I woke up this morning with the words of a song running through my mind: What the world needs now is love sweet love. It was written in 1965 by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and made famous by Dionne Warwick. That was the year I graduated college and began my career as marriage and family counselor.

                If you visit my website, MenAlive.com, you will see my welcome video “Confessions of a Twice-Divorced Marriage Counselor.”  I write an article each week that I hope will help people who, like me, are interested in sex, love, intimacy, and marriage. Let me begin by telling you about the title, “Love 6.0.”

                My wife Carlin and I have both been married twice before. When we met, fell in love, and planned to marry, we wanted this marriage to be our last—”third time’s the charm,” we told each other. Based on our experience, we knew that people change over time and vows that made at the beginning of a marriage might change as each member of the couple changes.

                We decided that we would review our marriage every fifteen years and if we still wanted to be with our partner, we would renew our vows and have another marriage ceremony. We first got married in 1980 and renewed our vows in 1995, and again in 2010, and 2025. So, we’ve had two marriages to previous partners and four marriages to each other. Hence, this is marriage 6.0 where I will share some of the lessons we’ve learned thus far.

Love Lesson #1: Our Parents Love Lives and Losses Impact Our Own

               My parents were both from the south. My father grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. My mother in Savannah, Georgia. They both moved to New York in their 20s, lived in Greenwich Village, and got married in 1934. They both wanted children but they tried for many years, without success, to get pregnant. Finally, they tried an experimental procedure of injecting my father’s sperm into my mother’s womb and I was conceived and came into the world on a cold-winter’s day in December 1943.

                My father had been an actor in New York and he and my mother moved to California shortly after my birth. The first public demonstration of television had occurred at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City and my father was convinced that he was destined for a career in T.V. or the movies.

                My parents bought a small house in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles and I remember sunny days playing in our yard surrounded by Sycamore trees and frolicking in the leaves in the fall. It was a joyful time of our lives, but things were about to change. My father was becoming increasingly depressed because he couldn’t find work and after five years experiencing one rejection after another, he took an overdose of sleeping pills feeling that my mother and I would be better off without him.

                Luckily, he didn’t die. But he was committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital. I grew up wondering what happened to my dad, when it would happen to me, and what I could do to keep the pain and suffering we felt from happening to other families.

                Years later after I had grown up and began my career in the helping profession, I found a series of journals my father had written in the months leading up to the overdose. I wrote about his mental and emotional challenges in my book, My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound. 

                In the last journal, number nine, I found these entries. Reading them was like watching a train wreck about to happen and not being able to stop it. I still feel his pain, and my own, all these years later.

                July 3, 1948: “Oh, Christ, if I can only give my son a decent education—a college decree with a love for books, a love for people, good, solid knowledge. No guidance was given to me. I slogged and slobbered and blundered through two-thirds of my life.”

                July 24, 1948: “Edie dear, Johnny dear, I love you so much, but how do I get the bread to support you? The seed of despair is part of my heritage. It lies sterile for months and then it gnaws until its bitter fruit chokes my throat and swells in me like a large goiter blacking out room for hopes, dreams, joy, and life itself.”

                August 8, 1948: “I’m tired, hopelessly tired, surrounded by an immense brick wall, a blood-spattered brick world, splattered with my blood, with the blood of my head where I senselessly banged to find an opening, to find one loose brick, so I could feel the cool breeze and could stick out my hand and pluck a handful of wheat, but this brick wall is impregnable, not an ounce of mortar loosens, not a brick gives.”

“December 8, 1948: “Your flesh crawls, your scalp wrinkles when you look around and see good writers, established writers, writers with credits a block long, unable to sell, unable to find work, Yes, it’s enough to make anyone, blanch, turn pale and sicken.”

                February 24, 1949: “Faster, faster, faster, I walk. I plug away looking for work, anything to support my family. I try, try, try, try, try. I always try and never stop.”

                March 12, 1949: “A hundred failures, an endless number of failures, until now, my confidence, my hope, my belief in myself, has run completely out. Middle aged, I stand and gaze ahead, numb, confused, and desperately worried. All around me I see the young in spirit, the young in heart, with ten times my confidence, twice my youth, ten times my fervor, twice my education. I see them all, a whole army of them, battering at the same doors I’m battering, trying in the same field I’m trying. Yes, on a Sunday morning in March, my hope and my life stream are both running desperately low, so low, so stagnant, that I hold my breath in fear, believing that the dark, blank curtain is about to descend.”

             Shortly after this March entry, my father took the pills and was committed to the mental hospital. The treatment available in 1949 was not helpful. He got increasingly worse and the doctors told my mother he needed more treatment and might never be able to leave. Eventually and reluctantly, she filed for divorce.

             I experience tears of grief and joy reading my father’s journals. Grief at feeling his deepening pain and rising fear as he suffers because he can’t support his family financially. I also feel joy to hear and feel the intimate words of my father as he reaches out through the years to tell me what was in his heart and soul and how hard he worked to be there for me.

            Given my parent’s experience, it is not surprising that I eventually became a marriage and family counselor. One of the books I read that helped me make sense of own relationships difficulties was Getting the Love You Want by Harville Hendrix and his wife Helen LaKelly Hunt. Drs. Hendrix and Hunt describe how couples come together and the forces that often pull us apart. They say,

                “When we fall in love, we believe we’ve found the bliss we were born with. Suddenly, we see life in Technicolor.”

                That was certainly how I remember feeling when I married my first wife.

They go on to say,

               “But inevitably—often when we marry or love in together—things just start to go wrong. In some cases, everything falls apart. The veil of illusion falls away, and it seems that our partners are different from what we thought they were. Old hurts are reactivated as we realize our partners cannot or will not love and care for us as they   promised and our dream shatters.”

              Fortunately, there is a way out and Drs. Hendrix and Hunt have developed a wonderful and effective system for helping us all, which Carlin and I have found very helpful in our 46 years of marriage.

“Consciousness is the key; it changes everything,” say Hendrix and Hunt. “When we are unaware of the agenda of love, it is a disaster because our childhood scenarios inevitably repeat themselves with the same devastating consequences.”

                Carlin and I share our own healing journey in our book, The Enlightened Marriage: The 5 Transformative Stages of Relationships and Why the Best is Still to Come. You can learn more about our own marriage in our book and on-line course, “The Five Stages of Love.”

                If you found this article helpful, please let me know. Drop me a note to [email protected] and put “Love 6.0” in the subject line. Perhaps this will be the first in a series of articles.