force them to do that, I generally will start with email correspondence. You can’t talk to each other person-to-person. You can only talk to each other through email, and the email conversation has to be respectful. No demands, no anger, no disrespect, and before you do anything, you have to ask each other how the other person feels about it.
So a lot of my therapy starts with email. Just get them to communicate with each other; they copy me on their email. I point out to them what they’re doing in the email itself that is hurting each other.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: I love that. I was listening to you — I’ve had some people do this, and even with their best attempt, they’re still passive-aggressive…
Dr. Bill Harley: Yeah, and they don’t see it. They don’t see it. So I point it out to them… It sounds very superficial to them; they think “This is not what I want. I want direct contact. I wanna be able to fight.” Well, fighting is ruining your marriage. So what I encourage couples to do is never, never fight. Never fight. So what you do is instead you treat each other with kindness, you treat each other with respect, you treat each other with goodwill. You want the other person to be successful… And I wanna get the hate to come up to feelings of either way; I don’t feel anything.
Now, I have a little test that I give people called the Love Bank Inventory. I give them this test every month to tell me whether they’re rising above the hate threshold, whether they’re coming to zero, or whether they’re starting to come to like, whether they’re in love. I have a measure of whether it’s working, and I can get the couple to actually start at this hating each other — it isn’t usually that they both hate each other; usually, one person likes the other person, and the other person hates the other person. It’s usually the husband that likes the wife, and the wife hates the husband. That’s what we see a lot.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: And do you find that the hate is often related to unmet needs, or injury, or feelings of fear, or hurt?
Dr. Bill Harley: Well, it can start with unmet needs, in the sense that instead of accepting the fact that the other person doesn’t wanna meet your need for whatever reason, and then negotiating with that person is how we can get that done. They start demanding it; then they start being disrespectful, they start getting angry.
I had one woman tell me yesterday that she has a very high sex drive, and she would be willing to have sex with any man on Earth, but not her husband… Because she hates him. And the basic idea is that as I can help him stop engaging in love busters, which is the problem. The problem is he’s engaging in love busters, that’s why she hates him.
I am working at it through email, and he’s getting better at it. He had a terrible temper; he’s not losing his temper anymore. He’s been terribly disrespectful; he’s not disrespectful. By the way, he’s a pastor of a church. So the basic idea is here’s a guy that’s very moral, and yet he’s engaging in all kinds of destructive behavior. So little by little, her Love Bank Inventory will show progress on his part. He’s the one that’s making Love Bank withdrawals by his behavior, so to the extent that he can become a more considerate husband, she’ll finally get up.
We’re working on the question of “Is she comfortable holding his hand?” Not yet. Not yet. She certainly doesn’t wanna hold him. She has a terrible aversion to anything resembling romance. By the time I get her up to zero on that Love Bank Inventory, she’ll be willing to hold his hand. And we have a woman with a high sex drive, so it won’t be taking too long before she’s the one that decides she’d like to have sex. But right now, because of his love busting behavior, because of his demands, disrespect and anger, independent behavior – he did it all – because of all of that, her Love Bank Inventory got so low… She tried so hard to be the greatest wife on Earth; she tried so hard to meet every emotional need, but with all of his love busters, they got to a point where she just couldn’t do it anymore. And so now they see me, and I’m telling him that it’s all his fault… Which it is. So he’s coming around, and he’s actually behaving like a man should behave, and sooner or later she’ll be in love with him again.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Now, I guess I’m curious – and thank you for giving an example; it’s super-helpful, and my mind is just like “Oh man, and I wonder about this, and I wonder about that”, and how it makes sense given this couple’s dynamic, that it wouldn’t make sense if she felt like “Wow, this is so painful that you’re giving all your love and your support to other people, and I’m your person, I’m your wife, and I’m not feeling any of that from you”, and just how that would whittle away… But for the person that’s engaging in the love busting behaviors, do you find that there’s something going on underneath? I just imagine, I’m totally projecting here, but as a pastor you have to — you’re in a leadership role and you have to really be mindful about how you’re supporting people in their journey. What do you do with all your frustration? What do you do with all the annoyances? What do you do with all the other stuff? Is there a space for that? Is that something he’s just unloading on his wife? I’m totally making up a story here, but do you find that when you’re asking people to be kind and really be loving, is there a reason why people are engaging in the love busting behaviors?
Dr. Bill Harley: I think they’re all instinctive. Basically, demands, disrespect, anger, dishonesty, annoying behavior and independent behavior – the six love busters – are all instinctive. All of us feel like doing these things. As we use our intelligence, we recognize that a demand really doesn’t work when you’re trying to get somebody to do something. Now, it can work in the Army, because you’re signed up to do that kind of thing, but it doesn’t work in marriage. And you end up finding yourself not wanting to do the thing that the other person is demanding, which is the opposite of what the other person wants to do.
This pastor had a feeling of entitlement. In other words, that his wife owed it to him to meet his sexual needs. Owed it to him to obey him. And over time, she tried to do all of that, and because it was a demand, because he did it disrespectfully, because he lost his temper, her feelings of love for him dropped below zero and finally into the Hey threshold. Now, she’s a Christian and she doesn’t believe that she should be hating anybody, and she feels terribly guilty about it, because God wants us to love other people, not hate other people, and she says “How can I get out of this feeling that I’ve got, that I don’t wanna have?” So you have to understand how visceral the whole thing is.
A woman with good intent is struggling with a reaction that is completely normal. Any woman would have responded the same way she did. Most women would not have done it as long as she did. They would have given up a lot sooner. But in her effort to try to be the good wife, she ends up digging herself further and further into a hole.
