Many marriages are happy -- ever seen an unhappy bride or groom at the altar? -- but they aren't lasting (only 50% survive). Almost one in five marriages last but aren't happy (remain together for kids or out of financial necessity).

We have discovered that the single most influential factor in fabulously happy marriages -- even more than love itself!! -- is the creation and nurture of ONENESS. Some couples who readily admit they still love each other nevertheless get divorced. However, in almost 20 years working with couples, we have never seen a marriage fail where healthy ONENESS had been created and nurtured.

Therefore, Creating Oneness I and II are core seminars for the Built To Last Marriage Course. There is no more important predictor of happiness and peace in your marriage (and family) than ONENESS. This is key: The blissful love that brought you two together and feels so wonderful does not create the oneness of happy, lasting marriages.

In fact, it's the other way around: ONENESS creates those fabulous feelings of blissful love. But unlike infatuation, the blissful love ONENESS creates only grows stronger and deeper with the passing years!! And it's just incredible! It's so good -- the best life has to offer!

Creating Oneness I introduces key concepts and practical exercises to begin building ONENESS immediately, regardless how long you've been married or how healthy your marriage is. We will help you develop and refine more effective and satisfying communication skills. This seminar mixes practical training with plenty of fun -- the most enjoyable way to learn! The two most important skills in communication -- non-verbal signals and listening -- are the primary practical emphasis in Creating Oneness I.

Tact is another key skill in effective communication. Whether it's marriage or management, knowing how to say things tactfully goes a long way in nurturing long-term success in whatever shared goals you seek to achieve. Timing is yet another important concept.

No matter how skilled and tactful you are, conflict is an inevitable part of any healthy, growing relationship. The final portion of this seminar will help you learn how to handle disagreements in ways that build your marriage instead of tearing it down.

Effective communication skills alone would go a long way in resolving misunderstandings that undermine love and friendship in marriage. We believe a primary long term benefit in improved communication skills -- both in sharing and in reading the cues of your spouse -- is in conflict reduction.

However, good communication is not the Emerald City of marital bliss that some might have you believe. Rather, it is more the Yellow Brick Road that paves the way to where you want to go. The real Promised Land for creating ONENESS is healthy Marriage Chemistry. That's the focus of Creating Oneness II.

Chemistry is the process that happens as two different substances interact. Chemistry is dynamic -- it's always changing. Your marriage has already changed, is changing right now, and will continue to change because both you and your spouse are always changing -- physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Every change, however subtle, affects your own personal chemistry as well as your marriage chemistry.

Creating Oneness is marriage, then, is a matter of shaping, safeguarding, and patterning the laboratory of your marriage so that in the experimentation of marriage you can safely learn what interactions create happiness (so you want to repeat these) and what interactions are more volatile and can blow up the lab.

Creating Oneness II helps the two of you set up your laboratory for safely experimenting and creating your own unique formula that predictably and repeatedly produces desired outcomes that feed ONENESS and build happiness.

This vital, core seminar will help you better understand how you and your spouse each contribute to your particular chemistry. More importantly, we will give you tools to empower each of you to more effectively impact the color and character of your marriage.We will help you discover and/or clarify what each of you uniquely contribute to your marriage chemistry and how either one of you can unilaterally change the chemistry of your marriage.

One of the key characteristics of most fabulously happy marriages is shared laughter and fun. Happy couples tend to have more fun together, are more playful with each other, and laugh together more than unhappy couples. Shared fun experiences help ease tensions, open doors for better communication, feeds intimacy and romance. Any couple committed to pursuing a fabulously happy marriage would be very wise to take fun seriously.

This seminar is primarily a workshop in fun and laughter. Needless to say, yes, it is a lot of fun. The experience will feed you and your spouse's appreciation of its value and help you intentionally make more room in your love laboratory for this easy-to-create formula.

If there is any sure thing in marriage, it is that both of you will occasionally (or more often) say or do something that damages the relationship. It might be an insensitive comment or a broken commitment. It might be an angry overreaction or a lack of appreciation for something deserving recognition. Being human, we inflict and are inflicted by hurtful things,intentionally or unintentionally.

When this happens, there are three possible responses. Only one of these three helps. The first is we do nothing. This is a very common response when we don't know what to do. But as with physical wounds, this allows the relational wound to fester, become more susceptible to serious infection. Then what starts as just a little problem becomes a big problem. Bad idea.

The second common response is applying the wrong remedy or prescription and actually exacerbating the problem. This commonly occurs when you try to say or do something that would be healing for YOU but not for your spouse. In effect you end up only pouring salt on an open wound. Then when your spouse responds angrily at your well-intentioned effort, it tends to have a recoiling impact and voila! Things go from bad to worse.

The best response is to learn, understand, practice, and master relational repair skills. That is the focus of this workshop. There are two kinds of relational repair skills: 1) general practitioner skills for the most common relational repairs, and 2) specialized skills for repairs unique to your relationship. We will help you identify the latter and practice the former as a key skill for restoring and refortifying ONENESS.