Maurice Taylor and Seana McGee couldn't find a better advertisement for their book, "The New Couple," than themselves.

Attractive, articulate, openly professing their love for each other after a decade of marriage, they could be the prototype of the evolved couple they envision in their book.

Before they met, though, they were both veterans of several failed relationships and couldn't imagine the kind of enlightened marriage they have now.

"I didn't think a committed relationship was viable in our era," she says, sinking into a plush couch in their white-carpeted Sausalito town house. "We approached relationships as absolute cynics. We were serial monogamists. But it's been 12 years now, and we still have a fabulous sexual and emotional connection."

"It's a miracle," he adds, as their cat settles into his lap. "We've cracked the code, if that's not too grandiose."

Taylor, 40, and McGee, 46, wrote "The New Couple: Why the Old Rules Don't Work and What Does," from their own marital experience, from research on effective communication techniques and from what they've learned as family therapists and couples counselors.

"For evolved love partners, the traditional methods don't reflect their needs," she says. "We have to replace it very consciously with a more suitable model."

Both Taylor and McGee are children of parents who stayed in unhappy marriages, and they are determined not to repeat that family pattern. On a quest to preserve their own passion as much as to help their clients, they developed what they call "The Ten New Laws of Love," which John Gray of "Men Are From Mars, Women Are from Venus" fame praises as "essential guideposts for anyone looking to be in a successful, fulfilling relationship."

Deepak Chopra, who has recruited Taylor and McGee to be relationship experts on the faculty of his new multi-media company, My Potential Inc., says the Ten Laws "guide us to awareness, wholeness and infinite blessings."

Taylor and McGee say they wrote "The New Couple" in the belief that healthy relationships are the last frontier of the human-potential movement and that couples must learn basic skills in order to stay together and grow together. It isn't something that comes naturally, as previous generations may have been told.

"With relationships, there's a kind of institutional prescription against education in our culture," he says, to which she adds, "We are brainwashed to believe that healthy relationships are instinctual, that if we need any education, heaven forbid, something is wrong with us."

Taylor and McGee would seem almost too good to be true, but they are quick to point out that they have their problems just like anyone else involved in a long-term, committed relationship.

"It's not about perfection," he says. "New couples get in trouble," she adds, "but we have a method for getting out of it, and we use it."

Taylor and McGee met in a family therapy class at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where they both received master's degrees in counseling psychology.

Two years later, they were married in a romantic ceremony on a bluff on Tomales Bay that overlooked Heart's Desire Beach.

"Seven world spiritual traditions were represented at our wedding," she says. "We wrote our own vows. It was real Marin."

But their honeymoon was shattered when the bride's mother, on a pilgrimage to the Southern California home where she and her late husband once lived, was killed in an automobile accident shortly after the wedding.

With the money they inherited from her, the newlyweds decided to travel around the world, ending up in Singapore, working in the international community in that upscale Asian republic as marriage and family therapists, seminar leaders and speakers.

While in Singapore, after attending a seminar called "Money and You," they decided to write a book outlining what they had learned about "this thing," as they put it, "called committed monogamous relationship."

Three years ago, they returned to the United States and finished "The New Couple" in a Bolinas home overlooking the Pacific, intending it to be "the handbook of 21st-century relationship." They also lecture and lead seminars for couples and singles through their Sausalito-based New Couple International.

In "The New Couple," they identify three distinct phases in relationships: The Intoxication Stage, the usually brief hearts-and-flowers period; the Power Struggle, when problems begin to arise and couples often believe they have fallen out of love; and, finally, the Co-creative Stage, when couples master the skills needed to maintain a healthy relationship and make it last.

"Most relationships don't get to co-creativity," he acknowledges. "They either break up or stay in the Power Struggle."

Taylor and McGee say the path to co-creativity can be found by using three fundamental skills: Emotional Literacy, the ability to speak about emotions in a respectful way; Deep Listening, hearing the emotions under a partner's words; and Peacemaking, learning to resolve conflict and come to agreement.

Recently, "The New Couple" was criticized by the conservative Institute for American Values, a small New York-based "think tank," for its emphasis on "relationship" rather than traditional marriage.

"Is this dispute over vocabulary really important?" the institute asks in its newsletter. "It is all important. Nothing matters more. If we lose the word 'marriage,' we lose marriage."

Taylor and McGee see this as little more than a thinly veiled condemnation of homosexual unions, since lesbians and gays cannot legally marry.

"Our approach is very inclusive," he says. "Lesbian and gay people have as much right to legitimate relationships as heterosexuals."

"And to have relationship education," she adds.

In fact, Taylor and McGee point out, their book is also aimed at couples in the early days of their courtship, before they've tied the knot.

"We want to catch them when they're still getting to know each other," he says. "That's when they need relationship education the most."