..there is hope. That's the marvelous thing about being human. We can change our future. We need not be enslaved by the experiences of the past. We can learn to love even when we have not received love.

I wrote this book [ Desperate Marriages] because of my own marriage. My wife and I struggled greatly in the early years of marriage. In spite of the fact that we were Christians before we got married, we prayed about getting married, we believed it was God's will for us to get married, and we still had great struggles.

I think one of the other myths is that your environment determines your happiness. That if you are living with an alcoholic or living with a depressed spouse for a long time, you are just going to be unhappy.

Love is always freely given. Love cannot be demanded. We can request things of each other, but we must never demand anything. Requests give direction to love, but demands stop the flow of love.

Recent research has indicated that the average individual listens for only seventeen seconds before interrupting and interjecting his own ideas.

The reality is, if you go to the library and read biographies, thousands of people have changed, radically changed. St. Augustine was one of them. He lived a terrible a life for the first 33 years, and then he radically changed.

If you grew up in a dysfunctional family, then there is really no hope for you to have a good relationship. That is another myth that we have to throw off, so that we can get into what I call Reality.