Do you think spending time together having fun as being critical to your marriage? I didn't. But, during our first year of marriage, my husband and I read a book together titled, His Needs/Her Needs. This book changed my mind. The author, Dr. Willard F. Harley Jr., is a marriage counselor who was discouraged about the number of couples whose marriages were ending in divorce and not being restored through his (and other) traditional counseling methods at the time. As a result, he became passionate about trying to fix this problem. He began to conduct research with the couples he counseled to determine just what caused them to end up in his office. The answer was quite simple. The couples were not in love with one another any more. However, his research also helped reveal the reason why this was the case. Dr. Harley discovered that couples have 10 basic needs in marriage. In general, both husbands and wives expressed the same basic needs. However, when asked to rank the needs in priority order, husbands ranked a particular five of the needs high, and wives ranked a different five needs as more important. As a result, Dr. Harley discovered that in marriage both people were trying to give to their spouse what they personally needed the most. But, because of the different preferences between men and women, the spouses were not getting their own biggest needs met. The result - discouraged couples who were falling out of love with their husband/wife.

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