A New Map for Relationships: Creating True Love at Home and Peace on the Planet

How would you like it if you never had another fight or argument? And what if doing that helped bring peace to the world?

You are invited to eavesdrop as Dorothie and Martin Hellman reveal the secrets that allowed them to transform an almost failed marriage into one where they reclaimed the true love that they felt when they first met fifty years ago. Their marriage became a laboratory, where they learned how to resolve seemingly unfathomable differences through holistic thinking and compassion. Listen in on their conversations so that you can do the same.

Working on global issues proved critical to bringing magic back into their marriage, and truly loving personal relationships provide the model for a peaceful, sustainable planet. Through formerly top secret documents, you will see scheming and outright lies get us into one needless war after another. You will also see how the same tools that transformed their marriage—holistic thinking and compassion—can avoid future such catastrophes.

The essence of this book can be summarized as, “You have to believe in the seemingly impossible gifts of unconditional love and a more peaceful planet, and then dedicate yourself to discovering how to achieve them.”

By revealing the mistakes that nearly ruined their marriage as well as the healing process that has them madly in love again, the book provides solid evidence for that belief. The hard-earned lessons from their journey will ease your own.

Former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry praises A New Map for Relationships as “a truly unique book that tells an engaging and persuasive story relating domestic peace to world peace.” He goes on to advise that “this book should be read by married couples seeking peace at home, as well as by diplomats seeking peace in the world.”

Marty calls himself a world-class fool and is proud of it. His research on encryption was originally seen as a fool's errand, but it recently won him the ACM's million-dollar Turing Award-often regarded as the Nobel Prize in computing. Following Dorothie down an uncharted path that even she could not fully describe until they reclaimed the true love that they felt when they first met also seemed like a fool's errand, but it proved even more rewarding. Even a million dollars can't buy true love. Thirty-five years ago, during the height of the Cold War and with Dorothie acting as a catalyst, Marty shifted his research from encryption to international security. What was the point in inventing fantastic, new encryption schemes if no one might be around to use them in fifty to a hundred years? That shift led him to co-edit a 1988 book with Moscow's Prof. Anatoly Gromyko aimed at discovering the equations of survival needed for the nuclear age. Breakthrough: Emerging New Thinking received critical acclaim from individuals ranging from Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to former CIA Director William Colby. As a professor at Stanford University, Marty is affiliated with its Center for International Security and Cooperation, where he works on bringing a risk-informed approach to our nation's nuclear strategy. To do that, he has intensively researched international conflicts that could escalate to nuclear threats and even use. Seven of those conflicts are included as case studies in the book.

After spending several decades following a relationship map that had her repeatedly driving off cliffs, Dorothie found the courage to tear it up and piece together a new map that allowed her to reach the place of love, acceptance and peace where she had always wanted to dwell. That allowed her and her husband Marty to transform an almost failed marriage into one in which anger became a nightmare of the past. To accomplish that, Dorothie has spent more than half her life studying anger, fear and grief, as well as joy, love and compassion. Practicing compassion was particularly important in her journey and is the centerpiece of her part of this book. Dorothie was trained as a CPA and worked at Touche Ross, now Deloitte. She left that career to become a full-time volunteer at the Beyond War Foundation, where she served as Vice President for Financial Support in the 1980s. She and Marty have been together for fifty years and, as you'll learn from this book, they had to navigate some very rocky patches and fall in love with our planet to recover true love at home.