If you want a close, vibrant love relationship, you need to become a master of commitment. The first step of this art is to spot and acknowledge the unconscious commitments that cause us to sabotage the harmony of our close relationships. In practical reality, the act of claiming ownership of an unconscious commitment changes a troublesome dynamic in a relationship faster than anything else.

make commitments you can stand by. Real commitments can be made only about things you have control over. Real commitments are verifiable. Love is a mystery -- part feeling, part spirit, part mind -- and mysteries by their very nature are outside our control. A real commitment would be to commit to telling your partner the truth about when you're feeling loving and when you're not. This type of commitment saves relationships while turning on the flow of intimacy and creativity.

If you want a long-term relationship that's both close and creatively vital, you have to become emotionally transparent. To go all the way to ultimate closeness and full creative expression, you must eliminate all barriers to speaking and hearing the truth about everything.

If you want a long-term relationship that's both close and creatively vital, you must break the cycle of blame and criticism. As a practice, this move liberates tremendous energy.

If you want a vibrant long-term relationship -- one in which you feel close as a couple and creative as individuals -- you have to do something radical about your creativity. You have to take your attention away from fixing the other person and put it on expressing your own creativity. Even one hour a week of focusing on your own creativity will produce results. More than that will often produce miracles.

If you want to create vital, long-lasting love, you must become a master of verbal and nonverbal appreciation. We teach couples how to appreciate each other spontaneously and frequently. Although this may sound like a simple thing, it most definitely is not. In fact, it's the last thing we teach in the program because it's the hardest to learn. To utter a clear, heartfelt appreciation to another person is radical partly because it's so rare. To receive such an appreciation from another person is equally challenging. Most of us have never seen or heard a rich flow of spoken appreciations in relationships. In fact, many people cannot recall a single instance of clear appreciation in their families of origin.