A couple, having relationship problems, was once absolutely certain that their deep love and optimism would make their relationship last. They had come together because they wanted to, because the idea of a life together felt so right, because they believed their union was the one thing that would complete them. They approached their relationship seriously, made sacrifices and promised they would offer up their hearts and souls to each other.

Now they were trying to understand why the very thing that they once thought would make them so happy had left them feeling trapped, overwhelmed by an unspeakable feeling of disappointment. They were hurting, second-guessing themselves, wondering how something could go stagnant and painful so quickly.

This book/article is about the truth about what you have to do to meet your needs and the needs of your partner, and exactly how to rebuild the foundation of your life so that you can have a fulfilling relationship.

I want to shake you back to your very core, wake you up and then help you start designing a memorable life and a memorable relationship.

This book/article is designed to strip away all your defenses and fears, to break through the clutter of your past, to raise your standards of personal excellence, and for you to stay diligently on course so that you may get what you want in your life. My mission is to help peel away the layers of confusion and distorted thinking that have dominated your relationship, peel away the false world you have constructed, put you back in touch with your inner core of consciousness and help you find the answers that work.

All you wanted to do was love somebody and be loved right back. You believed a relationship was the one thing that would complete you. You weren't an idiot, you weren't some masochist who looked for a relationship so that you could suffer, and you sure weren't lazy. No matter how much willpower you have to keep hanging in there, there is a line out there that, if pushed across, you will say, "That's enough, I won't take this another minute." You know yourself well enough to realize that if you cross that line, it will be the beginning of the end. You know your dignity and your heart can take only so much, and if it is violated one too many times, then you will finally dig your heels in and this deal will be over in a flash.

That line may still be looming way out in your future somewhere, or at this very moment you might be walking that line like a tightrope. I want to keep you from crossing that line.

The very society that has taught you that it is good and right and natural to share your life with another person, the same society that in large part defines and measures success by how you manage your relationships and your family, never bothered to teach you how you are supposed to do that.

You probably got your only lessons about being in a relationship by watching your parents. The problem with that is they no doubt had less instruction and knew less about relationships than you do. You never went to a class that taught you:

• how to understand your emotions,
• what to expect in a relationship or how to behave in one,
• how to relate
• how to select a good mate
• how to be a husband or a wife
• what to do when things went wrong

As a result, you probably chose your mate for the wrong reasons and then proceeded into your relationship with ill-defined skills, goals and expectations.

Working through this book/article, you will be relying on techniques and realities for creating and managing a healthy relationship. You're going to learn the truth - and the trust is that your relationship is in trouble because YOU set it up that way.

You set it up that way by actively, consistently and efficiently designing, programming and choreographing your entire lifestyle to generate and then support a bad relationship.

It is not possible for you to have a seriously defective long-term relationship unless you have generated and adopted a lifestyle to sustain it. Every single person in every walk of life has a lifestyle that supports who and what he or she is. You cannot have a bad relationship unless your lifestyle is characterized by stress, pressure, distraction and a hurried and chaotic existence. If you are living in a dysfunctional relationship with another person, it's because you have a dysfunctional relationship with yourself.

I'm not blaming you; I'm just telling you how it is. A bad relationship cannot exist if it is not fed and nurtured in some way.

If you have not designed and carried out your life to create or allow distance instead of intimacy, combativeness instead of cooperation, blame and rejection instead of accountability and acceptance, you cannot maintain the erosion and pain that you are now experiencing.

You will find that an overweight person lives to eat, while a person of normal weight eats to live. When it comes to your relationship, you have chosen to live patterns of thought, feeling and behavior that have generated something that is not giving you what you want. You are living to suffer instead of loving to live. That has to change and it has to change first before anything else will begin to fall into place.

If you are able to change yourself, if you are able to create a different lifestyle and environment in which your relationship takes place, if you are able to regain your own power and reclaim your right to dignity and respect, then your partner is going to be seriously affected.

You can't control your partner. You can't make changes for your partner. You can't tell your partner what to do. But you can inspire your partner. You can give your partner a whole new set of behaviors and new set of stimuli to respond to. You can stop sabotaging yourself and your relationship, and you can start inspiring the kind of reactions you want from your partner.

What you are doing, how you are living, is not working. If you do not push yourself to find out what it is in your lifestyle that isn't working, what it is about your lifestyle that has created and supports this negative relationship, you will continue to suffer. You will continue to work on the wrong things what have nothing to do with the status of your relationship at the expense of that which most certainly determines its success or failure. You will try to believe that it's okay to forget some of your dreams, telling yourself that at least you are "secure" and "comfortable." You'll find yourself telling yourself that you know you "should" do something about your plight and that you'd like to change but that you just aren't sure where to start. When you choose the behavior, you choose the consequences.

If you are going to rescue your relationship you have to start by changing how you treat yourself, and through that you alter the most important element of the entire equation. It means changing the priorities that dictate your time and energy. Until you begin to live with dignity, respect and emotional integrity, you will not have that quality and level of interaction with anyone else. You cannot give away what you do not have. If you don't have a pure and healthy love and regard for yourself, how can you possibly give that to anyone else? And if you can't give it to anyone else, then how can you possibly expect to have it reciprocated?

I'm not suggesting that you become someone you are not. I am suggesting that you become the best of who you are.

You have to be willing to admit that when it comes to conducting a relationship, whatever you are thinking and feeling and doing is not working. You have to be willing to move your position on some very deep beliefs and long-held emotions and behavioral patters. When I say "move your position," I mean that you must be willing to utterly change the way you think, feel and act in relationship to yourself an your partner. I am asking you to give up your security blankets and free-fall. Wipe the slate clean and start over in your thinking. Believe once again that you are a qualified person who deserves a quality relationship. Getting back in touch with your core of consciousness will remind and convince you that there is nothing wrong with you that justifies your having less than a rewarding relationship in which you can live, love and laugh every day of your life.

