Click Here To Read More Interviews

A FamilyChristian.com Exclusive Interview
Dr. Bill Harley
Building an Affair Proof Marriage

In a world where divorce is the norm and infidelity is excused, it appears that marriage is no longer a sacred institution. Dr. Bill Harley, a marriage counselor based in Minnesota, has worked with thousands of couples to save their marriages and restore their relationships. In 1986, his book His Needs, Her Needs: Building an Affair-Proof Marriage was published, showing couples how to love each other more completely by meeting the unique needs of men and women. Over one million copies and fifteen years later, His Needs, Her Needs is still recognized as one of the leading books on marriage available in either Christian or mainstream markets. Dr. Harley and his wife of 38 years, Joyce, recently spoke with Family Christian Stores about the book, the problems facing couples today and how to "affair-proof" a marriage.

FamilyChristian.com: What prompted you to write the original version of His Needs, Her Needs?

Bill: An employee of [my publishing company] was seeing me for counseling for his own marriage. After getting the marriage straightened out he said, "You need to write a book [about] what you've just gotten me to do." I had essentially put him through the program that's described in His Needs, Her Needs.

I wrote [the book] in three months. It was actually only a part of my total program. Each person needs a different part but there's actually three parts to it. The problem that a lot of couples have in marriage is they think their own needs are reasonable and important but that the other person's needs are frivolous. A husband will tell me that he doesn't think talking so much is important and the wife will tell me that sex is not that important. The point of His Needs, Her Needs is that you've got to become an expert at meeting a need that you might not think is all that important. I'm not telling any couple what their needs are or should be. Part of the book helps a couple figure out what those needs are going to be for them. But the idea is that whatever your spouse needs, get to be good at meeting that.

The second problem in marriage is that people hurt each other and they have to learn to stop hurting each other. I address that in my book Love Busters.

But then there's a third problem and that is negotiating. You've got to be able to negotiate.

FamilyChristian.com: You call that the policy of joint agreement.

Bill: Right. That's the third thing that couples need to understand. You've got to do all three of them. You've got to learn to meet each other's important emotional needs. You have to learn to stop hurting each other and you've got to learn to bargain with each other fairly so that you end up having a lifestyle that both of you enjoy at the same time. Those three subjects are going to be brought up for the very first time in the book that's coming out in August called Fall in Love, Stay in Love. Generally, when I counsel a couple, I don't work on all three of them; I work on the one that they're missing.

FamilyChristian.com: Was writing something that you wanted to do or was it something you fell into?

Bill: No, it was something I hated doing. (Laughs). I never thought it would be popular either. At the time I wrote it, I was directing 32 mental health clinics in Minnesota. I wrote the book to provide resource material for the counselors. I had about 200 counselors working for me and it was to give them reading material to give to their clients. I thought that at the very least we'd have some books to give to our clients.

The thing that really got the book on the road, interestingly enough, was a television show I did with Sally Jesse Raphael. This was in 1988, two years after it had come out. During those two years it really hadn't done very well. I got on her show and the room was full of women. Every cameraperson was a woman. The producers were women. The audience was women. The two other guests were women. I was the only man in sight. The topic was infidelity and the position of the two women was that infidelity had its place, that in certain situations infidelity was okay. My position was that infidelity was like a heroine addiction and infidelity destroyed people. It destroyed the betrayed spouse. It destroyed the children. It destroyed the extended family. But it also destroyed the person engaged in infidelity and the lover. Everyone in sight is destroyed by infidelity. If you can do something to preserve faithfulness in your marriage, you will have missed a bullet in life. I got a standing ovation from the audience. Sally Jesse Raphael said she read the book before the show and said, "If I had read this book, my life would have been very different and very much improved." She held it up, looked right in the camera and said, "I think this is a book that everybody should read." Well, the book just absolutely took off. It was really written for a Christian audience but where it really started in its popularity was in secular audiences.

His Needs, Her Needs by Dr. Bill Harley

FamilyChristian.com: The 15th anniversary edition of His Needs, Her Needs has been updated and expanded. I noticed that one of the chapters that had been changed dealt with a man's need for an attractive spouse. Was that changed in response to criticism from readers?

Bill: I get criticism quite often from people who are misunderstanding what I'm trying to say. If they disagree with me, they disagree with me, but if they misunderstand where I'm going with this or if they jump to conclusions with only reading a particular part of it, then I have to do something with that.

The issue of physical attractiveness can apply to the man just as much as the woman in the area of, say, weight loss or even the choice of clothes and hair style.

Joyce: It's what you define as attractive to you. Some men hate makeup. [Women should say,] "Whatever it is, honey, that makes you happy when you look at me, I want to do that for you."

Bill: It's a form of caring for someone else. I've argued that your appearance can be thought of as an act of care. If you don't care about your appearance, it means that you don't care about the other person who is looking at you. Without a doubt, it's the chapter I get the most flack on but it's also a chapter that is extremely important in marriage.

