Customer Reviews

Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples

5 star:		(133)
4 star:		(25)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

The relationship/self-help book market is booming. When looking for one of these books you are presented with a bewildering array of "experts" and "specialists", each with their pet theories about where men and women come from or what "rules" you should apply to your relationship.

It is rare to find a book written by an author with solid academic credentials and years of clinical practice. This book is one such find.

The book is organized into three parts. In part I, Dr. Hendrix describes the type of relationships most of us have - "Unconscious Marriage". In this section, he details how our childhood experiences, self image and ideals of romantic love combine to create an unstated power struggle between spouses. Often many books stop at this point, assuming that the reader can now go forth and solve their problems. Fortunately Dr. Hendrix continues.

In the second part, he describes what a more fulfilling relationship might look like, the "Conscious Marriage". He describes how to begin with commitment, stop destructive exit patterns, creating a zone of safety, understanding yourself and your partner, how to begin real self growth and containing rage. He closes by providing two examples of marriages that have been transformed by applying these techniques. The exercises and approaches described by Dr. Hendrix are hard. His most meaningful techniques are not quick tricks but require a lot of introspection and self awareness. As he mentions in his book, many couples may require external assistance (we did). However, his techniques provides lasting changes in the way that you interact with your partner.

The final part of the book is a series of exercises that help drive how the major points in each chapter of the preceding two sections. Relevant and helpful, their main point appears to be to draw the reader into applying the theories presented in the book to their own situation. In this respect, they are helpful.

We have tried a number of different books/techniques to help our relationship and we found this one to be the most helpful by orders of magnitude. I hope it works well for others

Let me start by saying I am not a self-help book devotee. That said, this book has revolutionized my relationship with my husband and taken it to a new level. BUT... I recommend this book for only those seriously committed to REALLY wanting an honest, soul-fully deep relationship. This is not a quick fix book full of easy answers. If you are looking for a book to tell you how to fix your partner or get them to be what you want them to be, don't buy this book.

To make the concepts in Getting The Love You Want work, it takes a tremendous amount of gut wrenchingly honest introsepction, humility, willingness to do things completely differently, and total selflessness. It's hard work.

But if you do what this book suggests, your life will be forever changed ... in all your relationships. This book has changed my life and enriched it beyond belief. I read the book - my husband didn't. Although he was not a proactive participant in the process, his life has been equally impacted and we are getting all we ever hoped for from each other.

I looked at this book from a different perspective than most readers. I didn't read it as a person in need of relationship advice. Rather, I read it as a person who has been happily married for 22 years. My question was, how closely did the advice in this book match what I was doing successfully?

A bestseller since 1988, the book is separated into 3 sections:

-the first part talks about how unmet childhood needs can affect your future relationships.

-the second part talks about a marriage that can fulfil your unmet childhood needs in constructive ways.

-lastly, part three is the exercises. Here you'll be taken through a series of exercises that you can do at home that have been actually used in the author's practice. They're easy to do and involve writing.

Well, that's a rough synopsis that should give you a little bit of a feel as to how the book is set up- and what its about.

So how closely did the advice in this book match what I have been doing all this time to create a successful 22-year marriage? Perfectly- both the book and I promote the idea that you have to work at your marriage to make it work!

And perhaps that's the best piece of advice of all: find constructive ways to make you marriage better- and that's one thing this book most certainly succeeds at. Other self-help books I liked include "Finding Happiness in a Frustrating World."

When I told a pastor friend of mine a short time ago that I was ready to start pursuing a relationship again he recommend this book. When I noticed that it referred to itself as a guide to couples I thought maybe he'd made a mistake recommending it to me, however, as soon as I started getting into it I realized why he thought it'd be helpful to read even before I got into a relationship.

I'd recommend this book to both couples in crisis and those just trying to make things better as well as to any, like myself, that simply want to work on knowing ourselves better before getting into a relationship. It is also very helpful in being able to form insight into how others relate to us in a relationship, why they expect what they do and why we expect what we do.

Some of the author's insight into how childhood wounds effect us are very helpful in seeing how some of our personality gets formed and how those traits affect both our partners and ourselves. When two people start a relationship they both have expectations, conscious and subconscious, of what they expect the other person to do for them. Obviously in a healthy relationship both people are trying to love and give to the other person because giving and loving and being unselfish are traits we all recognize as being "good" and honourable and most healthy people desire to be good or Godly in some form or another.

What is not so obvious, and what I found most helpful in my reading of this book, is that people go into a relationship with the expectation that the other person will heal us where we were wounded and hurt as children. This unconscious desire to have our partners fill the need left behind by our less than perfect parents often is the cause of the ensuing battles and eventual breakdown of relationships. Often the net result of this inability to get our partners to heal us is divorce.