So the problem with him is that he felt entitled to this, he felt that she owed it to him. I’ve talked him out of that, I’ve explained to him that whatever she does for him is a gift; it’s a gift, not a requirement. And I told him that if he wants something from her, he has to make it attractive to her. And anything that he does that’s unattractive to her is going to make it less likely for him to get what he needs.
He’s trusting me at this point that in the final analysis she’ll finally end up being a loving, affectionate, sexually-fulfilling wife. He trusts me that this will happen. And I’ve told him that I’ve gone through this with many couples already, and just do what I tell you to do. Let her explain to you what is happening, what you’re doing now that upsets her. Stop doing it. And what’s interesting about the Love Bank is what psychologists call regression to the mean. And that is if you don’t engage in any love busters at all, the Love Bank actually goes toward zero. Goes up from a minus thousand, slowly up to zero if you don’t engage in any love busters. She’s not allowing him to engage in any love builders; she won’t let him meet any of the emotional needs. But if he just stops hurting her, little by little, her feeling of hate will turn into simply dislike. And little by little, finally she’ll be neutral.
And I’m getting her to test this by just simply holding his hand every once in a while. Do you feel repulse when you hold his hand? And little by little, she will find that holding his hand isn’t such a big deal after all. That means that the Love Bank is going up.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: I love that he trusts you, and that they’re committed and engaged in the work… And it sounds like as they’re starting to see result, that that’s positively reinforcing their behavior in the work they’re doing. So you start with email, and then you’re getting them into contact with your facilitation… What’s next?
Dr. Bill Harley: I just go back to them with email. I look at their email every day. I look at a lot of email. Basically, I check out their email, I read it all; I don’t always respond. I give words of encouragement. She feels guilty about telling him about all the things that are bothering her about him, and he gets frustrated hearing about it. But they’re not doing it face to face, which is much more difficult than through email. She gets a chance to edit what she’s doing, so that she explains to him what her problem is; he accepts it, he’s making changes in life… He doesn’t do the same things he did before. She used to call him a monster; he’s not a monster anymore.
So little by little, I think she’s gonna gain some feelings of closeness to him, and her goal is to be in love with him. She wants to be in love with him, above all else. She says “I can’t make myself be in love with him”, and that’s a very important point. You cannot make yourself love someone. It’s the other guy that is responsible for your feelings of love for them.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Okay, so I get you’re still in process with this couple… And for the couples that you typically work with and what you’re anticipating, at what point do you start introducing the needs?
Dr. Bill Harley: Basically, I already kind of do in her case by telling her to try to hold his hand once in a while when you’re in church, see if you can hold his hand without feeling repulse… When she starts to feel like she can hold his hand, then I’ll start working with them on affection. Sex is a long way off, but I’m gonna get them to do things recreationally. I’ll get them to have conversations… Right now there’s no hope in having a conversation, because as soon as they start talking to each other, she starts complaining about something he’s doing that bothers her, and then he shuts down… So the email is gonna have to work. Then we work on intimate conversation after that, build this thing back up again.
A lot of what I do is — I never see the couple. I never see them, I don’t know what they look like… We connect with them through our radio show, Marriage Builders Radio. They come on the show and I work with them. I’m working probably 400 couples at once.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: And is all your work on the show? Everything’s made accessible?
Dr. Bill Harley: Yeah.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Wow.
Dr. Bill Harley: Yup, yup… And it’s all free.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: I love that. Okay, that’s quite a big demand, that you read everyone’s emails.
Dr. Bill Harley: Yeah, a lot of work. [laughter]
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Okay… So you have a ton of resources around helping people build these four essentials, and also eliminate the love busters… Can you tell people how they can get in touch with what you have to offer as far as resources?
Dr. Bill Harley: Yeah, basically our website is marriagebuilders.com. You should start by taking the tour; we have a tour about what’s there. The next thing I would encourage them to do is read my basic concepts, read the summary of basic concepts; it’ll take you 15 minutes.
We have a forum, and you can go right to the forum. We have people that will answer your questions within minutes of being on the forum. We have the radio show every day. It’s a podcast, and people come on the radio show, some of them email us, some of them are on live… We follow up with everybody, we send them free books when they’re on the radio show… And you can email my wife, [email protected] and she’ll get you started. She’ll let you know what you have to do to become part of the team. We work with thousands of people at a time. Like I say, I’m active with probably 400 right now, but we have thousands that are in a process of one form or another using our website.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Lovely. Well, I love that you’re providing such a concrete system, for the clarity and really direction for all the couples that you’re serving. I’ll make sure, again, to have all of those links on today’s show notes. Thank you so much for being a guest on today’s show.
Dr. Bill Harley: Well, I enjoyed being with you. Best wishes to your efforts. I’m in big support of what you’re trying to achieve.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Thank you.
I hope you have enjoyed today’s interview, again, with Dr. Bill Harley. Again, his approach is slightly different than how I approach, but I do think his message in what constitutes a date, with these four elements… It’s interesting, after this show I was paying attention to my husband and I and how we tend to share time together, and I was being really mindful of these four elements, and I do think it’s helpful.
Again, if you want access to today’s show notes, you can visit DrJessicaHiggins.com, click on Podcast, and you can find all the episodes listed there. Again, today’s episode is 227. Also on the website you can find many other resources, and I encourage you to check that out, as well as free gifts and opportunities to go deeper.
Again, thank you for listening, and until next time, I hope you take great care.
0 Comments