About Love Me True


Most everyone wants to find love, but after it is located, it often contains unpleasant surprises.  Relationships begin with excitement, but can end with frustration. Why does this happen? How can love, which is so common and fun, cause operatic swings in emotion and heartache? There are many reasons. Multiple forces work against intimate relationships, and people are complicated. Partners are busy, stressed and biased. Rational people become reactive, emotional, and self-protective when things turn south. Love Me True is about how deception is at the heart of all of these problems. It will show how the fires of passion also produce smoke from friction.

Twenty years ago I began my journey into the fascinating and messy love lives of couples. I wanted to understand the mysteries of love and breakups. Why did people attract and repel each other like crazed subatomic particles? To get answers to these questions it was necessary to go beyond paper and pencil tests used in typical research. Instead, I used interviews and observations to watch how partners perceived and reacted to each other. When challenges arose, spouses would rationalize, saying things like: “if you wouldn’t have looked at him, I wouldn’t have called you that.” There was exaggeration and denial: “I didn’t say it like that. I didn’t say that at all!” They became defensive, evasive, and misleading. Sometimes partners’ memories of the same event were so different that it was hard to believe they had been in the same place when it happened. Deception showed up in all relationships to some degree, and it always caused trouble.

​However, it was surprising to find that that even very aggressive participants in these studies could identify and admit their own deceptive practices. This didn’t happen when they were in the middle of the problem, but afterwards, when they were calm and invited to consider what was happening. This reflection led to insights and improvement. This is why Love Me True was created. It provides credible information that can help people step back and see differently. Partners can learn how to be more honest and authentic with each other.
In relationship wars,
​           truth is the first casualty . . .