Welcome, welcome, welcome!
By Al Turtle © 2007
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If you have arrived here interested in getting a wonderful partnership, or interested in how to do better, or interested in saving your marriage or that of friends, parents or children, or just interested in specifics of how peaceful partnerships work, you have arrived at a right place. Take heart! It ain’t rocket science!
I am a Marriage Therapist and a successful husband with a successful wife. I really think Sandra and I have learned our way into success as partners as well as to being each other’s best friend. It wasn’t easy. Some years ago we celebrated our 22nd anniversary on June 29th, 2006. On that day, I asked her would she marry me again. Her response, “The way you are now, sure!” Now, in 2012, it’s 28 years.
If I had to do it again, I too would definitely choose the same person. With what I know now, the process would be much faster and easier. I often say that at this point Sandra and I are working maybe 10% as hard and are getting 50 times more out of our togetherness. Hey, folks, it is all about learning to act smarter! I believe anyone can do it.
The purpose of this site is to make available the specific tools and supporting information that I/we have learned over years about how to really get along, and how make a great partnership/marriage. It is all about what you need in order to get from young, Romantic Love to mature, durable, Vintage Love. I want to make the process faster and easier for you, beginning at wherever you are. Speaking of “wherever you are,” a really good place to start is with a Map – by reading or listening to my Map of Relationships. So far as I know, the only place to get this “Map” is right here on this website
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While I will post many colorful pictures for the fun of it (and a picture I took in Istanbul of a piece of art is the most popular download on my site – go figure!), the really useful material is under the directory entitled Relationships. Here you will find topics (organized in more directories) full of essays, charts, skills, suggestions, and stories. I use these with couples and singles who come to see me – and I have seen several thousand over the past 15 years.
I often tell people that “if you live on a desert island, you need a whole bunch of skills – fishing, hook sharpening, fire making, cooking, utensil making and repair, bed making, hut making, etc. Think of these skills as all tools that take up two drawers in your life’s tool box. If you can live alone easily, you probably have a good set of tools in those toobox drawers. But when someone swims ashore and joins you, there are new set of tools you need – relating tools. This top drawer in your toolbox, the one with these relating tools, is the one I am a specialist at.” These are the tools I offer here. And remember, it ain’t rocket science.
In the directory of Relationships there are five folders for the five pillars at the core of all Romances and of long-term getting along – what I call The Biological Dream. Each folder has its own collection of articles or charts. These are the foundations of peacefully being together. I am not kidding. I’ve found these are simply “dead center” critical. If you are having trouble in your relationship with your partner, your boss, your friends, your family, your children, believe me you are probably stuck without one or more tools and are ready to learn the appropriate sets of skills. Please don’t blame yourself or them – get to work learning. I love to say that “You are either going to have a nice day, or you are going to learn something.” Looking back, the great wisdoms that came to me all began in some awful situation. So get on to the learning.
In addition to the five pillars, there are three abolutely necessary special skills and learnings: communication, boundaries, and what I call the “plumber’s version of emotions.” I believe everyone needs to learn this stuff if you “don’t want to live alone on that desert island.” So that is eight things you need – five pillars and three special skills.
Finally there is one special folder/topic, Healing, that is a must for married, or living-like-married, people. Remember the idea that “you can get along with everyone at work easily, but that person at home drives you crazy?” Well, I believe that Romantic Love sets up a unique situation and creates a very special kind of relationship, fraught with delight and a lot of specific solvable (often seemingly unsolvable) troubles. I first heard about this from Harville Hendrix, and it is the center of Imago Relationship Therapy. I didn’t believe it for quite a while, until I had enough evidence. Tis right!
When clients come to me as a marriage teacher, coach, tutor, they ask “What do I do?” and “Why should I do that?” I have found that most books on the market and most workshops on relationships are either too vague and do not explain what to do specifically, or they are too specific and without explaining “why.” Some books and trainings are, I believe, flat wrong. They teach things that do not work. I was asked by a casual acquaintance, “What book do you suggest to clients?” I have many, but I have seen no book or workshop that shares the whole set of problems in achieving a successful intimate relationships. (The closest thing that I know of is the Getting the Love You Want Couple’s Workshop, and the best of these that I know of is offered by Hedy Schleifer.)
An interesting side task for me has been participating in a project to take the wisdom learned from bringing durable peace to couples and extending this to groups of people. This is called the Imago Peace Project, where they learn and teach Communologue. You can find my papers on this material in the folder called Peace Making.
Thoughts on Copyrighting
Read, enjoy, learn, practice, and copy anything you want. You will notice that I put a copyright mark on most pages. This does not mean you should not download and copy what you want. This means I am the author, and if someone has a question about the material or the ideas, they can get back to me. When you copy stuff, please include that copyright. I see this a bit like the movie, Pay It Forward. All I ask from you in return is “future goodwill.”
There are so many roads that you may have come down to arrive at my site. I’d be happy to point out a direction for you on a page called Directions to Go. You also might try my paper on Where do you Start? If you want to be methodical, I suggest you start with studying the Map of Relationships. The Map gives the overall view to the whole set of challenges facing all of us. It also points toward the concept of a “University of Life”, a college-like series of courses.