I feel very positive about what I learned in this book and while certainly no panacea, I believe that anyone with an open mind and a desire to learn about themselves and have a greater empathy for their mates will get something positive here. I give it a strong recommendation to both married couples and those that intend to be in the future.

It's hard to put into words just how powerful this book is. It does a really great job of explaining how you have become who you are today, and gives you the tools to understand yourself as well as your partner. From that, you can start to resolve long standing problems - some of which you may not even know you had. It really helps you to get below the surface problems and deal with underlying issues.

The book is laid out in such a way that it continues to build on itself. In the beginning it educates you on how your brain works on a deeper and subconscious level, and then presents many examples throughout the book of situations, and how to overcome them. Near the end you're presented with two couples where everything you have learned is applied to show how situations can go from hopeless to happiness.

In my opinion, this book is one of the best kept secrets. I only wish more people knew about it.

Buy the book, and read it cover to cover. The time spent is more than worth it.

My therapist recommended this book to me and I must say I learned more about myself and my spouse in a couple of weeks then I have learned in 11 years of marriage. The book is very easy reading and really makes one think about how we think, how we respond to people and provides steps to make changes in relationships. The book also explains how our childhood plays an important part in who we are and how we deal in relationships. I'm not yet finished with the book, but I've already told my wife to please read the book. I believe that if we follow what is written in the book, our marriage can be saved and that we can be happy once again.

The wonderful thing about Hendrix's book is that it is designed to help you restore your relationship not just understand how it fell apart.

We marry often by chance or peer pressure and live to wonder how "we got into this."

Hendrix shows us how to meet our own legitimate needs and understand how to meet our partners'.

In the end we cannot badger our partner into changing or loving us.

It is us who must change and in doing so we change the conduct of our partner.

We need to understand both, but work on ourselves.

Any one who feels stress in any relationship should read and understand the "imago" and our limbic brains use of it.

As Tina Turner says, "Whats love got to do with it,...its just a second hand emotion"

Well she half right. Visceral love has a lot to do with who we married, but mature love has as much to do with staying married.

Dr Hendrix is terrific.

Just reading this book gave me great optimism about my marriage and my ability to greatly improve it. His exercises provide explicit and practical steps to take to meet the conflicts and sense of something missing and turn them into relationship and personal growth. The book begins by explaining things you never thought to ask, like 'why was I so attracted to this particular person I married?' He then goes on to describe how the things left unresolved from our childhood experience with our parents become the major themes in the new family created by marriage. The explainations have a common sense feel of the truth being told. From the understanding of how marraage works it becomes easy to see for the first time what creates the tensions and what to do about them. As a marriage therapist Hendrix assumes major problems is your marriage. If your marrage is still in good shape he may seem to overstate the conflicts but the descriptions and cures very much on target and useful.

My relationship of 16 months has been faltering for 8 months. Three weeks ago my girlfriend told me she "didn't want to be with me anymore." I was devastated. I've spent the last three weeks living and re-living all the events of our relationship and have talked to friends for hours ad-nauseum.

The relationship started out so well. We had been acquaintences for 8 years. Friends for 2 1/2 years and finally entered into a relationship 16 months ago. The stages of our relationship eerily followed the book.

My pain, confusion and loss was all-consuming. I could find no understanding within myself, no peace and no answers. Then one of my friends recommended I read this book.

I had gone through a "self-help book" craze 9 years ago for another issue I was dealing with. Although I did find some answers after reading so many books I ended up overdosing on them and haven't read one since. I was not enthusiastic at all about revisiting the "self-help" area again. But I opened the book and read the first couple sentences and knew immediately...instinctively...that this was the book that would be able to help me understand many of the issues we must face in relationships....why we are attracted to certain people and not others...what happens to relationships once you get comfortable with the other person and you begin to lower your "guard"...why many of the things you do to try to "fix" your partner actually do more to drive the partner away.

As other readers have noted, this book will not be effective for immature readers. Although I am a bit wary of psychologists that embrace a single theory to explain behavior, I found the rest of this book valuable and directly applicable to my life.

Thank God for this book. It has enabled me to have my first good night sleep in three weeks. Even if your partner lacks the maturity to absorb, understand and apply the message in this book, it will give -you- the tools you need to ensure a better relationship in the future. Thank you Dr Hendrix for writing this book!

This book is definitely an eye opener into your own self, and why we are who we are and why we choose the mate we do. This book is an excellent guide for any couple who are mature enough to know they want a lifetime committment to each other and want to understand each other and communicate with one another more effectively. This book probably would not be much help to a couple that is extremely young, i.e. teens, or who are still immature themselves. If you are willing to make the committment and want a more fulfilling and meaningful relationship with your partner, this is definitely an excellent guide, but both partners would need to be as committed as the other to wanting to make the relationship work. Dr. Hendrix's exercises at the end of the book are invaluable and really changed our relationship for the better.