True Love

Narrator: What keeps some couples together a long time, but others split up? Maybe it's because the long timers didn't confuse love with romance. That romantic high is wonderful but hard to sustain. True love usually takes time and bonding and communication. Dr. Mary Quinn is a couples' counselor and one of her top tips is, if you want to get information from your mate don't ask questions, make statements. How would these couples get the most information, the question "How was your day?" or the statement "I'd really like to hear about your day"?

Quinn: Pick a good time to present the topic. Choose your words carefully, no questions, make statements instead. Put things in terms of yourself and how you're seeing them and request the kind of change you think that would be helpful.

Narrator: Another tip from Dr. Quinn, instead of accusing your partner, you, you don't love me, you don't take care of me. Instead say I, feel lonely. But for some people communicating feelings is almost impossible. Thank goodness help is easy to find. There are communication games, like this one, called the Ungame, that I played with a friend. Complete the statement, I wish I felt free to...

Woman: To allow people to know my real fears and allow people to know how I feel way down below.

Narrator: There are also question books for couples about feelings and about sex. It is an interesting and very fast way to get to know your partner.

Woman: What kind of movie would most apt make you cry?

Narrator: Oh, separation movies when lovers part, children and parents part, war movies where the lovers are separated. Those kind just into the tank they go.

Narrator: In places like this singles dating service you have to work on finding somebody. But the trouble starts when people stop working after they find somebody.

Woman: They kick back. They get lazy and they don't intend to improve the relationship or themselves. So in order to maintain a really good relationship, you've got to put back into it continually. You have to be more giving, more loving, more thoughtful. And if someone isn't being thoughtful enough, you have to turn around and you have to be even more thoughtful in order to get the point across.

Narrator: Mary Quinn agrees and adds that couples should create love traditions.

Quinn: Your partner gives you a back rub and maybe a tradition of that. That's a simple tradition, or you get a foot massage, or you get to stay in bed and not have to get up for breakfast. Or simple traditions. I think we can build traditions around a lot of things that, early on in a relationship, if we note, were happening and then we just stopped paying attention and they just stopped happening.

Woman 2: Really implementing mutual respect and I'm talking about the common courtesies that people give to strangers or to their friends, they forget to give to the loved one.

Narrator: Dr. Quinn says you should write your own epitaph. Would it say, "I kept a tidy house and a clean car," or isn't this better?

Quinn: I wish I'd been closer to more people, or I wish I had done this special relationship better. Those are the things that it ends up really counting in life.

Narrator: And that's a great thing to pass on to the children.

Jim Wilkerson, Ten News for the Nightcast Extra.

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