Video Transcript: How Dr. Harley Learned to Save Marriages

I want to thank you for making us a part of your day, and I believe that there's going to be some real simple solutions to what you might view as some real, extremely complicated circumstances, particularly with your marriage and your relationships. I have two wonderful experts that have really committed their lives into rescuing and helping others. Audrey and I, as you know, have this deep passion to be able to love couples to life that you know that you wouldn't just survive in your marriages, that you might really begin to be able to thrive and enjoy life the way you were meant to. So I want to introduce you to my new friends, Joyce and Bill Harley. Welcome to its new day. I have in front of me in let's you know, we can take a cover shot on this. I have in front of me all kinds of books. I have authors with me, but I have prolific authors, I mean writers and I know the labor of love that goes into that. And so to this week, as we, you know, take time to really focus on our relationships and our marriages. This is a lot of love, you know, because you care about people, and so I just want to say thank you for coming and being willing to invest your time. You know with us that we might be able to share you with it's our pleasure. So thank you. Let's talk about yourself. If people go looking for you. They're going to find you easily on the internet. Simply Google marriages, and up you come. There we are, and it's marriage builders, right, right. Okay, now, marriage builders working with marriages. That's nothing new, but it's been happening a long time. Give me a little bit of a history. 

Well, I started out as a psychologist and got my PhD, and I became a teacher, and people came to me with their marital problems. Now they figured that psychologists ought to know something about marriage, and my father had been a psychologist, and he was a marriage counselor, but I discovered early on, actually, I started marriage counseling when I was only 19, and I wasn't successful. My friend too early, my friend who came to me thinking that I ought to know something about marriage, all the advice I gave him didn't work. He ended up getting divorced, and throughout the years, I was very unsuccessful, and so I figured that this was something thatI just wasn't cut out for. And but the Lord does an interesting thing with us, and that is, He lets us know that he has a plan for our lives. And the way he let me know that is, he kept sending people to me with marital problems. He wasn't going to quit,  but I didn't know what I was doing, and the Lord wasn't giving me a whole lot of help, just a lot of people.

And so the basic idea was, I figured, well, I better train myself in this. So I went to I did a two year internship, and I read a lot of books, and I got I got specialized training from the chairman of the marriage and family department at the University of Minnesota, and what I discovered was that this fellow that was training me had a horrible marriage himself, the person that I did the internship with, who had created what was advertised as the best program in America, was divorced before my internship was ended. 

And, okay, now during this time you're married, we are married. How's your marriage doing? Fabulous? Yeah.

Fabulous, Joyce, did you know, we thought we knew why. We thought we knew why. Let's give Joyce the credit. Simply give Joyce the credit.

There is something to be said for that, I will admit, but we thought we knew what we were doing that made it work. And I would try to communicate that to couples that I counseled, but they would end up getting divorced, even those that would actually follow through on what I recommended, the things that I recommended that had to do with the training program that I was inL communicate, improving communication, that sort of thing didn't work either. So I went to work. I took it seriously. I figured the Lord is calling me this sort of thing, so I better be good at it. So I went to work asking couples specifically, what could I do that would save your marriage? And like, I say, Yes, I had couples very good. I had couples coming to me with broken marriages, and I would tell them I don't know what to do. And they said, you're the best person we've ever come to because everybody else we've seen, they tell us they know what to do, but nothing they do works. At least you're honest enough to tell us that you don't know what you're doing. And so I said, Listen, you got to help me with this, because if you can help me with this, we will not only save your marriage, but we'll save 1000s more if we understand the problem here.

And what I heard from people, and I was counseling mostly Christians, what they were telling me was that they didn't want to live through a loveless lifetime. They didn't want to be married to somebody that they didn't love, they didn't want to be married to somebody that didn't love them back. And I would argue with them, I would say, but think of your children. Think of your think of your commitment, think of your faith in Christ. He doesn't want you to get a divorce. Why would you want a divorce when there are so many reasons to stay married and they kept coming back with, I can't do this if I'm not in love. Now, to be honest with you, that isn't the first answer I got from people. Usually they would give me a lot of other answers, but as I would explore the real, honest basic answers, it would finally come to the fact that they were not in love. I have yet in my experience, and I've counseled 1000s of couples., I have yet to have to counsel one couple where they are both in love with each other, in love. Feeling romantic love for each other, they don't want to get divorced. Nobody, nobody that is in love wants to get divorced. And the key is really the romantic part of it as well. Yeah, none of your children care.

