9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fun and Informative, July 9, 2006
This review is from: Love...What's Personality Got To Do With It?: Working at Love to Make Love Work (Paperback)
My fianace and I had a blast reading this book together. It's surprisingly accurate, fun, interesting and a good tool to help get to know someone. I learned some things I didn't already know about my fiance, as did he about myself.
I'd definitely recommend this book for anyone who enjoys these sort of books and for those who genuinly find interest in reading about themselves and others. This book features good tips on dealing with others that are different from yourself. It's also quite in depth (about 5-7 pages for each "color personality") and can be quite helpful in a relationship.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Love is a lie, December 23, 2011
This review is from: Love...What's Personality Got To Do With It?: Working at Love to Make Love Work (Paperback)
when used as a verb.
Unreciprocated love is only an infatuation. We can't truly love a rock, a pet, or a sociopath. Feelings to the contrary can easily be explained by the Placebo Effect, the Pygmalion Effect, or the Hawthorne Effect - a statement with a LOT of supporting science. Real love is a relational adjective ... something that describes a relationship intimacy executed between and by two or more people (not one). Real love is a systems view of people. And, real relationships are not about personality (or shouldn't be). For example, I can easily get any dog to like me more than their owner simply by giving them more treats. Sadly, we too often build relationships on but shared instinctive rewards or innate personality ... which is sometimes called our "Monkey Brain" (who we are born as). Then, which would you rather be... a bear or a wolf? I've found most people answer based soley on whether they like the idea of long naps or not. While being a wolf might be a "personality" for the wolf, being a "wolf" for a human is more of a value difference (such as about less sleeping) and not a innate personality.
Real love is not based even on our beliefs but on the values we base those beliefs on - for instance, this is how a Christian and an Atheist can have a truly loving relationship. Encouraging personality based love is nothing but support for a tyranny of our lowest common denominator instead of our greatest (the ethics and morals we plagiarize from our heroes ... the expression of which is commonly called art and culture). Real love is sharing the desire to be more like a personal hero who somehow feels the same way about you. This starts with deciding who you want to be - in other words, deciding your personal vision (and not, as Carol states, strengthening some baseless self love). Every culture has first defined adulthood not by anything chronological but by the quality of one's vision quest and depth of the resulting vision statement (not to be confused with a mission statement about what you want to do) such as with Plato's concept of being an Ethical Warrior. Our "personality" (which is primarily "reptile brain" things like how fast we react to things) does not have to define us (as Carol states on page xii).
The core problem with all humanistic phsycology is the belief that right and wrong and a "good life" come from subjective personal choices in the moment. For example, Dr. Albert Ellis (best known humanistic psychologist) brags in "REBT: it works for me" how his ABC program wholly affirmed his life-long habit of sneaking up to women to press his genitals against them as well as his belief that no woman can be "loved" without continual affairs (his first wife of course didn't agree). His happiness was "proof" of the concept's validity. Ellis is a far better (smarter) author - check out his 1969 The Art and Science of Love. But, we really can be so much more than just happy dogs.
Moreover, studies show four color personality tests like what takes up more than half of this book to be bunk - with their conclusions typically changing in six months. They are all decedents of the Briggs-Myers test which was designed by a woman with nothing but a Political Science BS after reading a single text from Jung (Psychological Types) specifically warning quantitative assessments based on his particular work would be not just without value but actually harmful. Alas, I expect that won't be enough to change your mind ... because of the Placebo Effect and your dependence on forebrain stimulation over something more mature. But, try letting the idea stew for a bit. What Carol calls the science of personality has more to do with the science of what's easy to sell (see Colbert's concept of truthiness). This book is not about what makes love work, it's about what makes love easy (truthiness - something known intuitively "from the gut" and "not just something we FEEL to be true but something WE feel to be true"). In this effort, Carol repeatedly describes the world only in black and white terms with any unpleasant interactions as bad (as per p. 150). Real relationships actually promote and encourage conflict to overcome complacency (along with, of course, developing greater conflict resolution skills) as per ALL organizational bahavorists of the past 50 years (see Demming et al). The most respected introduction to such relationships is
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. And, for a review of Carol's popular but inaccurate definition of self-esteem see
The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations - famous for being referenced in President Carter's "Malaise Speech." Please believe there is much more possible for love than described in this text.
A far better read IMHO is
Constructing the Sexual Crucible: An Integration of Sexual and Marital Therapy (Norton professional books) by Dr. Schnarch (the most respected and quoted relationship and sexual dysfunction counselor since 1957). Alas, it's very technical, but he has a few easier to read books. Personally, I feel the articles he's written over the years are even better if you can find one (such as in the Networker March/April 1993 at the URL in the first comment). I really like the Biblical use of the word "know" to describe sex as it implies a much greater intellectual and emotional intimacy than does simply saying two people met one of each other's innate needs. Alas, Schnarch has shown 9 out of 10 Americans are so terrified of real eyes-open knowledge they are physically unable to have an orgasm with their eyes open. Carol sadly encourages us to run from such problems and instead work on just being happier. But, relationships can be unimaginably better if you do manage to open your eyes and move beyond just satisfying your monkey or personality desires. It has been speculated the reason human women physically have larger breasts than do monkeys is specifically to promote such face to face eye-open intimacy. It is not easy. But, this text can only take you in the wrong direction.
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