Willard F. Harley Jr.

His Needs, Her Needs

His Needs, Her Needs by Willard F. Harley Jr. is one of the most widely read and practically grounded books on marriage ever written. Harley's central thesis is both simple and striking: affairs don't happen because people are bad — they happen because needs go unmet. Drawing on decades of marriage counseling experience, Harley argues that every spouse carries an "emotional bank account," and when that account runs dry through neglect, the marriage becomes dangerously vulnerable to an affair. The antidote is not willpower or guilt — it is learning to identify your spouse's most important emotional needs and meeting them with consistent, loving effort. Harley organizes those needs around a revealing pattern: the five needs he finds most common in husbands and the five most common in wives are often quite different, creating a gap that, left unaddressed, quietly erodes the marriage from within. The book's goal is to help couples understand each other across that gap and become "irresistible" to one another — building what Harley calls an "affair-proof marriage."