Scarlet Letter - Infidelity - Part Four of Four

Even as a single guy I have found the book "His Needs, Her Needs" to be a great read. I have read it multiple times. His basic premise is that if you don't meet your spouses needs they will get their needs met elsewhere.

An on-line Christian bookseller summarized the book:

"It's no surprise - men and women have radically different priorities. Describing the ten most important needs of men and women, Dr. Harley teaches you how to "affair-proof" your marriage. Learn how to sustain romance, increase intimacy, and deepen your awareness year after year."

Her needs:
1. Affection
2. Conversation
3. Honesty and openness
4. Financial Support
5. Family Commitment

His Needs:
1. Sexual Fulfillment
2. Recreational Companionship
3. An Attractive Spouse
4. Domestic Support
5. Admiration

If you don't meet your spouses needs and you spouse strays, his advice for surviving the affair:
Step 1: Ask yourself "do you want to survive the storm?"
Step 2: Don't put up with it another minute.
Step 3: Know what to expect
Step 4: Start meeting each others needs

In the last chapter he says:
"The Cure for incompatibility: Getting Down to the Full-Time Business of Meeting Each other's Most Important Emotional Needs.

The quickest cure for incompatibility and fastest road to becoming irresistible lie in meeting each other;s most important emotional needs. Happily married couples are already aware of this principle and have learned how to make marriages a full-time priority. But these couples not only put out the effort, they also put out their effort in the right places.

I have seen this principle work in many different situations. For example, I once managed a dating service in the Twin Cities area. A dating service is designed to help people with common interests and objectives meet each other. Soon after I opened the service I began to see a very real problem. Those who had enrolled---some five hundred---needed more than an opportunity to meet each other. Almost without exception these people lacked skills in meeting the needs of others. Yet each of them eagerly sought someone else who would be highly skilled in meeting their needs and could care for them. They complained that they only met selfish and insensitive people. Of course they could not see their own selfishness and insensitivity.

So I reorganized the dating service. Rather than than help my subscribers meet eligible people, I helped them become eligible people to meet, developing skills and other qualities that that would make them attractive to the opposite sex.

A number of the dating-service bought in to my new concept and took the pains necessary to become skillful in meeting the needs of other people. For these men and women, my dating service was a roaring success. In fact, they found they no longer needed a dating service to introduce themselves to anyone. Their newly acquired abilities made them attractive to the opposite sex wherever they went. Many of them married within two years.

I believe that our societies failure to train people in meeting the needs the needs of others---especially the needs of the married partner---has caused much of our high divorce rate. Marriage is not a simple social institution that everyone eventually enters into because he or she "falls in love and lives happily ever after". As long as we fail to to see marriage as a complex relationship that requires special training and abilities to meet the needs of the opposite sex, we will continue to see a discouraging and devastating divorce rate.

Children should be trained at a very young age to to learn how to meet the needs and expectations that will be laid on them if and when they enter marriage. There is no reason we must see so many marriages that barely hold together or drift into affairs."

His comments about singles is so true. I see so many others that are looking for someone to meet their needs and not trying to meet the needs of others; I am also guilty of this.