Are you frustrated by the endless stream of suggestions for magically improving your love life—like having sex in strange places or going to motels with no luggage? Are you tired of trying all the gimmicks and tricks that make you feel foolish or embarrassed—like saran-wrap surprises, wearing no underwear, or talking dirty on the phone? Are you discouraged by seeing that nothing seems to work the way you hope it will—or that it only works temporarily and then you're right back where you started?

If you're feeling desperate and doomed to a life of struggling to find and keep a good relationship, don't give up hope. You can have a lasting love. And it doesn't require any miracles. Deep down you know everything you need to know about making love last; you just forgot. What you need to do is calmly reflect on what you already know—and then act on it. That's what this book will help you do.

This is a guidebook, an instruction manual, and a source of inspiration whenever you get discouraged. You can't pick up this book and not find something you can use. And while it may not seem sexy, if you consistently follow its suggestions, it will do more for your sex life than any sex manual you can buy.

The ideas in this book come straight from our own experience—both personally and professionally. We've been married for 41 years and have spent the past 20 working with hundreds of other couples on their relationship issues. These experiences have brought us a new clarity about what's important in making love last. But you don't have to take our word for it; you can verify the ideas in this book from your own experience.

You'll see that this stuff is not "pie in the sky." It's very basic and solid. And since it grew directly out of our own struggles to make love stay, it's based on reality. We faced most of the problems that any couple faces. We didn't have insight into how to avoid them (or how to deal with them if we couldn't avoid them), but we survived—and we learned from our experiences.

Looking back, we can see how desperately we needed a book like this when we were starting out. So we've written the book we should have had, but didn't. We know a lot of you are bogged down in the same kinds of thinking we did and facing some of the same issues we faced. But you don't have to stay frustrated and disappointed about the course of your love. You do have this book and you can use it to make your love stay.

Inspiring You to Take Charge of Your Love

Falling in love is easy, but staying in love is quite another matter. Apparently it's one of the most difficult things any of us ever attempts. Because of the high divorce rate and the large percentage of remaining marriages in which couples don't have a vital love relationship, you may have come to believe it's inevitable that love will fade with time. Or perhaps you've already experienced the discouragement of seeing the love you once shared somehow slip away.

Don't settle for thinking you really can't expect more. You can and you should—regardless of your current situation. While no long-term love relationship is without difficulties, it is possible for love to survive and to be renewed and transformed over time. That's what this book is about—showing you how you can realistically aspire to something better.

Relationships can be the source of great joy or great pain. They seldom stand still; they're either getting better or getting worse. You deserve more out of love than just a few brief romantic interludes or an ongoing struggle to "get along." You don't want life to pass you by while you're waiting (and hoping) for a good relationship. You'll feel better if you're actively doing something toward that end. By paying attention to what's happening—and taking responsibility for what's happening—you can make a difference.

If you still doubt whether you can take charge of directing the course of your love, maybe you'll find encouragement that "anything is possible" by hearing a little bit about our own struggles to change the course of our love. Even where the specifics of our experiences are unlike yours, the similarity of the struggle is a connection we all share.

When we married at age nineteen we had no real concept of what was involved in making love stay. We believed our love was so special that it could withstand anything. We had the typical tendency to take our relationship for granted and "forget" all the things we really knew were important to keep our love strong. Through the years we confronted many of the standard problems that can drive a wedge between a couple if they aren't paying attention.

For instance, early in our marriage we found ourselves involved in one of the most common problems of all—losing touch with each other because of so much focus on career and children. We didn't lose touch just because we were focusing in different areas; it was because we didn't maintain the bridge between those two areas (and between ourselves) by talking straight to each other about how we felt about the situation.

We just went along, thinking this was the way things had to be. We didn't realize that you don't have to change "how it is;" you only have to change "how you deal with it." Unfortunately, we simply didn't deal with it. So we started down a path of distance and isolation from each other—and lost that special connection on a deep level that's critical to making love stay.

The weakening of our basic connection made us vulnerable to all kinds of other problems that can create difficulty in long-term relationships. One of the most common is simply the familiarity that comes from being together over the years. We started taking each other for granted—seeing each other primarily in terms of our roles as "husband" and "wife" instead of who we were as individuals.

This shift in our thinking was gradual—(we didn't even realize it was happening)—but we fell into stereotyping each other as one of "them," with all the negative baggage that carries with it. This included a lot of "ain't it awful" kind of thinking and talking about each other. "Men are so distant, so preoccupied with their own interests, so insensitive, so uncommunicative..." And on the other side, "women are so emotional, so smothering, so demanding, so talkative..."

Naturally, each of us thought we were right in our assessment of what was wrong with the other one. And commiserating with others only served to reinforce these stereotypical ways of reacting to each other. Slowly, but surely, we joined the masses who view the opposite sex not as individuals, but as members of a mysterious group that you don't understand and can't change—so you just have to tolerate. This attitude further increased the distance between us and decreased the strength of the loving aspect of our relationship.

These standard problems became like a cancer, slowly robbing us of the closeness we had originally felt. It wasn't that our love was gone; it's just that it was getting buried under the sense of isolation and distance created by the mounting pressure of fulfilling our roles while losing ourselves.

What finally got our attention was a crisis—dealing with the issue of extramarital affairs. It shook us to the core and forced us to learn, or relearn, a lot of the basic principles we had forgotten. We had thought we were good communicators because we did talk. We had never fallen into the trap of using the "silent treatment" to deal with differences, but it was only when we were confronted with a situation that required some really deep talk that we began to learn to communicate effectively.

