When I made the decision to write about love and relationships, I approached the subject from four distinct but related vantage points: First, as someone who was once "addicted" to drama in relationships (and who, gratefully, no longer is); secondly, as a survivor of what I only later fully understood was an emotionally abusive relationship in college; thirdly, as a person who had the good fortune to meet and marry the man I've been in love with for nearly seventeen years; and, finally, as a licensed member of the counseling profession. Throughout the book, I provide detailed examples to illustrate key points, including some rather revealing stories from my own life, in the hope that they may be of some use to readers.

CONSIDER THIS: I strongly believe that healthy love is always within reach, provided you pay close attention to certain basic truths about yourself, about what you are looking for in a partner and in a relationship.

I'm no Pollyanna, and I've certainly been through my share of dark days. Like most people, I know what it means to suffer for love (or at least for what I once thought of as love). But I have worked hard to master the art of what the writer Norman Vincent Peale so famously called "the power of positive thinking," and that has had a profound impact on my life. I've always admired people who are optimists by nature. That can be a great gift. While I am not a born pessimist, I would describe myself as a bit of a worrier, which means that I've always had to work a little harder at creating my own sense of hope and optimism. Still, as hard as I've worked on improving my outlook over the last few years, it has been well worth the effort. By making the conscious choice to start seeing the world and most of the people in it as fundamentally good, I have substantially improved the quality of my life in many areas.

On a totally practical level, I've learned that people tend to be more drawn to optimists than they are to pessimists. After all, it's fun to be around people who enjoy life. It's not a good idea to put on a façade of false happiness if in fact you feel miserable inside, because façades eventually crumble. Instead, try to harness all your inner resources to create as much genuine happiness in your own life before you date someone new, because prospective partners will probably be much more receptive if you do.

QUICK QUOTES: It's a very powerful concept: to surrender, to give oneself over entirely to a designated role or entity, such as wifedom, or the institution of marriage.

Never Surrender

I've noticed that a fair number of books on the market about love and marriage seem to focus on the more negative aspects of dating and relationships. In recent years several marriage and relationship books have been published with the rather provocative word surrender in their titles. I've read some of these books, and while I find that they are written in clear, compelling voices and contain many useful ideas about the value of relinquishing a certain degree of control in intimate relationships in order to achieve greater satisfaction, I continually find myself tripping over that one rather daunting word in each of their titles: Surrender. It's a very powerful concept: to surrender, to give oneself over entirely to a designated role or entity, such as wifedom, or the institution of marriage. The word makes me picture a battle-weary soldier: dirty, bleeding, fatigued, and at long last defeated, weakly waving a torn white handkerchief while whispering those famous wartime words, "I surrender!" before falling to his knees and giving himself up to the enemy.

No one wants the idea of marriage to automatically conjure up images from a battlefield, and in my view, that is precisely what the word surrender so often implies. It also calls to mind Ophelia's famous, tragic suicide in Shakespeare's Hamlet. She loses her life at least partly because she believes she has failed to capture Hamlet's heart, and also because she is convinced that she has somehow disappointed everyone in her life. (Talk about surrendering oneself for the sake of love!) In fact, the haunting image of Ophelia's suicide remains so resonant to this day that in her well-known book, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, the contemporary writer Mary Pipher has effectively borrowed that evocative image to shed much-needed light on some of the more daunting challenges that face teenage girls today, not only in their relationships with boys, but in many other areas of their lives as well.

It's important to reiterate that the marriage and relationship books that contain the word surrender in their titles are complex, nuanced, and enlightening works on the subject of marriage and intimate relationships. Again, it's not the actual contents of the books that I object to; rather, it's that I wince a little every time I glance at the covers of these books because of all that's implied in that one charged, provocative word--surrender.

In contrast, I believe that there are many ways to have successful relationships that do not involve surrendering one's identity, volition, or sense of self to the union.

QUICK QUOTES: Maybe it's silly to quibble over what some may view as mere semantics, but I don't think so, because the words we choose to describe the state of being married (or being in a long-term loving relationship), should accurately reflect how we feel about it.

To that end, I propose that rather than talking about surrendering to marriage (or to a role, such as wifedom), we talk instead about committing ourselves to marriage, or to our love relationships. Do individuals sometimes need to make sacrifices and compromises in order to make their intimate relationships work? Absolutely. But if couples make some sacrifices and some compromises that does not mean (in my view, at least) that they must surrender to their marriage or committed relationship in the same way that a defeated soldier must surrender to his enemy.

In my own life, for instance, I feel I have committed myself heart, body, mind, and soul to my husband and to my marriage, but at the same time I feel that I've surrendered to only one thing--"The Great Mystery That Is Love." By the mystery of love I mean that huge, unstoppable tidal wave of passion mixed with tenderness that overtakes us when we know with utter certainty and clarity that we have met our perfect match. Call me a diehard romantic, but I like to think that the act of surrendering to Love--that greatest and most mysterious of human emotions--is radically different from surrendering to another human being (one's spouse), or to a pre-defined role (that of husband or wife), or to an institution (marriage).

Keep It Simple

With that in mind, I wrote this book in large part to celebrate love and marriage and to make the argument that love does not have to be fraught with drama and excessive complications, or, for that matter, surrendering of any kind. Granted, life is far from simple, but the mere act of loving and being loved can be relatively unencumbered and much smoother and easier than many people imagine.

CONSIDER THIS: The key is to learn how to allow our love to flow more easily, unrestricted by pettiness, jealousy, panic, mistrust, drama, bitterness, resentment, or any of the other nasty impediments that can conspire to block love's smooth passage between two partners.

I like to think of this concept of smoothly flowing love between partners as simple love. In a nutshell, loving simply involves letting go of negativity and accentuating the positive by focusing most of your attention on the best qualities in your partner and yourself, rather than the worst. If you spend too much time zeroing in on your own faults and/or those of your partner, you risk losing sight of all the reasons you fell in love in the first place. However, if the two of you are determined to cultivate a long-term committed relationship (for example, a marriage)--one that is filled with mutual kindness, tenderness, and honesty, a continual loop of positive feedback, if you will--your committed relationship (or marriage) stands a good chance of weathering most of the storms that will inevitably come your way.

At its most basic, loving simply can probably best be described as loving and being loved by your significant other according to the Golden Rule, because above all else, we need to treat our partners the way we want to be treated, and vice versa. The most challenging and important aspect of loving simply is that we can't apply the Rule only when we feel like it. The Golden Rule needs to be the one strong, unbreakable thread that runs through all of our interactions with our partners, even when we are angry with them--especially when we are angry with them. I emphasize this point because we all get angry with our mates from time to time. It's when we are at our angriest that we tend to say the cruelest things, so that's precisely when we need to rein in our worst impulses and learn how to master the art of arguing in the least hurtful way.