About the Book

LOVE IS A DECISION is a practical, concise, “how-to” workbook designed to help married couples grow closer to each other and to their family members.  The handbook contains 29 exercises that help couples to understand themselves better and improve their relationship.  The exercises, extensively field-tested with married and engaged couples, are both enlightening and fun to complete. 

The enrichment handbook teaches you how to:

• Identify and appreciate each other’s intelligences
• Manage conflict effectively
• Speak each other’s love language
• Recognize and avoid harmful Drama Triangle situations
• Use Myers-Briggs as a helpful tool in your marriage and family life
• Avoid going up the Ladder of Inference
• Listen with your head and your heart
• Understand and appreciate each other’s personality style
• Identify what you value most as individuals and as a couple

From the Introduction...

Happily married couples enrich and inspire us. Whether married five days or 50 years, we sense when couples are in love: their knowing glances, tender touches, gentle kidding and savored memories are telltale signs of the committed couple. Loving couples have that unmistakable aura of mutual trust and joy. Alternatively, unhappily married couples advertise themselves by their sniping, coldness, long silences, sarcasm and apathy. Their sadness, frustration, hopelessness and despair are like anchors weighing them, and all around them, down. Sadly, about one-half of all marriages end in divorce. We believe that falling in love is grace-filled—that we do not fall in love entirely by ourselves. Though we have free will, God has a hand in matching us, which makes marriage failures doubly tragic. Surely, most couples think that their marriage will work. What goes wrong? This book’s goals are to deepen individual and mutual self-understanding and to improve communication skills. Effective communication is an acquired skill that requires sustained, hard work. A prerequisite to communicating well is self-understanding. Accordingly, the book first discusses ways to know one’s self better, then ways to communicate better. The chapters include exercises to help learn and apply the concepts and techniques. The exercises are meant to be completed independently, and then shared and discussed. In many cases we take the exercises ourselves and share our results with you. Completing the exercises will require time and effort, but we guarantee that your hard work will be worthwhile.

Table of Contents

Introduction		iii
—Working On Me—
Chapter 1: Live Your Values		1
	Exercise 1: Live Your Values	4
	Exercise 2: Distinguish Your Ideals and Values	4
Chapter 2: Control Mask Behavior		7
	Exercise 3: Identify Your Personality Style	8
Chapter 3: Use Myers-Briggs		13
	Exercise 4: Estimate Opposite-Preference Integration	16
	Exercise 5: Ways to Integrate Opposite Preferences	19
	Exercise 6: How You Complement and Frustrate Your Spouse	21
	Exercise 7: Typewatch Others	25
Chapter 4: Use All the Intelligences		29
	Exercise 8: Assess Your Intelligences	31
Chapter 5: Integrate Masculine and Feminine Sides		35
	Exercise 9: Assess Your Masculinity and Femininity	36
—Working On Us—
Chapter 6: Speak Each Other’s Love Language		41
	Exercise 10: Identify Your Primary Love Languages	43
Chapter 7: Stay Out of the Drama Triangle		47
	Exercise 11: Identify Drama Triangle Roles	51
	Exercise 12: Understand the Drama Triangle	52
	Exercise 13: Acknowledge Drama Triangle Roles	54
Chapter 8: Effective Communications: The Fundamentals		57
	Exercise 14: Distinguish Feelings and Actions	59
	Exercise 15: Describe Feelings	62
	Exercise 16: Change Attitudes	65
	Exercise 17: Distinguish Assertive, Passive and Aggressive Communication	70
Chapter 9: Your Spouse has a Problem: Listen Actively		71
	Exercise 18: Avoid Active-Listening Barriers	72
	Exercise 19: Assess Active-Listening Effectiveness	73
	Exercise 20: Analyze Your Touch Behavior	74
	Exercise 21: Don’t Make Others’ Problems Yours	75
	Exercise 22: Don’t Give Advice	75
Chapter 10: You Have a Problem with Your Spouse: Conflict Management		77
	Exercise 23: Check Out Inferences	81
	Exercise 24: Explain the Reasons Behind Questions, Statements and Actions	83
	Exercise 25: Ask Whether You Can Give Feedback	84
	Exercise 26: Make an Assertive Interaction	85
	Exercise 27: Avoid the Anger Fallacies	86
	Exercise 28: Analyze Your Conflict-Management Style	89
	Exercise 29: Ask for Forgiveness	92
Chapter 11: Whither We Goest?		94
Index		97