Joyce: [Couples] have to work through how they're going to define it.

FamilyChristian.com: Of course, responses, whether positive or negative, mean people are reading the book.

Bill: I love getting reactions. Joe Beam, who leads His Needs, Her Needs seminars all over the United States, read the book after he'd divorced his wife. After reading the book, he called his wife up and asked if she'd like to consider getting back together again.

Joyce: And they are remarried.

Bill: He's dedicated his whole life now to leading His Needs, Her Needs seminars all over the United States.

FamilyChristian.com: One interesting facet of your book is that you refrain from using specific Scriptures to back up your principles. As a result, you're reaching both Christian and non-Christian couples. Was that your intent?

Bill: The reason I did it was not for the secular reader. I did it for the Christian reader who is having a bad marriage and is totally turned off by everything Christian. This is what you essentially get in a bad marriage, especially with somebody having an affair. The last thing they want to hear is some Scripture on adultery. The approach I was taking was what I would use with a pastor or a missionary or an evangelist that was having problems with a marriage. They already know that they are clearly out of God's will if they are having an affair, but they also need to understand that they're out of God's will if they're not meeting their spouse's emotional needs.

FamilyChristian.com: What is your response to those who criticize the lack of Scripture?

Bill: There's nothing in [His Needs, Her Needs] that is inconsistent with Scripture. That's an extremely important point. This business on physical attractiveness [is a sticking point] for [some] Christians. They say, "Hmmm. I wonder if Jesus Christ would have written that." I feel like I'm in the will of God on this one but it still jumps out at you.

Joyce: To me what's in the will of God is that your mate not be tempted by someone else. You're building an affair-proof marriage. That's in the will of God to have an affair-proof marriage. Another thing I wanted to bring up regarding your not having Scripture [in the book] is that your concepts have touched people outside of the church and outside of Christendom.

Bill: [It's] brought them in. I had a couple in Oregon [contact me.] She was a pagan believer and he was a Buddhist and they both prayed to their gods that they would be led to someone who would save their marriage. They both independently found our website and came to me and they said, "Isn't it remarkable that our gods would have sent us to a Christian?" (Laughs).

FamilyChristian.com: Unfortunately, divorce is now a fact of life in our culture. How has that changed your counseling practice over the years?

Bill: I started out when divorce was becoming a national phenomenon [in] the mid to late 60s. People were divorcing right and left-and they were Christians. I didn't know that it was a national phenomenon. I just thought it was this person and this person.

What struck me was that I couldn't save their marriage. I didn't know what would work. The arguments that they would give me didn't make any sense. It had to do with their personal ambitions and how they were not getting as much out of life as they wanted to. These were [ideas] that I was not raised [with], thinking about how much I was getting out of life in reference to my marriage. Once I was married, I was going to be married forever. Even if my wife turned out to be a horrible person, this was what God had given me and I had to do the best I could. I'd have my Bible with me every time I went to see a couple and I would look at all the Scriptures on marriage and how important it was to the Lord but no one seemed to care. I started asking people, "What will work? What would save your marriage?" And eventually it came to, "Well, if I was in love with my husband or my wife again, but I'm never going to be in love again." So then I worked on getting them to be in love again.

In those days, when I got on the right track, they would do what I told them to do. A couple would come in and would say they hate each other and they want to get a divorce. I would say, "Your assignment for today is this: husband, I want you to go home and talk to your wife about subjects that she's interested in for two hours. I want you to put your arm around her. I want you to give her a big hug and a kiss. Wife, I want you to make love to him. I want that to be your assignment. You're supposed to talk to each other for two hours, be affectionate and then make love. I'd like you to do that four times between now and the next time we see you next week." They would do it and come back with smiles on their faces, saying, "This is a pretty good week! We like this week!" And I'd say, "I think you've got the formula. I don't know if you're going to have to pay me again. I think if you can just keep doing this, you'll probably be fine."

Now, you can't do that. That assignment will not fly. It's much more complicated than it used to be. People are much more sophisticated. For one thing, they are expecting you to help them resolve their conflicts. Marital therapy has been that if you want to save the marriage, you've got to communicate better. And so they want me to help them communicate better. Well, that isn't going to save their marriage. I've got to talk them out of that and into the other [program]. That whole process is very clumsy and cumbersome and it takes a lot more time and energy.

To some extent, I think infidelity is much more common now than it was back then and it is more resilient. In other words, when people come to me and say they're having an affair, they can look at the president of the United States as a role model, or Rudy Gulianni, mayor of New York City. We've got national leaders having affairs in the open, saying that it's perfectly all right. I didn't have that back then. When I said, "What you're doing is disgraceful," they would agree with me. Nowadays, it's not disgraceful anymore.

What I'm struggling with now is third generation children of divorced parents.

FamilyChristian.com: What difficulties have you encountered in dealing with children of divorce who are now contemplating divorce themselves?

