If you press them they will tell you what they really want. They want to change the world.

Their book does not look like a manifesto and they look like models in an exercise gadget info-mercial, not activists with a global agenda. But secretly, that is what Seana McGee and Maurice Taylor, a husband and wife team, hope will happen when people read their book, ''The New Couple.''

That does not mean they would be disappointed if the book performed its more modest and primary purpose: teaching couples to love each other (and themselves) more fully. Psychotherapists who built a career as couples counselors in Singapore, McGee and Taylor returned to California last year with a desire to share what they learned about relationships in their practice and in the 12 years they have been a couple. "People have evolved in so many ways," says McGee. "We meditate, we levitate, but we don't stay in love."

McGee and Taylor believe that the love stories we tell ourselves are mired in outdated scripts that haven't kept up with the choices available to a modern couple. The authors believe this is why so many relationships dissolve. If a couple is successful, their relationship will have three stages. Unfortunately, many of us never get beyond the first or second phase. McGee and Taylor call the first period the ''intoxication stage.'' These are the initial days, weeks or months with a new partner. The giddy, butterflies in the stomach period, when the lovestruck fixates on only the good attributes of the beloved. As anyone who has been madly in love can testify, this phase does not last forever.

As the blush of new love begins to fade and people become more comfortable with each other, a mechanism in one or both partners' psyche goes into motion. Long dormant fears and anxieties from childhood begin to demand attention. Partners in a relationship unconsciously expect the other partner to heal these wounds and become frustrated when their expectations are inevitably unfulfilled. McGee and Taylor believe that couples moving out of the intoxication stage run smack into this psychic trap and then wonder how it happened that their love turned sour. The authors call this less exhilarating and more demanding stage the ''power struggle.''

"People should realize that the intoxication period is supposed to end," says McGee. "A lot of people think that first thrill is what love is all about. But really, it's just the beginning." The power struggle is where relationships founder, they say. It's the point when serial monogamists and commitment-phobes bow out and start anew. Some are eager for the next rush of new romance, others can't stand the revival of old anxieties. Sometimes it's a combination of both.

How, then, do lovers pass through this rough patch of romance? What awaits on the other side? "What can follow is a higher order of love," says McGee. The therapists call this ultimate period the ''co-creative stage.'' They are quick to say that this phase is not some Valhalla inside a Valentine's Day car d where lovers who have "made it" can go to retire in easy bliss. It takes work to get there and it takes work to keep it sustained. But by Taylor and McGee's reckoning, that work is what puts us together more completely as human beings.

To help couples find their way from the power struggle to co-creativity, the authors outline the ''10 New Laws of Love.'' The laws reflect their background as therapists, and are a synthesis of different schools of theory as well as the authors' own ideas. Fragments come from their years in practice and the individuals they treated; other pieces are a result of their own experience as partners in love and work. Their laws cover topics like chemistry, priority, emotional integrity, peacemaking, self-love, ''walking'' (the ability to feel autonomous and free within a relationship) and transformational education.

According to Taylor, the law with the highest rate of return for time invested is the law of deep listening. Deep listening is simply giving one's partner 10 minutes to talk without interruption. "It's so easy to do and the payoff is enormous," he says. "Men aren't raised to be listeners. We weren't listened to as kids ... '' McGee and Taylor believe that children become the primary victims of relationships mired in the power struggle. Parents look to the children to compensate for what's missing in the partnership. "By the time men are in relationships of their own, their attitude is, `I'm not listening to (women) any more.' Been there, felt that," says McGee.

And here is the germ of their revolution. McGee and Taylor hope that couples who want to have children will wait until they have put their relationship on the road to the co-creative stage. The children of those unions will, in turn, be better suited for fulfilling partnerships, and so on until the world is filled with happy relationships, one couple at a time. "That's our special, secret agenda," says McGee, smiling and placing her hand in her husband's.