Best Books on Marriage and Relationships pdf
So, you’re in a relationship, and you’re thinking about becoming happily married. The great thing about marriage is that it lasts for several years, which provides you with a decent enough amount of time to think and plan your whole life together with your partner. But how do you make the best out of that period?
If you’re looking for the best books on marriage and relationships, you’ve come to the right place. Books are a fun, shared experience that can help you and your spouse deepen your knowledge of each other.
Best Books on Marriage and Relationships pdf
Loving Your Spouse When You Feel Like Walking Away
When you said, “I do,” you entered marriage with high hopes, dreaming it would be supremely happy. You never intended it to be miserable. Millions of couples are struggling in desperate marriages. But the story doesn’t have to end there. Dr. Gary Chapman writes, “I believe that in every troubled marriage, one or both partners can take positive steps that have the potential for changing the emotional climate in their marriage.”
Loving Your Spouse When You Feel Like Walking Away, the revised and updated edition of the award-winning Desperate Marriages, teaches you how to:
Recognize and reject the myths that hold you captive
Better understand your spouse’s behavior
Take responsibility for your own thoughts, feelings, and actions
Make choices that can have a lasting, positive impact on you and your spouse
Gary Chapman, a marriage and family therapist and the best-selling author of “The Five Love Languages,” is aware of how challenging it can be to put up the effort when it feels like you’re the only one trying to maintain your relationship. He teaches readers how to identify their own annoyances, comprehends their partner’s conduct, and make decisions that benefit the relationship as a whole.
He addresses relationships experiencing poor communication, verbal abuse, infidelity, addiction, mental illnesses, and more. His guide is not intended to minimize the very real struggles that marriages can experience, but he does highlight easy coping mechanisms that are advantageous to everyone involved.
The Art of Loving
The ground-breaking international bestseller’s 50th-anniversary edition, which teaches readers how to unlock their innate capacity for love and live rich, fulfilling lives, is now available. Most people lack the maturity, self-awareness, and courage necessary to love on the one level that actually matters. Love, like any art, requires practice and focus as well as sincere knowledge and insight.
Erich Fromm, a renowned psychoanalyst and social philosopher, examines love in all of its facets in his classic work The Art of Loving. This includes romantic love, which is rife with misconceptions and unrealistic expectations, as well as brotherly love, erotic love, self-love, the love of God, and parental love for their children.
“This is a timeless book that continues to resonate with couples. It’s one of those books you take off the shelf every decade or so to be reminded about the true nature of love: that it is an art that requires knowledge and effort. It is about increasing one’s capacity to love, and understanding the confusion between falling in love and the permanent state of being in love.
Loving is not simple. It is an art like any other that needs to be practiced on a regular basis, with concentration and patience. This small book will inspire couples to look at their relationships from a new perspective.” — Sharon Gilchrest O’Neill, a marriage and family therapist and the author of “A Short Guide to a Happy Marriage: The Essentials for Long-Lasting Togetherness
Mating In Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence
When our desire for safe love clashes with our desire for passion, Esther Perel tackles the challenges and worries that result. She describes what it takes to bring lust home and urges us to consider the paradoxical coexistence of domesticity and sexual desire.
Perel has treated hundreds of unhappy couples over the course of her 20 years of professional practice. They talk about open, loving, but not particularly sexually stimulating partnerships. What is happening?
In this explosively unique book, Perel argues that erotic desire for both men and women is incompatible with contemporary culture’s preference for equality, community, and complete transparency. The standards of moral behavior aren’t usually followed when experiencing sexual arousal. It is inappropriate politically. Power struggles, unjust advantages, and the distance between oneself and others are what it thrives on. It is conceivable to have sex that is more exhilarating, fun, and even poetic, but we must first banish egalitarian principles and emotional housekeeping from our bedrooms.
While Perel’s interpretation of bedroom dynamics promises to release, fascinate, and provoke, Mating in Captivity demonstrates why the home sphere can feel like a prison. By throwing open the doors to domesticity and erotic existence, she asks us to reclaim the “X” in sex.