They have for each lots of people who care for each other want to get divorced, but nobody that's in love wants to be divorced. So I thought to myself, well, that's the answer. That's so great. All done as a psychology got the answer, okay, how do you accomplish it? Now, I love it. How do you get people to be in love with each other? So I said, Okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to train you as a couple to be in love with each other. And the first response was, Well, that ain't going to happen, because once you lose your love for somebody, you can't get it back. I said there are lots of illustrations of people that lost their love for each other that got it back. Of course, you can get it back, but I don't know exactly know how to and so we're going to have to think this one through. Well, I come from a background in psychology, right? So psychologists ought to know something about emotions and how to create emotions. So I go back to Pavlov's dog. And very romantic. You know about Pavlov's dog? Okay? So the idea is that just like in Pavlov's dog, when you associate the meat with a bell, eventually the bell causes the salivation that the meat would have caused before. Well, I thought, you know, I'll bet you can do the same thing with romantic love. I'll bet if you associate really good feelings with a particular person, the you will eventually feel good when that person shows up. And if you do it enough, or if you do it in large enough quantities, it may trigger romantic love. That's what happened when you first met your spouse. You know that chemistry was there. You know they walked through the room, the flutter came. And so this is what we're recreating now in the marriage teaching at the time.

So I had access to students. I had access to people. I did a lot of experiments. I said, okay, here are students that really are interested in the subject of romantic love. So the question is, how are we going to trigger romantic love in in my in the students? So I had various experiments that I talked to people that I was counseling, and I said, Okay, what we want to do is we want to have massive positive experiences. So I talked took to a couple, a husband and a wife, and I said to each of them, what could your wife do for you that would create a really, really great positive feeling. And so I would get a list of things from the men. I'd ask the wife, the same thing, get a list of things from the women. And then I came up with the idea of the love bank. The love bank, it would be an easy way for people to understand how Pavlov's dog would work in in. Ordinary married life, right? So the basic, how do we make these kinds of investments? How do we make deposits, deposits and withdrawals, you know, the love as well. So willing to give the love. The point is that I finally, after two, three years of of trying to figure this out, I actually came up with a little test that would measure whether a person was in love or not. That was pretty accurate. After all of this, I found the list of things that most husbands said would, in my nomenclature, deposit love units for them that the wife could do, and I came up with a list of things that the wife could do that would deposit love units in the husband's love bank. Okay, so after all of this had been pulled together, I noticed something that was absolutely one of the best discoveries of my life, which I should have known. I should have known before I started all this. And that is that the list I got from men was very different than the list I got from women. We're different one the same lists. So let me just jump in here. Joyce, how are you doing through all of these experiments? I'm sure there's benefits of all bringing the work home and saying, These are my discoveries. That's what, I'm fine, right?

Really, what was happening was we were participating in all of this already. We were already doing, but we didn't know what to call it. And you know, what's beautiful about knowing what the system really is, is it's a good check and balance, and now we know what we're doing, and we can monitor, are we still doing it, that kind of a thing. But yeah, we had healthy behavior, yes. And it will produce health. It'll produce the life that you want if you follow it.  And are you still doing it? And that's the question I think couples have to act, have to ask constantly in your relationship. The world is not designed to help happy marriages and healthy marriages. They don't say, have you had time with your spouse this week? You know, it's very much like in a relationship with God. I wish there was a billboard that said, Did you talk to God this morning? You know, that kind of have you enjoyed your marriage? Exactly? Have you deposited love units? Are you meeting each other's needs? And it's a good way to kind of test it and evaluate where you are in your relationship.

You're here by design purpose that people might enjoy their marriages. Yeah, I want to help you if you're stuck, you know, if you're at war with one another, I want there to be peace, but ultimately, I really want you to enjoy life with each other. That's it. That's what I really, really and to finish my story, I'm not gonna let you I'm an engineer at heart. I'm an engineer. So let's create some my background. I started out by college education with an engineering, engineering emphasis. I was going to be an I was going to be an engineer, and I was going to be a scientist. And so my whole thought is, okay, I got a list of things from the husband. I got a list of things from the wife that would deposit the most love units. I want to think efficiently. See, I don't want to waste people's time. Yeah. So I want to know what would do the most good, what deposits the most love you for the effort you're putting into? Yes, I don't want, I don't want people to to be doing a lot of things that are unnecessary. Yeah. So the so you make an investment, what's going to result in the greatest return? Right? Exactly. And  this is especially attractive to men. Men want to know what what does she want that will require the least amount of effort? So I came up with what I call the most important emotional needs. Most important emotional needs are the things that would deposit the most love units for both men and women. What can a man do that when he does it is the most likely to trigger a feeling of romantic love in his wife. What can a woman do that's most likely to trigger a romantic feeling of love in her husband, I called those are the most important emotional needs now.

