finesilkflower 's review for:

The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country's Foremost Relationship Expert by John Gottman

2.0

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I probably shouldn't rate self-help books; I don't like the genre. In my defense, I wasn't expecting this to be such a typical self-help book. I know of John Gottman from his research referenced in other books (Malcolm Gladwell and others), so I thought that his book would go more into the science and the findings of his lab. Instead, it was basically a therapist's marriage class in book form. There were a lot of quizzes and handouts and exercises. The few times it used statistics it did so in a really annoying way, overly specific numbers with vague ideas, "I have found that 67% of couples feel this way," etc. That said, the advice seems solid enough, and I appreciate that it presents couples' differences of opinion with a neutral, nonjudgmental stance on issues such as money, children, religion, and values. It was quite heteronormative, another thing that disappointed me since I know Gottman has done research on gay and lesbian couples. Advice was given with the assumption that the reader(s) are a husband-wife pair and gender/role specific advice is given ("it is usually the wife who...")