User workflow for The Return-to-Love Process™
Revive your relationship with collaborative conversations.
If you can read aloud, you can practice building trust and empathy with your conversation partner.
The end point in the
Return-to-Love Process™ is when you have a satisfying, scripted conversation with your conversation partner about a challenging situation in your relationship.
The Return-to-Love Process™ provides scripts, crafted by a large language model (LLM), for a collaborative conversation that is aligned with the principles and practices of
nonviolent communication (collaborative conversation) and
mindfulness.
This gives you a safe, respectful path through a realistic conversation about an unsatisfying situation in your relationship.
Every relationship has them.
The scripted-conversation approach enables you both to practice skills in
self-awareness and
emotional intelligence by enacting scripts inspired by your unfulfilled desires.
Below are the process steps to get to better understanding and empathy.
In
Beginner mode, we make every effort to give you helpful hints and choices rather than to leave you by yourself with empty fill-in-the-blank fields.
In
Experienced mode, we get out of your way and let you do your thing without much hand-holding.
Summary of The Return-to-Love Process™
- Sign up for a free account.
- Log in.
- Describe a challenging situation in a relationship with a conversation partner.
- Describe what's important to each of you in that situation that doesn't feel fulfilled.
- Click the [ Script a conversation ] button.
- Read aloud with each other the script that's generated.
- Discuss the topics raised in conversation together. You can add followup topics if there are other matters you want to bring to the scripted part of the conversation.
- If you're willing, please give us feedback about each script (under "Is the script acceptable?") and about your experience in the conversation.
- Repeat steps 3 through 8 until you have a satisfying outcome.
Comprehensive outline of the user-workflow process
- Sign up for a free account or log in.
After you create your user account, log into your account for the Return-to-Love Process™.
- Continue a conversation or start a new one?
When you arrive at the build-a-conversation page, you can continue a conversation you started before, or you can start a new one.
- Enter your aliases or names.
Enter aliases or names for yourself (Person A) and for your conversation partner (Person B).
(Aliases offer more privacy from over-the-shoulder onlookers.)
- Select your type of relationship.
Select from a drop-down list the type of relationship the two of you have. Or select "Other" and enter another relationship type.
- Select your conversation topic.
Select a topic from one of these lists: 1) Topic of Conflict, 2) Topic of Opportunity.
Or select "Other" and enter another topic.
- Select a situation example, or start fresh.
The list of situation examples displayed automatically is limited to the type of relationship and the topic of conversation you selected.
To browse a list of all situation examples, click the [ Show more examples ] button.
- Describe your situation.
Describe in your own words the challenging situation you're facing -- either a situation of conflict or a situation around an opportunity for your relationship.
You can enter as much or as little text as you want to.
Of course, the more richly you describe your situation, the more on-target your scripts will be.
(There's no wrong way to do this. Even an unhinged rant will return a surprisingly cogent script.)
- Describe what's important to you that doesn't feel fulfilled in the situation.
The magic is in describing the experiences you DO want without focusing your conversation exclusively on your uncomfortable experiences.
To help you with this, the process provides you with a comprehensive list of desired experiences, the [ What do I want? ] button, from which you can choose a subset that are your most familiar desired experiences.
From that subset list, you can name the unfulfilled desires you're experiencing in the specific situation you've described.
If you want to share your feelings with your conversation partner but you don't have the vocabulary, you have right there at the ready a multiple-choice tool for selecting from a list of common feelings. Click [ How do I feel? ] to use the feelings tool.
To use the what-do-I-want tool, click the [ What do I want? ] button.
- Describe what's important to your conversation partner that doesn't feel fulfilled in the situation.
Now here is the most challenging and possibly rewarding part of the process.
Describe the unfulfilled desires your conversation partner is experiencing in the situation.
If you don't know what those are, you have uncovered a key to increasing the probability of getting your own desires fulfilled as a result of the conversation.
If you can describe your partner's unmet needs even close to correctly, when your partner reads your description, they will feel more understood by you than before.
This will open doors to deepening trust and intimacy.
If you want aren't confident you know how to describe what your partner wants, you have opened within yourself a door of curiosity to find out by asking them compassionately and listening patiently.
And, of course, you have right there at the ready a multiple-choice tool for selecting from a list your partner's most likely unfulfilled desires.
To use the what-do-I-want tool, click the [ What does PersonB want? ] button.
- Request a script for the conversation.
Click the button [ Script a conversation ].
- Wait a minute.
About 40 to 60 seconds later, the Return-to-Love Process™ presents you a script about your situation.
- Rate the script.
You can give us feedback about how helpful you feel the script is.
If you're not satisfied, your script rating is “Not acceptable”.
Submitting your feedback will result in requesting a new script, and you will pay nothing for the unacceptable script.
- Enter a followup topic.
To continue once you get an acceptable script, you can enter a followup topic you believe would make the script more balanced or to extend the benefits of the script or perhaps to add another aspect of the situation about which you want to extend the conversation.
- Request another script.
Click the [ Add a script ] button, and wait another 30 to 60 seconds.
- Continue. (It's cheap.)
There is no additional cost for adding followup topics to the conversation.
Feel free to keep the conversation going as long as you have relevant topics to consider.
You only pay a small, flat fee for the entire conversation.
- Collect the conversation.
At any time, you can send the conversation to yourself in an e-mail message, or you can copy the conversation to the clipboard, or you can print it.
The system saves all your situations and conversations until you decide to delete them. (Deleting is coming in a new release soon.)
- Set up a successful conversation.
Below the situation description and above the script, there's a link to an article about how to set up a successful conversation with your conversation partner.
- Send feedback about your experience.
It will be a great help to the process if, after enacting the scripted conversation with your conversation partner, you will send us feedback about your experience -- what went well, where there were challenges, how this process might be improved, etc.
- It's a practice. Just do it.
You can think of this situation-conversation process as a practice for rediscovering your dormant vitality for each other -- for exercising self-awareness and emotional intelligence while you create more trust and intimacy with your conversation partner through insightfully scripted conversations.
The more often you exercise the process, the better you and your partner will become at identifying unfulfilled desires in each of you.
Herein lies magic for deepening trust, intimacy, and fun between you.
Our small team at Open System Applications sincerely wishes you success in this process.
We will appreciate hearing from you about your successes and challenges.
Please be direct in expressing your thoughts about how we can improve the Return-to-Love Process™
for you.