“The one lesson in this book that really stuck with me — that I always share with the couples I work with — is that space creates intimacy and growth for the relationship. Too much togetherness dilutes the curiosity needed in a relationship for it to thrive and grow. In essence, space provides closeness and intimacy.
Couples need time apart not only for personal growth but to maintain a healthy dose of independence within the confines of a relationship. And quoting Dr. Perel, ‘When intimacy collapses into fusion, it is not a lack of closeness but too much closeness that impedes desire. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness. Thus separateness is a precondition for connection: this is the essential paradox of intimacy and sex.’ I love that! What I love about her writing is that she is real. She gets it. She has spoken to hundreds of couples and really is an expert.” — Kristin M. Davin, a therapist in New York City
Attached
The most cutting-edge relationship science currently in use, attachment theory, is explained in this ground-breaking book by psychologist Rachel S. F. Heller and psychiatrist Amir Levine. It can help us find and maintain love. There hasn’t been an accessible overview of what this fascinating science has to teach us about adult romantic relationships—until now. Attachment theory is the foundation for many best-selling books on the parent-child relationship.
John Bowlby, a British psychologist and psychotherapist, is credited with developing attachment theory. Bowlby looked at the profound influence that our early relationships with our parents or caregivers have on the individuals we become in the 1950s. The fact that our need for a close relationship with one or more people is ingrained in our DNA is another important component of attachment theory.
Levine and Heller show how these evolutionary forces still determine who we are in our relationships today in their book Attached. According to attachment theory, there are three main ways that people behave in relationships.
“The book I recommend to almost every couple client, as well as to many individual clients, is ‘Attached.’ I firmly believe that an insecure attachment style — one in which people are either too anxious or too aloof — is at the root of most relationship problems, especially those with ongoing conflict. What therapists see a lot is one person with abandonment issues in a relationship with someone who needs a lot of distance — this typically results in chaos and drama that makes both people miserable.
I’m amazed at how well the authors distill something as complex as attachment theory so that the reader can easily apply it to their lives. I also love that they give people actionable tools on how to modify an insecure attachment style. The authors go against conventional wisdom by discouraging anxiously attached people from playing hard-to-get games in the beginning of the relationship, which will just attract someone who avoids intimacy. Instead, they urge people with abandonment issues to be transparent about wanting a serious relationship; this will weed out the commitment-phobes, and attract those who are ready for a secure, healthy relationship.” — Virginia Gilbert, a marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles and the author of “Transcending High-Conflict Divorce
Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
Get closer to people who are more helpful, loving, and deeply satisfying. Dr. Harville Hendrix helps you change your relationship into a long-lasting source of love and companionship by sharing with you what he has discovered about the psychology of love over the course of more than thirty years of practice as a therapist in this ground-breaking book. Dr. Hendrix and his wife, Helen LaKelly Hunt, have included a new preface to their famous book for this edition, highlighting the profound impact this book has had on so many readers over the years. GETTING THE LOVE YOU WANT can assist you in developing a loving, supporting, and renewed partnership with its step-by-step method.
“I was a therapist for years before I found this book, and for a long time I felt hopeless about my work, about relationships and about marriage. Sometimes I sat with couples in my office and thought, ‘I’m not sure what to tell you. Get divorced, I guess.’ The couple felt hopeless and so did I. And then I found ‘Getting the Love You Want.’ And it made sense: why couples get together, what they are looking for in a partner, why they argue and that basically we are all fundamentally drawn to someone that we are incompatible with — this is true for all of us. But now I understood why.
We are always going to be drawn to someone who has the capacity to heal us from our childhood wounds. Reading this book, I got it. As a therapist and as someone in a relationship, it was clear to me why I picked my spouse and why we argued, and how to heal and grow from those arguments. I became a better therapist and a better person because of this book.” — Tammy Nelson, a sex and relationship therapist and author of “Getting the Sex You Want”
Conclusion
In closing, marriage is a challenging undertaking—but it’s exciting, rewarding, and worth the effort. Whether you’re newly engaged or considering tying the knot in the future, understanding your relationship goals and having them on paper can help you discover what it takes to make a marriage last.