With fifty percent of marriages ending in divorce and the ever-increasing numbers of "trial" marriages, serial monogamists, and "scared-singles," attaining a happy, long-lasting relationship can seem hopelessly out of reach. Conventional relationship advice promises such fulfillment in love, but really only adds to the confusion, anxiety, blame, and heartbreak. Where can couples turn when the old rules don't work anymore? Seana McGee and Maurice Taylor, couple educators and husband-and-wife psychotherapist team, have the answer.

In the quest for safety, belonging, continuity, and comfort, we too often fall back on traditional, deeply ingrained expectations and assumptions about relationships, including such stifling stereotypes as the male provider and the good wife and mother. But these conventions ignore our individual needs to learn to love ourselves and to find and fulfill our true life's work, as well as our need for a more authentic, ongoing emotional connection to our mate. Maxims such as "do something nice for each other every day," "be positive," "never go to bed angry," and "treat your spouse as you would a stranger" are hardly sufficient to heal serious rifts and re-establish all-important trust. Taylor and McGee provide the keys for a deeper understanding of modern partners' "higher-order needs" and the tools for their fulfillment within the context of a committed, loving, and honest relationship. For all couples -- living together or married, straight or gay, with children or without -- The New Couple offers tools for emotionally and sexually fulfilling relationships that last.

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In our day, a truly successful relationship seems well-nigh miraculous, especially to those of us who fear that we're condemned to remain forever rudderless when it comes to long-term love. Yet human beings don't yearn for anything that isn't possible. As a very wise person once said, miracles don't really exist; they're simply phenomena ruled by laws of nature that our scientists have yet to discover. Well over a decade ago, when we started teaching, training and counseling couples as a team -- which was also just about the moment we met -- we were already convinced that such natural laws must also exist for love, that there must be a way for everybody to have emotionally and sexually deep connections that last. And we embarked on a singular quest to find those laws, hoping to introduce sanity to love.

To tell the truth, our resolve wasn't only work-related; it wasn't only for our clients that we began our search for the most cutting-edge information and the most effective, enduring-results-producing techniques (though serving couples was, and still is, our joint mission in life). We were also, quite frankly, mad about each other, which made us bound and determined to do everything in our power not let the gift of our own precious love fade away. Our commitment to the healer-heal-thyself ethic -- which says that if one talks the talk, one had better walk the walk -- also became immediately relevant: no sooner did we two therapists (ourselves veterans of several failed relationships) fall in love with each other than we had huge problems with each other! Thus, inspired both by professional research and ethics, and by the passion between us, we became adamant about figuring out this thing called committed monogamous relationship and discovering the laws that govern it.

Our research was underpinned by our eclectic theoretical orientation -- a hybrid of humanistic, depth, self and transpersonal psychologies, systems theory and the recovery model -- and based on our separate and mutual clinical experiences working with couples, parents and single persons in community counseling centers, schools and hospitals in the United States and in private practice in Asia, as well as on our own relationship. In fact, over the first two years together, we dated, broke up twice, got engaged, then married. Along the way, we sampled a variety of couple counselors, relationship experts and workshops. In short, as though it were a carburetor from yesteryear, we repeatedly took our own relationship apart into a million pieces and meticulously put it back together again. While the value of the techniques and processes we sampled -- their power to crack open our hearts, blow our minds and set our spirits free as individuals -- was unquestionable, and though many of these approaches deepened our intimacy as a couple as well, none offered the cogent relationship tenants we were seeking.

A New Model of Love
It was clear to us that these laws would have to be part of an overall vision -- a sparkling new model of love that not only honored our more sophisticated requirements for relationships, but also boldly replaced the traditional. After all, though it's been oft-repeated that relationship is a journey, not a destination, it's neither fair nor viable to ask lovers today to head out for parts unknown using a map -- or a model -- that's fifty-plus years old. Above all, this replacement would have to be strong enough to keep us all from defaulting back into the trance of the traditional model of relationship.

As the larger picture came into focus, the exact dimensions of this model -- what would later become the laws -- vividly revealed themselves in the negative: in other words, we noticed certain facets of relationship the neglect of which consistently got couples (our own included) into trouble. Conversely, we also noticed that a respect for these facets seemed to keep couples healthy. Though ignoring one facet alone was often enough to do a couple in (and respecting one alone was never enough to save them), partners were usually tripped up by a cluster of them.

Though they wore many faces, these standard couple conundrums always boiled down to some variation of the following:

1. Lack of a passionate initial connection
2. Unwillingness or inability to prioritize the health of the relationship
3. Inability to deal with emotions
4. Inability to listen from the heart
5. Entrenched unfairness
6. Inability to make peace and restore broken trust
7. Seemingly irreconcilable points of conflict
8. Undiscovered or unmanifested life purpose for one or both partners
9. Emotional or financial dependencies
10. Unwillingness to embrace healing and education for the relationship.

To our delight, we realized that each of these problems was linked to a binding principle. In those principles lay the essence of what we sought -- the natural laws of love. And since none had been specifically articulated in previous generations, we call them the Ten "New" Laws of Love.

As for our own couple, the laws plainly function as a sacred scaffolding -- stabilizing and enriching our relationship just as they do that of the couples we serve. Having befriended our fair share of dragons -- which, of course, we expected -- we can't imagine where we'd be without these laws to fall back on. To their credit, we're still very much each other's absolute best friend in the entire world, and our life continues to be an exciting reflection of both our individual and joint dreams made manifest. Because these laws have repeatedly proved their effectiveness over the years -- serving as a hologram of couple health for ourselves, our clients, workshop participants, our lecture and radio audiences -- we were inspired to write this book.

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