If you find this valuable, you might considering donating in support of this website. Click the link.
Send me your comments and questions and I’ll be happy to reply or post my answers as I have time. You can post your comments anonymously, but I would prefer you leave an email address so that I can get back to you. Thanks for visiting. Al
My Husband told me a week ago he wasn’t happy and was not in love with me anymore and wanted to separate. I was very sad and panicked.
Over the last several years he has been very withdrawn and even pushed me away. All of my advances to hug, hold hands, kiss, or talk, even have sex were met with a No most of the time. I have tried to just tough it out. I do think we were both letting our everyday lives let our relationship take a back burner. We didn’t spend too much alone time together and the kids always came first. I had been really trying to improve our relationship for the last 3 months and it seemed that made him pull away even faster and harder.
Anyways the next day he went to his brothers and has his been there since. We have had contact but he won’t discuss doing any type of counseling and said he has “tried” for so long and doesn’t want to anymore. He is being very confusing because a few days after he left he was at our home watching our two children (who still don’t know he has “left” and just think he is hanging out with their uncle) and ended up staying the night and tried for sex numerous times. Even kissing and holding me. I wouldn’t have sex because of the hurt of what he had done. He got up and went back to his brothers the next morning. I don’t know if that was wrong of me or not
I don’t know what do or say or even think. I just want our marriage to work.
Hello Christina, Seems to me a very confusing time for you. My general thought is that when two people haven’t been deeply sharing (what I call low intimacy) and then something breaks and they start to share deeply, the first stuff that comes out seems really confusing and odd. Behavior seems really odd. Words seem cockeyed. All that.
Couple of ideas. a) for me this is “moving in a good direction” of sharing more and remediating the undone and unfinished stuff. So it’s time to celebrate – though it probably doesn’t seem that way.
b) A guiding principle now for you might be “All people make sense, all the time.” His behavior and words make sense. His past behavior has made sense. So has yours. Now is the time to find out and share those many “senses.” Putting the rebuilding of your relationship on a higher priority, I think, is a darn good idea. Putting “good communication about actions” ahead of the “actions” is also a good idea. Check out my “Map of Relationships” to help get clarity about where you may be.
Sir, I am just feeling terrible my love says she does nt love me as because we do not have any future(As She Thinks)
now how do I convince her?
she alwayz cries fr me seeing my pics(Told by her friend)
She misses me bt jst she want to stay away frm me for sake of my future
plz help
Very clear description of what I call the Choice Point in a relationship. The common feeling is one of hopelessness. Seems that we all have to reach this point before things start getting better.
Much of my website is written for you. Stop the Divorce! Read the Map of Relationships. Get to work. Good luck.
Hi Al,
My name is Kayla and my fiance and I are going through a lot right now, We have been together for 4 years, most of that long distance. We have been together physically for a year of that now. A few months ago he told me he had to leave to work on himself but we could stay together long distance, the plan he put in place was for 6 months and he made it 3 weeks before deciding to come back home. He told me he no longer wanted to be in Wisconsin where we were and we made the choice to move to Idaho, now that we are in Idaho he says he needs to leave again and that we can once again stay together but this time he wants to get a job and take care of and support himself in Oklahoma and once he has been stable and in a place for 6 months then he wants to move me to Oklahoma to join him. We are only 22 and he has never been fully independent and on his own, I have been and I can understand the need to know you can take care of yourself if you ever needed to.
I also feel like living with family or friends puts a lot of stress on our relationship and we are currently living with my family and his family is in Oklahoma. I have offered to go to Oklahoma with him and set up but he says he needs to do this on his own.
I love him more than I thought possible, I never knew you could love another person this much until I met him. I would go through anything I had to if it meant his happiness. However I cant seem to stop over thinking and over analyzing all of the what could happen if… Its scary and the last time he left we did stay together but he did lie to me about a couple of things which really hurt me and ruined a lot of my trust for him. Now I cant stop assuming he’ll lie to me this time, find someone else and just string me a long… (he did not find someone else last time, no cheating or anything like that).
I have expressed to him that this is the last time this can happen and that once were back together we cant keep being apart and long distance, this will be the second time and its all or nothing because emotionally I cant keep doing this. It really puts me through a lot. He has told me he understands and the last thing he wants is to loose me and he knows if he did it a third time he would.
I just don’t know where to start, how to handle him being away again, what I should and should not worry about, and really what to make of the whole situation.
Thank you for your time and I have read many of your articles on here, thank you so much for the information!
Long distance relationships seem to be hell on building intimacy. They seem good for maintain a “Romantic state” of blindness. He’s giving you clues and I would suggest you follow up and learn more about him and about yourself. After being together this long, I think you should be moving beyond observing what he does and says toward understanding “why” he does what he does and says what he says. AND learning why you do what you do, so you can tell him. I don’t think “love” is so much about a “feeling” and is more about “doing,” and stubbornly learning, and sharing. What do you two do when together that makes him think he needs to be away from you to learn about himself? The negative side seems to be where all the wisdom is hidden.