Are you ready to embrace a new kind of thinking, a new belief system, a new way of looking at yourself and your partner? To see if you're ready to move forward in this book/article, answer the following questions.

• Can you forget what you think you know about managing relationships?
• Can you decide to measure the quality of your relationship based on result instead of intentions or promises?
• Can you decide that you would rather be happy than right?
• Can you stop playing the blame game and recognize that it is a new day?
• Can you be willing to move your position on how you approach and engage your partner?
• Can you be willing to get real and be honest with yourself, about yourself, no matter how painful it is?
• Can you stop the denial and be completely, totally honest about the state of your current relationship?

First: it is not too late. You may think your relationship has failed, you may feel like you have tried everything, you may feel tired, deflated and defeated, but I'm telling you, you have to get that thought out of your head or you are dead in the water. You have to be willing to give yourself one more chance. Even if you have hurt so long and so badly that you aren't at all sure if you care whether your relationship survives; even if you're not sure you can ever subject yourself to any more pain from a relationship; even if you don not feel motivated or very hopeful, you can start getting out of your ditch if you will just say to yourself, "I wish I felt good about my relationship again."

Second: you are not alone. You might feel bewildered and demoralized right now, engulfed by the loneliness that comes with a deteriorating relationship. You may feel intimidated and overwhelmed by what may seem like insurmountable problems or hurt that tend to run so very, very deep. Once you learn the real truth about how you got into this mess, and then once you learn what you can do to get rid of the mess, you will shudder to think you almost walked away. You are closer to success than you could ever imaging if you just have the courage to get real with yourself.

The strategy for rescuing your relationship involves seven major steps.

• First, we will focus on defining and diagnosing where your relationship is now, because you will never be able to change what you do not acknowledge. Only if you are able to define specifically, precisely what is wrong with you, as well as what is wrong in your relationship, will you be able to set reasonable goals for change and match a solution to it
• Second, we must rid you of wrong thinking. You haven't suffered just an absence of information, you have suffered a poisoning of your thinking by an infusion of wrong information. You were sent down the wrong road, pursuing the wrong alternatives to poorly defined problems.
• Third, it will be important to blow the whistle on your own negative attitudes and behaviors and the specific ways you do irreparable ham to your own relationship, how you interact in ways that are in direct opposition to the healthy self that is defined in your core of consciousness. You are going to find plenty to fix in yourself before you ever get to focus on your partner. The fact that you are the focus should be great new because you can control you!
• Fourth, is to internalize a set of what I call "Personal Relationship Values" that will become the new foundation for your relational life, that will emotionally tune you in to the best parts of yourself and behaviorally set you up to give your partner positive things to respond to.
• In the fifth step you will be taught one of the most basic and powerful formulas active at the core of human functioning: the specific formula for a successful relationship.

• In our sixth step, we begin the reconnection process. Whether preventative or remedial, this will be the time to reopen negotiations, to work through a series of critical steps in order to learn how to deal with your own needs and your partner's need in a way that sets you up for success. YOU HAVE TO NAME IT BEFORE YOU CAN CLAIM IT.
• In the seventh step, you will earn how to manage your relationship once you have reconnected with your partner. We will spend time on how to make sure that emotional baggage gets jettisoned so you can have a fresh start and a new chance in your relationship.

To accomplish these seven steps, you must do one thing, starting right now. You must put your relationship on what I like to call Project Status. This means that you must consciously decide to actively, purposefully work on improving your situation each and every day. I mean DO IT, every single day. Discipline yourself to do the work. You are going to have to set aside time each day to get this relationship recharged. You will get out of this project what you put into this project.

Putting your relationship on Project Status also means you must be committed for the long haul. A tried and true formula fits the need here: Be - Do - Have. Be committed, do what it takes, and you will have what you want. You have to commit to work on this "until" you have what you want. I suspect that it took you a good while to get things this screwed up, so give yourself equal time to get the relationship right.

Throughout this journey there will be setbacks, there will be pain, there will be disappointment, but there also will be change.

It is not enough to have some sort of "desire" or " hope" that you will develop a better relationship. You must be willing to reach down and find that long-hidden hunger for excellence that lurks somewhere inside you, and then you must be willing to unleash it.

Adopt a philosophy of passion that says, "I will not quit. I will not allow my hopes and dreams to be pushed aside". Never forget, this life is your only shot.

Don't forget about the importance of your relationship with yourself. You must demand nothing less than the best of yourself and for yourself.

It is not wrong to want, expect, demand, and aspire to a relationship in which you are treated with honor, dignity, and respect. It is not unrealistic to believe that your mate can and should be your soft place to fall. It is not a pipe dream to believe that God has provided for you another person in this world whom you can trust with your most intimate and vulnerable secrets and needs.

I am not telling you to pretend that there are not problems, or that they will go away. I am asking you to exercise the belief within yourself that you can do this, and that your relationship can be much better. "Sometimes we make the right decision and sometimes we have to make the decision right." You will find in these pages the no-nonsense but powerful strategy that can get you and your partner reconnected.

You might not like hearing about all of it. You might not like having to confront the truth about yourself - but I predict that you will love the outcome. You will be able to go from an individual hoping for a future to an individual making your future happen. And then both you and you partner can begin working to get what you want, to stop the pain that both of you are feeling, and to create more peace, love and the deepest of you in your relationship.