Understanding how and why we had gotten to that point, working through the hurt, and rebuilding trust gave us a new appreciation of the healing power of honest communication. Since that point—almost twenty years ago—we have consistently tried to implement the ideas and suggestions we're now offering to you. We know these ideas work because our love and trust are now deeper and stronger than ever—solidly based on a shared, ongoing commitment to honesty and fairness.

We're not holding ourselves up as a perfect couple. On the contrary, we fully expect to continue the process of learning and working on our relationship. We still have high expectations of love, but they're based on experience and realistic possibilities rather than magical thinking.

We invite you to use our understandings and insights, not as the final answers to your problems but as a means of helping you find your own answers. You have the power to make your love last—and this book can help you do it.

Of course, the title of this book is misleading if you take it literally; you can't arbitrarily and unilaterally make love do anything. On the other hand, love doesn't come and go capriciously. This book is about the understandings you can reach and the specific things you can do that will make all the difference in the world in whether or not your love will stay.

Understanding Love and its Place in Your Life

Throughout the book we'll be giving you all kinds of specific actions to help make your love stay—but you really need a clear understanding of some basic ideas before you start. The first of these understandings is to recognize what's at stake. We're not talking about some little fringe issue in your life here. When all is said and done, having a long-term, loving relationship ranks toward the top of the list of the best of what life has to offer.

This book is different from most others in that it respects love's significance. We are presenting a way of looking at your love relationship in the context of your life as a whole. Our goal is to help you achieve a love that provides a solid place to stand in the world. Your love can be the kind of positive force in your life that lets you go out and face the world on a completely different basis than you could do otherwise.

In focusing on this goal, we are trying to avoid the pitfalls of the "romantic" approach to making love stay. We're elevating the meaning of a loving relationship beyond just achieving temporary pleasure. Part of our motivation for writing this book came from our growing frustration with the popular advice that's based on this short-sighted, superficial approach to sustaining (or reviving) love.

This is a book of substance for people who want the most from what love has to offer. It's simple without being simplistic and it's serious without being stuffy. We are suggesting a wide range of interconnected actions that are based on a deeper understanding of the nature of lasting love.

You can open this book to almost any page and get a sense of something you can do to enrich your love. Most of the ideas arise out of a loving attitude. It's not so much the specific act as the attitude with which you do it that keeps your love alive. Love can't be frozen in time and put on the shelf. So enjoy the memory of whatever initial vows or promises you made to each other, but remember that was only the beginning—not the be-all, end-all of your love.

The Payoff is Well Worth the Effort

If you have some resistance to working to make your love stay, it may be based on feeling that love should be effortless—not something you have to work at. But it's really not work in the way we usually think of work. Actually, it can be a tremendous source of energy, joy, and satisfaction, but only if you reframe the way you think about work and love—and only if you reorder your priorities to give it the place it deserves.

Yes, it takes time and energy, but once you get a sense of the incredible payoff for your effort, you won't be able to imagine living any other way. It's a little like the experience you may have had with exercise. If you start by seeing exercise only as something you ought to do, you're likely to dread the time and energy it takes. Many people never get past their negative attitude toward exercise to experience the true benefits. If you're a person who values fitness and knows from firsthand experience the benefits of exercise, you know that the positive results outweigh the time and energy it takes—and whatever resistance you may have had gives way to wanting to do it.

Of course, just as you need to start with an exercise you enjoy, you need to start with a person you genuinely love. It figures that you can't "make love stay" if you don't start with a real love in the first place. But assuming you start with the raw material, then you're ready to build on that beginning. That's what this book aims to help you do.

Reading sections of it aloud with your partner and discussing your reactions can provide a way to talk about some issues that you may not have found a way to address previously. This can also enable you to nip some problems in the bud and avoid others altogether. Above all, use these ideas in a positive way—to find better ways of relating to your partner—not to show them their attitudes or behaviors are wrong.

This book can be used in several other ways, according to your mood at the moment and your goal. You can use it as a handbook, picking it up and reading it at any point and referring to it at random. You're likely to discover ideas that you had forgotten or lost sight of and be reminded to focus on them again.

Or you can use it as a reference, going directly to whatever points that deal with the particular issues you see as most relevant to your current (or past) relationship. In fact, we've indexed it so you can quickly find the ideas that are most relevant to some specific issue. But, of course, no issue exists in isolation; everything is connected to everything else.

Or you can read it all the way through from front to back to get an overall perspective. In fact, you'd miss a great deal of the benefit of the book if you don't do this at some point. So we recommend that you get your own sense of the way the various points in the book fit together by following the way we describe the stages of the process involved in making love stay.

Since this is a complex undertaking, it's impractical to lay out a precise guide that fits for everyone, but there are some fundamental processes that apply to everyone, and the order in which you work on these processes can make a significant difference. So we've organized the book in a way to make sense of that process. Each of the seven chapters addresses one of the steps involved in this process of making love stay.

This first chapter focuses on the importance of getting a basic understanding of the nature of love and its place in your life. In Chapter 2 we will show you "the path to making love stay"—which happens to be honest communication. Chapter 3 addresses the critical issues, which we call "core issues," that lie beneath the day-to-day stresses, strains, and joys of your relationship. In Chapter 4, we discuss the nitty-gritty issues of daily living that stimulate most of the differences you will face as a couple. Then in Chapter 5 we talk about ways to handle the negative reactions to your differences. Chapter 6 describes the strategies and processes you can use to sustain your love. And the last chapter reinforces what you've learned by showing you the benefits of following this path.

So we're taking you step by step through the building blocks of making your love stronger and better with every passing day. By the time you're finished, you'll have a realistic perspective of lasting love and some tools to help you achieve it. But, of course, we can only make suggestions; it's up to you (and your partner) to make it happen.