Bill: These couples that I'm dealing with have grown up with a mindset that "I can survive as an individual." There is, to some extent, an emotional barrier that is hard to break down. It has to break down in a great marriage. In a great marriage, you have to be vulnerable. Well, kids that come from divorced families are very fighting-oriented. They argue instead of negotiate. They have their position and [say,] "I am right and you're wrong and I'm not going to try to see things your way because your way is really a stupid way to see things." If they want to understand each other, they've got to negotiate, [but it will be] years before they're going to be able to do that effectively. So I have to start with doing things that are fairly superficial. Instead of negotiating, I'm going to tell you, "You can't make a demand, you can't show disrespect and you've got to meet each other's emotional needs." That straightens out the marriage in a superficial way. So now they're in love with each other again and they're getting along. Then I say, "Okay, now I've got to tell you how to create a lifestyle where you're going to integrate each other into your lives." That turns out to be, for many couples, the tail end of the program. A lot of times we're dealing with children of divorced parents, where the idea of following the policy of joint agreement is about the stupidest idea in the world. [They say,] "For me to make all my decisions, to check my decisions with my spouse, you've got to be crazy to do something like that."

FamilyChristian.com: Another major problem many couples face is a husband's addiction to pornography. What are your thoughts on that?

Bill: That problem is huge right now because of the internet. A lot of Christians who never would have gone to a prostitute [or] a store to pick up a pornographic book [are addicted to internet porn]. With the internet, it's all so easy. You push a button-there it is. And they get addicted to that sort of thing.

FamilyChristian.com: How do you counsel couples in this situation?

Bill: My experience in terms of helping is I start out by saying that first of all your wife is not going to fall apart. She will not hate you forever. She needs to understand your weaknesses to protect herself and then at that point she says, "Well, can I do anything to help?" At that point he says, "I want to make you the focus of my sexual interest but you aren't letting me do that. And it would be easier for me to overcome this problem if I could work with you." Then, as a couple, they'd solve the problem together.

When you're married, your focus of sexuality should be on each other and there should not be any competition. Nobody should have to compete, and pornography is a form of competition.

In marriage, you need to know the person for who they are and you don't want to deceive your spouse into thinking that you are better than you really are.

Joyce: You say something to the effect of, "What do you want to know about me? Just feel free to ask anything." As things come to your mind, you bring it up. You're just very open and honest with each other.

Bill: I have a personal history questionnaire in Give and Take that is also going to be in the new book Fall in Love, Stay in Love. I say, "Here are all the questions that you need to ask your spouse because you may never have known the answers." You go through to find out everything that you might not have known. After you're done filling out the questionnaire, write a short biography of your spouse and that biography will turn out to be something your children will cherish because you'll get to know each other for who you are and how you think and what you do. It's an exercise in understanding the person you've chosen as your life mate. To me, this whole business of knowing each other to the core [involves] knowing the evil side of all of us. And if you think your spouse does not have an evil side, you're being deceived. In order to avoid an affair, you need to understand that you're capable of an affair.

FamilyChristian.com: Can a marriage survive an affair?

Bill: The thing that's interesting about affairs is that, if done the right way, they recover with such incredible passion. [There is] complete recovery. You'd think that an affair would leave you crippled the rest of your life and it tends not to do that. The recovery of an affair leaves people with a much better understanding of each other and much more realistic approach to how their marriage is going to work. They end up being, in many cases, more in love with each other than they ever were before the affair. My website, www.marriagebuilders.com, is essentially a ministry to those that are having affairs. Almost 90% of the people that contact us are having affairs. We cover everything from who does the dishes and how to raise kids, the whole gamut of marital problems. But the one [issue] where people are coming to us in droves is the issue of infidelity, primarily because we're saving marriages where somebody's unfaithful.

The only way to really make your marriage safe and secure is to re-inject passion into it. It can be done and it is done all the time. It's done in my own marriage and it's done in the marriage of my kids.

You have all these people out there that will testify that it is something that can be sustained indefinitely and that's what gives people hope. They have the choice of either having this passionate affair or going back to this very boring relationship. I say those are not your choices. Your choices are a passionate relationship with somebody who is not the mother of your children, who will destroy you in every way, shape and form. Or [you can have a] passionate affair with the person who is the mother of your children, who will not only straighten out your marriage, but will straighten out every other area of your life. Those are your choices. Are you going to do something that will make you happy or do you want to do something that makes you miserable?

FamilyChristian.com: Ultimately, what makes His Needs, Her Needs unique?

Bill: My mission is working with individual couples. My goal is to save their marriage. My goal is not to encourage them to get divorced; my goal is not to help them decide whether or not they're going to get divorced. My goal is to save their marriage.

Jen Abbas, a writer in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Corporate Informations:
About Family Christian Stores® |  Jobs
Information / Official Logos For Business Partners / Suppliers

© 2008 Family Christian Stores®, Inc.