I came across your site maybe by the grace of God. About 6 weeks ago I came home from work and YES I was completely blindsided my boyfriend moved out no warning no fights nothing. He told me later it wasn’t me it was him but could not give me any concrete answers. I hear you don’t push stay busy don’t give time work on myself. Human nature you worry if you don’t reach out they will think you don’t care. It has been extremely difficult. I sent 2 cards today but I won’t send anymore call or text and let the chips fall where they may. This is going to be easier said than done. Thoughts?????
Dear Crystal, Your summary of the situation, while very brief, sounds pretty realistic. Without more detail I’m not sure I can say much more than what I’ve already written around this site. I don’t like your “chips fall where they may” completely as I think you can do a great deal and relationships, even temporarily fallen apart ones, seem to me such invitations to move forward and learn. But it sure hurts.
Cuz you didn’t give much detail I decided to share a kind of guess of mine. I think you are in a special group, people whose partners have just left without you being aware before that they were heading in that direction. My guess is that experience happened to more than 70,000 yesterday, in this USofA. Actually my guess is 78,904 decent people faced this each day for the last many years. Big group. Horrible amount of suffering. Oh I wish we could stop this. I do my best to help people recover and learn.
My best wishes to you.
Do you still respond to questions on this site?
Yup. Still here, even if a bit retired. I try to answer any question that I think is serious – and that is most of them. (If I don’t think it is a serious question or if it is an advertisement or something like that, I just don’t post it at all and may respond to the sender by email.) Still since I often feel “retired”, I may not answer right away.
Sometimes I am just having fun and neglect my website for a couple of days. Sometimes a question takes some thought to answer, and so I wait a couple of days to get back. But usually I get to your questions when I can.
What’s up, Crystal?
Dear Al,
I’m 34, single mom of a 6 year-old daughter. And my fiance’ is 49, he has no child. We both failed in previous marriage. We have been together for more than 4 years, and he started to meet my daughter 2 years ago. We are from different countries and he decided to move to my country last year. We had prepared all document to process marriage as well as renting an apartment. However, all was postponed since August, because he was not ready for my moving in. As he said, since he moved to my country, he lost confidence and sense of responsibility and felt very confused in relationship with my daughter, he tried but he couldn’t accept her behavior from his background culture (she attacked him when I’m not with them, she played in the dining time, etc..). Every small thing in business, in daily life was very difficult for him, it caught him some months but he still couldn’t find what he should do. I understand that it’s tough for him, but actually I felt hurtful when he said he couldn’t accept my daughter’s behavior. Before his moving to my country, we built a dream that he will raise her with me as his own daughter. So, maybe I kept my resentment since then.
Before Xmas, we had a long holiday in his country. During the trip, I didn’t see the love in his eyes although he had taken care of me and my daughter very carefully. I felt his was unhappy seeing my daughter in his house. In reverse, my daughter changed her attitude toward him, she wanted to live with him, and longed for his return home after work, she said his small house is the warmest place in the world. The contrast feelings hit my heart a lot. Especially when I unintentionally found his albums of previous marriage in bed room – full of his ex images, I got terribly unstable and jealous but I didn’t say anything with him.
After that, I continued to sense his leaving and got more and more anxious. When I asked him about new year holiday and plan for next year, he said that he had book a flight for new year and next year’s plan is not clear, I exploded. He explained that he got stress in job, and in our trip to his country he was not confidence to live with my daughter and wanted to be alone, but he wanted to re-try after alone time. I got panic because he didn’t share with me any information about that plan and feeling after such a long time waiting for our marriage. So, although at that time we are in different countries, I text him that he’s a liar and I lost trust in him…We got a terrible week of hurtful distance messages. He got shocked, and suddenly became silent.
2 weeks later, he sent me an email that his passion to build a family with me had been broken. He’s empty and he cannot recover, now memory with me and my daughter is very heavy for him. I could realize my wrong words in anger, I apologized and asked him to reconsider then I will respect his decision. From that time till now, one month has passed, but he’s still silent, no reply.
I feel blinded, lost, tired and disappointed. I still cannot believe that everything was over. Please advice what I should do.
Dear Linda, oh that different country stuff can be so painful and complicated at best. Merging a new guy into your family is also very tough particularly if he has never had a child. (I recall when I was looking for a new partner, one requirement is that she had to have children, as I did. There’s a lot of experience you can share.) Wow, lots of pain. To that add a guy who doesn’t share his feeling easily! Very tough, but not impossible. People all over the world deal with this kind of thing – some well, some not so well.
What can you do? Well first take care of your health and your daughter. Make sure you both have support, lots of it. Finding a lover in another country seems not as practical as one close by, but for support maybe you need friends. Even if you manage to reconnect with this guy, it will probably take some time and you need to feel at peace while you do the necessary work.
So, looking at him. Rule One: you can’t make him do anything – he has to decide to do it. You can help him make decisions in your directions (or away). That part is yous. So read “What to do when he/she leaves”, then the Map of Relationships, then Reliable Membership and the Testicle Principle. You may have to read “When to Fold em”.
Doesn’t seem to matter how old you are in learning this stuff and waking up to being Dialogical (fully and comfortably connected with your partner’s uniqueness). Good luck.