I got to talk with Harville Hendrix, the author of Getting the Love You Want, last week. He's in Portland for a conference of Imago Relationship Therapists, the school of therapy he and his wife pioneered.

In the hour we talked, Hendrix answered my questions with great depth and careful consideration. Typed-out, his replies to each of my four queries were several pages.

Boiled down, edited and over-simplified, here's the heart of it:

"It really is very simple, how to be in a great relationship," Hendrix says. "It can be stated in a few sentences."

1. Your relationship will become more satisfying to the extent that you get it that you live with another person. This person is not you. They are an other. If you get it that you are living with difference and you give up trying to make them be like you, then the conflict starts to go away.

2. You have to drop negativity. Negativity is all an attempt to change the other person. Replace it with affirmation and finding all the things about your partner that are beautiful and wonderful. If I'm getting curious about my wife when she's doing something that makes me uncomfortable, 99 percent of the time, my discomfort has nothing to do with what's she's doing. It has to do with her not matching an inner image I had of her. She moved out of my picture frame, and I want her back in the frame.

3. Affirm and advocate their otherness. Become curious about it. And the way I can make all this happen is to engage in dialogue. So I can hear her disclose who she is and get at who this person is I'm living with.