LOVE BANKS ARE FOR DEPOSITS, NOT WITHDRAWALS

Written by Mike and Shannon

When you meet someone new, you start from scratch. You've yet to invest in each other, but you haven't made any so-called withdrawals either. There's nothing but an empty bank account sitting in front of you. Or a love bank.

A Love Bank is a concept first developed in 1986 by Dr. William Harley. Inside all of us is a Love Bank with accounts in the names of everyone we know. Generally, these accounts are connected to those we are closest to; children, family members, close friends, and our partners and spouses.

When these people are associated with good feelings, deposits are made into their accounts. When they are associated with bad feelings, love units are withdrawn. People with positive balances tend to attract us more. Negative balances can push us away. Our emotions encourage us to be with people who consistently treat us well, and avoid those who repeatedly hurt us.

Like a bank works with money, more deposits than withdrawals will ensure healthy and successful relationships. Deposits should be easy. It's as simple as understanding what makes my partner or spouse happy? What are their key love languages? (See our blog A Healthy Marriage Equals Healthy Kids for more info on Love Languages.) What efforts do I repeatedly do that they recognize as an investment in them? It's as simple as that. Effort. The effort to deposit into your spouse, and the effort to withdraw as little as possible.

You can spend a lot of time and effort investing in your partner's love bank. But one careless withdrawal can erase it all. The investments required to build back from a costly withdrawal will take even more time and effort than the original deposits. If you think of a love bank as an emotional bank account you'll understand that trust is the biggest currency exchanged. It's an account based on how safe you or someone else feels with another person.

The trust you have or lack in someone works like a credit score. Good credit indicates responsibility, maturity and good decision making. Bad credit history shows a lack in all the aforementioned qualities and therefore a pretty good indicator that trust will be an area of concern. Repeated emotional NSFs, overdrafts and missed payments will be costly, just like in the real world.

When you take a hit to your credit score, it sucks. You wonder how you can get back to where you were. The first time I made a withdrawal from the love bank Mike and I shared was horrible. I was disappointed in myself because the withdrawal wasn't worth it. It was frivolous spending without thinking about all the effort I'd put into my investment. It simply wasn't worth it.

The other analogy I use to describe the idea of a love bank is a whiteboard. Imagine you have an erasable whiteboard. When it's brand new, there's no hint of marker residue. The longer you have it, and the more you use it, a residue starts to get left behind. You can never get it quite as clean as when it was fresh out of the package.

Whether you use the analogy of a love bank or a whiteboard, the idea is, investing in your relationship is likely to give you a better return than if you don't.

Mike & Shannon, The Herdfather & the Herdmother