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hopeful
inspiring
medium-paced
I really liked this book and understood it!
I borrowed it from the library and ended up telling my husband we needed a copy. I have read a LOT of swill in my search for marriage enhancement and problem-solving advice. Most marriage and relationship books have left me disillusioned: Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, Love and Respect, and The Alpha Female's Guide to a Happy Marriage (or something like that title) to name a few. All basically wanted to gender role enforce and say if for example I just put my head in my purse when I got home and let my husband be the king, he would just naturally make the best decisions for our house. So - there's that. Imagine my joy when Gottman, quoted in multiple books that I highly recommend, comes in with data and research. Imagine the joy of practical case studies we can sit down and do to de-escalate and de-personalize issues we might be facing. Imagine him going so far as to say the REAL secret in those gender-enforcing books is when the husband (who usually has the highest privilege here in the states due to being a man) lets go of power and allows his wife to influence him and listens to her and respects her input. EVEN in very tight religious circles he studied, IF those very patriarchal marriages were happy, it was about the two of them having equal input even if the wife wasn't allowed by her scripture to vote! AT LAST its not about me learning to submit and not have a brain. My husband didn't want to marry someone who would cow to him, but wanting an egalitarian marriage means we needed help to 'decolonize' the patriarchal norms and ... I needed help too not passing down the defensive behaviors I learned growing up. In sum, yes, the author is confident, so what. Yes these include activities and a reader COULD choose not to do them, its not a book flaw - that's a reader choice. There is a lot here to work with for both men and women. I know its heteronormative and maybe he can change that for the next edition - but I also dont know if he has studied homosexual marriages and couples and will have similar findings when there is not a gender and/or sex difference in the couples. He even admits that in general the trends in marriage are toward the woman having biologically better ability to have distress than men but admits we might not all fit into that. Its the best I've read so far and my husband is looking forward to reading it. Either way, I'm getting some scripted examples of how to communicate better and how to talk about hard issues. 2 thumbs up here.
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
informative
fast-paced
I like this, but it doesn't work on audio. Need to buy it to run through the exercises.
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
medium-paced
My wife and I read the book separately, but spent a few months regularly working through all the exercises together. I highly recommend it for other couples who want to develop their marriage.
The strategies are research-based. As a marriage and family therapist, my experience is that spouses want to fix things their own way, ignoring the fact that their own way got them in trouble in the first place. As Einstein noted, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.