The Marriage Plan: How to Marry Your Soul Mate in One Year or Less

by Aggie Jordan Ph.D.

Overview

A relationship coach offers a step-by-step program for marrying your soul mate in one year or less.

Whether you're divorced or have never been married, if you're searching for long-lasting love, you're not alone: millions of people are on the lookout for their soul mate, and most of them are having trouble finding and keeping him or her. With The Marriage Plan, Dr. Aggie Jordan offers readers a tried-and-true program for finding and attracting the right man and building a healthy marriage, without sacrificing mutual respect, integrity, or your true self.

Aggie Jordan's no-nonsense approach to marriage will get you off the dating roller coaster and have you happily married in an open, committed, mutually satisfying relationship in under one year. Unlike some books that promote game playing and hard-to-get tactics, The Marriage Plan emphasizes honesty, commitment, and openness from the very beginning. Based on Jordan's principles of openness and self-awareness, The Marriage Plan's thirteen steps--such as setting a goal, drawing a profile of your ideal mate, and being open and direct--will help you get specific about what you want. Her easy-to-follow exercises and worksheets will help you clarify your dreams and needs. Beginning with tips for getting the word out, Jordan explains how to avoid wasting time on partners who aren't right for you and tackles issues including kids, chores, money, and sex, as well as communication and intimacy. Her sensible approach and clear direction will guide you every step of the way. It worked for her: Drawing on her years of work as a goal management trainer, she wrote the thirteen steps as a guide for herself when she was looking for love, and she met and married her soul mate in under one year. It worked for the six couples whose stories are included here, and it will work for you.

If you're fed up with playing games that get you nowhere, The Marriage Plan is for you. For guidance from the first date to the wedding date, The Marriage Plan is the perfect match for anyone who's looking for lasting love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780767907675
Publisher:	Harmony/Rodale
Publication date:	01/28/2001
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	277 KB

About the Author

Aggie Jordan, Ph.D., began her career teaching goal-setting and achievement to executives at GM and other Fortune 100 companies. Applying her motivational philosophies to marriage, she developed the enormously successful seminar "The Marriage Plan," which she has presented to thousands of women. She lives in Mount Crested Butte, Colorado, with her husband of twenty-five years (whom she married just seven weeks after their first date).

Read an Excerpt

What is a soul mate?

Most people can get married if they want to by whatever deadline they set. They could be married in two weeks if they simply put an ad in the paper and took the first response. This, of course, is not what you want. You want to marry happily. You want someone to share your life and to grow in knowledge, wisdom, love, and joy. That's why The Marriage Plan is about marrying a soul mate not just getting a husband.

Many people ask me, "Can a person have more than one soul mate?" The answer, of course, is yes. Many people have experienced a soul mate's death and have found another. You may have a soul mate who is not someone you would want to marry. Perhaps you have a best friend whom you would call your soul mate.

We want to live in our spirit. Living in our own spirit means that we try to understand the depths of our being. Here is where our desires, our fantasies, our dreams, and our hopes live. These tell us what our soul is and wants, what motivates us, what makes us happy. Imagine that inside your soul are rooms of all kinds. Think of your soul as a castle to be explored, a rich array of talents and experiences that form your essence. Each of those rooms gleams with history, stories that make you who you are. Stories of sorrow are in one room, of pain in another, of mistakes in another, of guilt, of love, of achievement, of desires, of fulfillment, of nurturing, of friendships in others. Many rooms in that castle are yet to be filled. You would like your soul's complement to help you to fill them as you explore life.

Four important characteristics will help you to recognize your soul mate. The first is acceptance. He will accept you as you are. He does not try to change you. You want someone to listen to your dreams, to stimulate your mind, to understand your heart, to give you courage and confidence, and to give you love. You want someone to explore you physically, emotionally, and psychologically. You want someone to explore your mind, your ideas, your anger, and your joy. You want him to laugh with you and even cry with you.

He accepts your positive qualities (and you have plenty of them) and your negative ones (even the ones that irritate him). If there are too many of the latter then he is not your soul mate. Your soul mate recognizes that your strengths and weaknesses are like two sides of a coin. Both the negative and the positive characteristics make up who you are. You probably can't have one set without the other. It's part of being human.

Let's take an example. If you are assertive and maybe even aggressive, you probably get things accomplished in good measure and efficiently. A good thing! Perhaps you are also somewhat insensitive to other people because it simply takes too much time to consider their feelings. A not-so-good thing! Or let's imagine that you might be a nurturing, loving, giving person, but you also may tend to give to such an extent that you smother another with attention or even forget about your own needs. Often our strengths make us intolerant of others who don't have our strengths. The soul mate sees the balance and the beauty of both sides of you. He realizes if he tried to change you, he would also change those characteristics that attracted him to you in the first place. You too must remember the same about the person to whom you may become attracted. His strengths are also his weaknesses. If you can accept these, then he's your soul mate.

The second characteristic of a soul mate is generosity. The person with whom you are involved feels so much love for you that he is generous with his entire being. He first is generous with his time. This generosity means that he recognizes that not only does he want to be with you and talk to you but also he recognizes that relationships deepen only with personal contact. If one of you is out of town, you make arrangements to talk over the telephone, to e-mail, to communicate in whatever way you can. A soul mate is also generous with his energy. He's willing to devote his energy to learn about you, to participate in what you like to do, to give the energy to address your needs and to let you know his. Generosity also extends to financial caring. He's not stingy with his money. He's willing to share with you what he has. Even the person in dire straits can find ways to share. Generosity is not dependent on how much money one has.

All of these characteristics of generosity are also applicable to you. You too must be generous. If you find generosity does not characterize your relationship, then you are not soul mates. Someone once asked me if two selfish people can be soul mates. I suppose they can at the most primitive level but selfishness is not a long-term bond.

The third characteristic of a soul mate is that he is a learner. This means that your soul mate is constantly learning, as are you. Your soul mate must be curious about you, about what makes you tick, about your background, about your interests, your talents. He must want to learn about your personality and what makes you happy. He should also extend this curiosity to the outside world. The joys of marriage to a soul mate have to do with mutual exploration beyond the relationship. Although you both certainly won't have all the same interests in life, your ability to listen to each other and to get excited about the other's learning will excite and deepen the relationship.

My husband, Robert, is one of these great learners. We've been married for over twenty-five years and there is not a day I remember that he hasn't shared new knowledge. Now sometimes, I'm not the best listener when he goes into detail about topics that lose me, but I catch his excitement about some software advance, or a character in a book, or a new skiing technique, and it motivates me then to share what I've learned that day. It is this willingness to learn that will assure growth in a marriage and a permanent relationship.

The fourth characteristic is that a soul mate loves you madly. We'll talk more about falling and being in love later. A soul mate in or out of marriage appreciates who you are. This is much beyond the first characteristic of accepting your essence. This is a person who cares about your well-being, who thinks about your needs, and who is ready and able to support your choices.