This book is an introductory guide to the subject of how to have a happy marriage, pair bond, civil partnership, or sex-love relationship - which means a happy and successful couple relationship - and it is designed to be helpful for committed, long-term couples, and for counsellors and therapists (who want to learn from the author's experience in this field).It deals with a broad range of knowledge and skills, spread across three volumes, and is based on the author's thirty-four years of study of couple relationships; and his twenty years' experience of helping couples to improve, revive, restore (or dissolve) their relationships with their long-term, committed, sex-love partners. This first volume is an essential foundation for what comes later.The fundamental need for this bookWhy is this book so important? What makes it different from other forms of marriage guidance and relationship advice which are available today?As far as I can tell, most modern resources for couples - including books, articles and blogs - are designed to inform the reader of certain facts about love and relationship, without teaching how to change habitual ways of being. Some may want to help couples to change their habits, but they do not go far enough in this direction. They do not provide tools for habit change.But this book, in addition to informing the reader, also sets out to help individuals to change themselves, at deep, non-conscious, emotional levels, so that they become better lovers, and more successful relationship partners.Loving-couple3There is research to support the idea that people choose their love partners non-consciously[i], on the basis of habit. (Teachworth, 1999). And, also that we tend to have conscious goals for the type of mate we would like, but that we then choose our mate on the basis of a non-conscious goal about which we know nothing. (Gladwell, 2006; and Lewis, Amini and Lannon, 2001). Therefore, it is clearly pointless producing a list of 'rules of love' (Templar, 2016) and encouraging people to read them, if we do not at the same time show them how to get those rules into their non-conscious brain-mind, from where they can inform their non-conscious goals for partner selection. And that is why we have structured this book so that the reader can reprogram themselves; change their non-conscious goals; change their 'radar device' for finding a partner. This 'radar device' is their inner model of an ideal couple (called, by us, 'The Inner Couple'. [Teachworth, 1999]).Anybody who studies this book, in the ways we recommend, will find that: - their relationship behaviours change for the better (because their non-conscious goals have changed!);- their emotional intelligence will increase; and- they will find themselves either choosing a better partner, or working successfully with their current partner to produce an amazingly satisfying relationship together.And counsellors and psychotherapists who study this book, will be able to incorporate many new strategies, tools and techniques into their work with their own troubled couple-clients.
