Principle 1: Enhance Your Love Map

The more you are familiar with your partner, the more intimacy happens. This is called having a love map of your partner. This helps maintain intimacy, and better prepares one to deal with stressful evens and conflict. Life-cycle transitions (=inherent stressors), such as bringing in children into the family, are also better handled as the couple are “in touch”.  Those who do not have an adequate love map experience a drop in intimacy in the couple relationship with transition to parenthood.

Tools to improve love maps

  1. love map questionnaire: Self-assessment to see how much the person really knows his/her partner.
  2. Exercises in this book:
    1. ‘love-map 20 question game’ -asking the partner to think of the things important to the asking partner.
    2. ‘make your own love maps’: filling in info about partner’s:
  1. People of partner’s life -(friends, potential friends, rivals/enemies)
  2. Recent important events in partner’s life
  3. Upcoming events
  4. Partner’s current stresses
  5. Partner’s current stresses, worries
  6. Partner’s hopes, aspirations
  1. ‘who am I’– self-exploration exercise to allow you and your partner to build better love maps. This exercise looks at:
    1. My triumphs and strivings
    2. My injuries and healing
    3. My emotional world
    4. My mission and legacy
    5. Who I want to become