I have been a marriage counselor since 1968 and have helped more than 25,000 couples find real, lasting love. I’ve also helped an equal number of singles to find that special someone and learn to have a marriage that lasts through time. I tell my clients that marriage is the graduate school of life. It’s the advanced degree that you don’t have to enroll in college to earn, but you don’t get it by simply falling in love. It takes work, but it’s the best kind of work a person can do in life.

                Many would think with all the experience I have gained over the years I would be an expert at creating a great marriage, but that isn’t the case. If you visit my website, MenAlive.com, you will see my introductory video, “Confessions of a Twice-Divorced Marriage Counselor.” There is a lot I’ve had to learn.

                Perhaps the most important question people in the world are asking is this:

                If everyone wants real lasting love in their lives, why do so many people find it difficult to achieve?

                It took many years to find the answer, but I believe I have succeeded. Carlin and I met, fell in love, and I have been joyfully married now for forty-six years and we are still going strong. Here are the secrets we have learned thus far:

Secret #1: Bust the myth that finding the right partner is the most important key for a great marriage.  

                I met the woman who I eventually married in college and we got married in the summer after we graduated. We were sure our relationship would last forever, or at least until “death do us part” in our old age. It lasted ten years and we had two wonderful children before we eventually got divorced.

                After grieving the ending and going through a contentious period working out child support, custody, and settling into single life again, I was convinced I had married the wrong person and eventually remarried a second time, thinking this time I will get it right.

                Before looking for the next Ms. Right, I did some soul searching, personal counseling, and realized that finding the magical “right partner” was a myth. My years of experience have convinced me that there are in fact many potential “right partners” for each of us. I tell clients, only half-jokingly, that there are 5,284 perfect partners for each person. I believe now that looking for that one perfect “needle in the haystack” leads us astray. Never give up on love but let go of the myth that there is only one right partner for you.

Secret #2: Reflect on your past relationships, see what worked, and what you most want in a partner now.

                When a relationship ends, we are often emotionally drained, wounded, and confused. There is a tendency to blame our “ex” or ourselves for the breakup and either bury our feelings or spend endless hours replaying all the things that went wrong.

                A more helpful practice is to recognize, that like everything else in life, all things come to an end. There is much we can learn about ourselves and our needs from a relationship that has ended, but we learn little if we get locked into patterns of shame and blame, whether we are shaming and blaming our partner or ourselves.

                We can practice compassion for ourselves and the other person, we can begin to examine the positive things that brought us together, focus on what we learned about ourselves, and think about what things we would want in a future relationship. Never give up on love and focus on what was loving and good in your relationship.

Secret #3: Recognize the evolutionary basis of our desires.

                When we fall in love with a new person, we are flooded with all kinds of hormones and neurochemicals that alter our perceptions of reality. This is evolution’s way of ensuring we mate and reproduce. As Dr. Helen Fisher, the world-famous anthropologist and human behavior researcher, describes it in her book, Why We Love:

                “Romantic love is one of three primordial brain networks that evolved to direct mating and reproduction. Lust, the craving for sexual gratification, emerged to motivate our ancestors to seek sexual union with almost any potential partner. Romantic love, the elation and obsession of ‘being in love,’ enabled them to focus attention on a single individual at a time, thereby conserving precious mating time and energy.”

                Never give up on love but recognize that “being in love” is different than “real lasting love.”

Secret #4: Learn that great relationships are built over time.

                Like many, I grew up with the romantic belief that once I found the right partner, the rest was relatively easy. After I found her, we would live “happily ever after.” I learned our love lives are not so simple. A great marriage is built over days, weeks, months and years. Dr. Fisher describes the third primordial brain network this way.

                “Male-female attachment, the feeling of calm, peace, and security one often has for a long-term mate, evolved to motivate our ancestors to love this partner long enough to rear their young together.”

                Both Carlin and I had been married twice before, so we knew that a great marriage takes time to develop and people change a lot over the years. So, we decided that every 15 years, we would decide again whether we wanted to marry each other, and if so, to create new vows that reflected who we were at that stage of our lives.

                We first got married in 1980. We had our first re-marriage ceremony in 1995, our second one in 2010, and our most recent in 2025. We are still together after 45 years and still growing in love. Never give up on love but know that it takes years to develop a great marriage and we must change our vows as we change.  

Secret #5: Understand that disillusionment is a stage in every successful marriage.

                In my book, The Enlightened Marriage: The 5 Transformative Stages of Relationships and Why the Best is Still to Come, I share my naïve belief that I there were just two stages of marriage. In stage one, we fall in love. In stage two, we create a life together and live happily ever after. When disillusionment sets in people often feel the marriage isn’t working and they should get out.

                What I have learned is that disillusionment does not signal the end of a marriage, but is a stage that all marriages go through. When we enter a new relationship, we inevitably project our hopes and dreams on the other person. As time goes on, we must confront the realities of who we are. In stage three we learn to get real with each other and accept ourselves and our partner for the wonderful, complex, ever-changing, human being that they are. Never give up on love but give up the illusions of perfection we project on each other and engage in the challenging work of getting real.

Secret #6: Accept that the purpose of stage three is to uncover and heal wounds from the past.

                The CDC-Kaiser Permanente ACE Study and subsequent surveys that show that most people have at least one ACE (Adverse childhood experience), and that people with four ACEs — including living with an alcoholic parent, racism, bullying, witnessing violence inside the home, physical abuse, and losing a parent to divorce — have an increased risk of adult onset chronic health problems such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, suicide, alcoholism, and problems with relationships.

                One of the gifts of confronting the unhappiness in Stage 3 is we can get to the core of what causes the pain and conflict. Like many people, Carlin and I grew up in families that were dysfunctional in many ways. Both my father and mother suffered from depression and my dad took an overdose of sleeping pills after he had become increasingly depressed because he couldn’t support his family doing the work he loved. Carlin’s father was an angry, violent man. Her mother left him in order to protect herself and her daughter. We all have wounds and the wounds need healing if we are going to have a relationship that is real and loving.

                Never give up on love. Loving ourselves and another requires that we heal the wounds from the past. This is one of the great gifts of being in a long-term committed relationship.

Secret # 7: Real lasting love is the gift we get when we work through our problems together.

                Everyone wants to find a partner they can learn to love and share their lives with. Carlin and I are in our 80s now. We feel blessed to have found each other and stayed with each other all these years. When we first got together, we had the great good fortune to meet one of the icons of psychology, Carl Rogers. He was speaking to a group of therapists and was accompanied by his life Helen. He mentioned that they had been married for more than fifty years.

                At one point Carl turned to Helen, smiled, and asked her, “Do you remember those fifteen difficult years?” She smiled back and said she did.

                I was shocked and surprised that my hero and expert had experienced serious marital problems and even more surprised that the problems lasted so long and they remained together. Now, after being with Carlin for forty-six years, I understand. Never give up on love. The best is still to come.

                If you’d like to learn more about real lasting love, check out my on-line course, Navigating the 5 Stages of Love. If you’d like to learn about private counseling with me, drop me a note to [email protected] and put “counseling info” in the subject line.

                I also enjoy hearing from people. Let me know if this article was helpful.