Meet Dr. Harley

Willard F. Harley, Jr., Ph.D. is best known as author of the internationally best selling book, His Needs, Her Needs: Building An Affair-proof Marriage. Over four million copies have been purchased, and it is available in twenty-two foreign translations.  It now has the subtitle, Making Romantic Love Last.

Dr. Harley earned a Ph.D. degree in psychology from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1967 and has been a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in Minnesota since 1975. For the first ten years after earning his degree, he taught psychology at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. During those years, he was also a frustrated part-time marriage counselor with little success in helping couples.

In 1973 he discovered that he was not alone in his failure to save marriages — almost everyone in the marital therapy profession were also failing. So he spent the next two years designing an entirely new approach (see How Dr. Harley Learned to Save Marriages). When his success rate skyrocketed in 1977, he resigned from his teaching position to counsel full-time. Over the next ten years his solo practice developed into the largest network of mental health clinics in Minnesota (thirty-two locations) with over one hundred psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and chemical dependency counselors working with him to provide a full range of mental health services. He became the exclusive provider of mental health and chemical dependency services in ten counties, and had offices in other counties as well.

One of his responsibilities was to write support materials for the clinical program he directed. He created over one hundred questionnaires and wrote numerous articles that were given to clients as part of their therapy. Among the materials he distributed was His Needs, Her Needs, which originated as audio tapes of a 13-week Sunday School class he taught at his church.  It was transcribed from the audio tapes into written form, and that caught the attention of an acquisitions editor at the Fleming H Revel publishing company.  It was published in 1986 and within three years had become a national best-seller and a basic reference for marriage counselors throughout the world.

By 1988 he found himself spending almost all of his time administering his clinics, and very little time doing what he enjoyed most — improving his marital therapy program. So he began turning his clinics over to the counselors who worked with him, and the ownership of his last clinic was transferred in 1993.

Dr. Harley saw the many logistical problems that brick-and-mortar clinics faced, and saw the need to provide remote marriage education and therapy that would be far less expensive and much more convenient for couples.  The cornerstone of that effort was his launch of this website, Marriage Builders®, in 1995.  His son, Steven Harley, designed and managed the website, and Dr. Harley provided all of the marriage education that you can read on this website, and also created remote counseling that remains available to this day.  Since the publication of His Needs, Her Needs, he has written nineteen more books on marriage and hundreds of articles.

Dr. Harley continues to write, speak, counsel, and lead seminars throughout the US, Canada, and Mexico. Information regarding booking arrangements for his weekend seminar is found at How to Fall in Love and Stay in Love Seminar.

Dr. and Mrs. Harley also host a one-hour show, Marriage Builders® Radio. It can be heard on radio stations and on the Internet. They have been married for 63 years and live in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. They have two adult children, who are now working with them as marriage coaches, four grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren.