9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Real Help for Troubled Marriages, December 12, 2007
This review is from: How to Love Your Marriage: Making Your Closest Relationship Work (Paperback)
I've read plenty of books that do an excellent job of describing the ideal marriage, with lots of lists of how the husband and wife are supposed to feel and act. I've written and taught on the subject myself.
Those perfect pictures and detailed lists work fine if your marriage is cruising along smoothly.
But what good is knowing your spouse is supposed to be your #1 priority if your heart hates them?
And what good is knowing you should have a "weekly date night" if they won't speak to you kindly for five minutes?
For a marriage on the rocks, what matters is not whether we know what the marriage should be (we usually do). The core question instead becomes how do we deal with a hurting heart caused by someone we once thought could do no wrong?
That is the question that counselor Eve Hogan herself faced five years into her own marriage. She's been there, wondering if a marriage that started with two wonderful people with wonderful plans had any future at all.
How to Love Your Marriage is a book on how to actually turn yourself and your marriage around, regardless of the details of the situation and regardless of whether your partner is interested in change.
How? It focuses on the heart and personal responsibility. She carefully progresses from basic principles of our response to all relationships, to self-evaluation of our values and how we respond to hurt, to steps to change our attitude and experience of marriage, to embracing change and managing emotions and communication, to romance, the role of children and finally seeing marriage as a spiritual journey. The book is a balanced mixture of didactic teaching, do-it-yourself exercises, anecdotes, and practical tips.
If you work through this book, it will change you. It will make a good marriage experience better, and may make a bad marriage experience bearable. But it will change you, your experience of marriage, and your whole life.
Life in general & marriage in particular is a spiritual journey, and this book deals with marriage in deeply spiritual terms. Regardless of your particular religious path you will find much that you can embrace in this book, but doubtless you will also find things that are incompatible with your own worldview. For me, the sheer amount of wisdom and practical help this book contained more than outweighed the points that clashed with my reformed Christian theology. Without qualification it is the most helpful teaching on marriage I have ever read. Highly recommended for all.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Advanced Reader Review, December 13, 2007
This review is from: How to Love Your Marriage: Making Your Closest Relationship Work (Paperback)
HOW TO LOVE YOUR MARRIAGE: MAKING YOUR CLOSEST RELATIONSHIP WORK
by Eve Eschner Hogan
I have to admit neither the cover nor the title would normally draw me to pick this book up off the shelf, however, given the assignment to review, I found the content was well worth the read. Although the book is intended primarily for marriage relationships much of the advice could be equally applied to other relationships and in fact a short section at the end of the book does speak to other family relationships. Hogan's EROS equation is a particularly useful tool: Event + Response = Outcome + Solution. She demonstrates repeatedly how our Response to Events are ours to control and that this is more important than the Event in determining our resulting emotions. She also gives a very clear perspective of how our Egos get in the way of building happy relationships with our desire to control or gain approval. A considerable portion of the book deals with building self-esteem as well as spiritual growth, tying both back to loving marriages. Multiple exercises are included throughout the book to give the reader practice in applying her advice. Perhaps one of the most useful recommendations considering our disposable society is the idea to try resolving marriage problems with the premise that divorce is not an option. A bibliography with online resources and an index are found at the end of the book; also the author does maintain a website at www.EveHogan.com.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Marriage bliss, August 29, 2006
This review is from: How to Love Your Marriage: Making Your Closest Relationship Work (Paperback)
Regardless of where you are in your marriage or before you tie the knot, this book is a must. Ms. Hogan's philosophies and guidance are backed up by real examples. It is a guidance book that is fun to read as well.
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