How Did Harville Hendrix Save His Own Marriage?

Harville Hendrix says the marriage was saved when he and Helen LaKelly Hunt stopped treating each other as a resource and started treating each other as a gift, after a year of trying to remove criticism.

Both had felt invisible since childhood. His sharecropper parents both died before he was six, and three older sisters passed him around because they were poor. Hunt grew up in a mansion while her parents were busy with money and philanthropy, and maids cared for her. They had been relating to professional personas, not to who they were. They found they liked each other.

The first three months brought only X marks on the calendar. A daily appreciation and some humor left them only 50 percent of the way there after three more months. In his telling, the marriage required negativity because each saw the other as a resource who would fail the deal. They changed that perception to a blessing or a gift, valuable simply because each person exists. Over the next three months the impasse dissolved. They felt safe and seen. The change was 26 years before the talk. Oprah Winfrey called, and they returned to public life. Twelve years before the talk they set out to teach the same dialogue to 2.4 billion people by 2050, the tipping point of the world's population that day. You cannot love whom you do not know, and you cannot know without listening, so listening is the first act of love.