Well, as soon as I discovered all that, I started applying it, and in my success rate just all of a sudden went skyrocket. Worked. I was successful one after another that came in. I became very, very popular in the Twin Cities. I finally gave up my job teaching and I went into full time clinical practice. Now, at the time, I taught a Sunday school class on the subject of marriage, and I described these most important emotional needs during my Sunday school class. Somebody had the the wisdom to tape record the whole thing, and somebody else had the wisdom to transcribe it. So all of that was done for me. It was done. I kind of knew it was happening, but I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention. Somebody came to me as a client, somebody's a client that worked for Ravel publishing, and he said, you know, your program is so great, you need to write a book about it. And I said, Well, I'm really not a good writer, but here are some transcriptions of a Sunday school class I did, and we sent that to the publisher. They accepted the book. I finished it up. I wrote it up as a book, and the rest is history. So that's his needs, her needs. It.s the first book I wrote on marriage, and that was back in the mid 80s, right? Yep. Okay, now here's the thing, everything that you've said so far, people are waiting for that list, right? They really don't care anything more about what you say, because I want to know what I can really, really do. Here's the thing, because what you wrote in the mid 80s is not outdated today. No, in fact, you were saying that, you know the the copies sold, you know what you said, over 3 million copies. But this year outsold last year. It's selling more every year and and we are, there's no end in sight, but here's the thing, because your story, I'm glad you finished it. We'll get on it soon.

But the thing is, Bob will take charge right now, everybody wants to know, because what they want to do is they want that romantic love back. They want to feel loved, you know, in deep down inside, they're like, you know, Divorce isn't the answer if I were loved and knew love. Because if you know, as you said, you've never seen a couple that were romantically in love, wanting divorce or separation, because why? I'm loved, right? I'm desired. I'm wanted. Let me encourage you, his needs, her needs, available from us here at New Day ministries, you can get it at marriage builders.com, it's there. I mean, there's all kinds of books. But let's continue in looking at this. Because I want to put this in your home, you need to be reading this. Why? So that you can begin to make those deposits and withdrawals and begin to thrive and enjoy the marriage you've always wanted.

Is that okay? Yeah, except you don't want to make withdrawals. You only want to make deposits. We'll be talking about we want to we'll be talking about how to avoid making withdrawals later. Well, then what is the benefit? The benefit is that if you make deposits, both of your love banks grow and grow, and you end up being in love with each other. If you make withdrawals, you're going to lower these love bank balance.

We would call those love busters. I know where you are going, because if I withdraw money and I give it to you, you were thinking that was deposited, right? But it's done in marriage. In marriage that doesn't have to happen. You can be depositing in the both love banks at the same time, and you're enjoying and you're growing and wonderful, wonderful. This is good building and a fair proof marriage. All right, let's go. Where are we going to go to from here? Well, what are they?

And, you know, the language and we talked before the program, you saying, out of this, you know, you really almost wrote this book more towards a man, you know, a little bit of a bend towards the men, you know, because we just tend to be a little more lazy. Well, that is because in my counseling, in the counseling that I did, I came to recognize that it was hard to get men on board. Okay, very hard that, basically, I had women telling me that they wanted help making their marriage fulfilling. And the men were very reluctant to be involved. Men tend to, more than women, say, I'm okay with this. And the woman is like, I'm not okay with this with this concept. You mean just in marriage, what I want in marriage is for you, for you and I, to be able to get along. men just, you know, want to enjoy the marriage. Want to be able to make love. Want to be able to, you know, have a meal at night. But, but the idea of being romantically involved seems like more what the woman want, exactly and the book appealed to the man, which was when it first came out, was more unusual, because what? What is this stat? 90% of women buy the books. 85% 85% buy books on marriage, on marriage, and hardly any men read it. They're geared,. they're focused, they're aimed at the purchase person who is purchasing the book. And so finally, a book came out and said, Hey, man, I want to talk to you about this. And they were addressing things that they could really relate to as yes, this is a need I have. I wouldn't have known how to verbalize it, but I really do want this and the relationship. I don't write that specifically. I  don't say, Look, this is written to men. It's a balanced book. The woman's needs are emphasized just as much as a man's needs. But what men notice when they read the book is that there's not a lot of psychobabble, there's not a lot of frilly stuff. There's not a lot of talk about your childhood. It's very sense, right? And the whole thing is that the success is there. It works. And if we can get this concept, you can begin to rekindle that romantic love that the feelings and the emotions that you've wanted and begin to enjoy life.