Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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226 of 233 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stands out from the Pack of Couples' Fixit Books, April 12, 2001
Most books on improving a marriage focus on communication techniques or the basics/exotics of sex ed. David Schnarch has created something quite different. This book focuses on using conflict within the couple to create the growth necessary for partners to relate to each other. The book balances a well written presentation of psychological theory with anectdotal examples of how it manifests in couples. The root of marital conflict is not failure to communicate. Rather, it is accurate communication between incompletely individuated people. Individuation means the ability to connect with another, even in conflict, without losing one's own sense of self. When individuation is lacking, members of a couple must find ways to keep their distance from their partners in order not to lose their sense of self. This distancing is the root of marital (or other committed couple) discord. Schnarch uses the forum of the couple to challenge each individual to develop a stronger, less contingent sense of self. The very institution that produces anxiety--the relationship--becomes the mechanism of repair! He postulates that couples only form between individuals who are similarly individuated. As one member of the couple develops, it challenges the other. The two partners "leapfrog" in their development, continually challenging the other. I've been married for 15 1/2 years. We spent the last three years (we're slow learners) working with a therapist who subcribes to Schnarch's ideas. After many, many wasted dollars with other therapists (we learned all the nice communication techniques, with no improvement in our couplehood), we've finally begun to develop a sense of intimacy in our relationship. This stuff WORKS! For those who'd like a more theoretical background on the material, Schnarch's THE SEXUAL CRUCIBLE is an incredible reference work. It contains the theoretical material found here, but instead of anectdotes about people living the material, it pulls in reams academic material to refute other theories and buttress Schnarch's. Five stars for breaking new ground. Five stars for making key psychological theories accessible. Five stars for importance. If you're in a relationship, and you think it could be better--get this book! It can be! (
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99 of 99 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Maps real-life marriage's desolation, milk and honey, January 17, 2000
By A Customer
No better, stronger, and truer book on the real-life, grow-or-close-down processes of marriage and long-term commited relationships than this one (and David Schnarch's more technical "Constructing the Sexual Crucible", written for therapists). When you are ready, or almost ready, to take an honest and self-confronting look at yourself and at life itself --- including those areas where you really don't think you need to look because you've got it all figured out --- when you are ready to quit blaming your partner for every heartbreak, limitation, and shortcoming your life has delivered --- when you are ready to face yourself down so that you can become the better self part of you longs to be --- than this book is your map. Almost incidentally, you may find that your marriage --- perhaps predictable, perhaps torment-filled, perhaps sexually flat --- may become full of surprises, ravenously and heated sexual, and spiritually, intellectually, emotionally fulfilling. In crisis two years ago, I searched this site for books on marriage and happened onto this one. My much-loved husband of 22 years and I were at a terrible, terrifying marital crossroads neither of us could make sense of. I read readers reviews. I ordered perhaps half a dozen books which seemed promising. This was one. I can remember the crazy deep panic, trying to find something to latch on to, something that would take me deeper, or make sense. I ordered several books that night, and tore into them eagerly. Right from the start it was clear the Passionate Marriage was the key through the locked door, the map through the strange territory, and I didn't need to "wait for him" (my spouse) to change or get better --- I could start examining myself immediately and that, in itself, would create change --- for me. And, because my husband and I were then "fused", in Schnarch's language, any action either of us took changed the whole "elegant system of marriage... which is an engine for personal development." (More Schnarch-talk.) The map, of course, is not the territory. But with this guide and a LOT of hard work on his part and mine, over time --- we made our way through the once-verdant, than desolate country our entrenched patterns of loving each other had unwittingly created. The mechanics of marriage play out differently in each case, but there is enough common in the process of being married ITSELF that Schnarch's reasurrance makes sense. What is that reassurance? That you are not going crazy, that the seeming craziness is marriage working as it should, that, instead of treating the normal if searinmgly painful processes of marriage as pathology we should look at them as developmental, for growth. Once you start to get it, even though it's like nothing you've heard before, you --- or we --- go "Ah-HAH!" pretty quickly. Best of all, it elucidates how to start coming from the strong side of yourself, rather than the weak (the wounded child, poor-victimized-me stuff that is so pernicious a part of our self-help culture, including psychology as usually and wrongly practiced.) PM, as it is affectionately known in our house, is the one approach I have ever found that truly tells it like it is --- "it" meaning the dynamics of grown-up, real-world, long-time committed relationship love and passion. My husband and I continue to go deeper and deeper as a result of the reshifting of many of our most basic and cherish assumptions, which Schnarch's truly groundbreaking work forced us --- painfully --- to do. Painfully --- but with what joy and wonder do I regard the results! My husband and I, through the ideas in PM (note: IDEAS, not "how-to"s) have not only weathered our crisis but learned how to go through crisis and take meaning and strength from the anxiety, to love on life's own terms as two adults, not as two babies in grown-up bodies suckling on the same infantile "fusion fantasies" that love will save everything and solve everything and that you have to feel "safe" in order to love. Through the brave work of Schnarch and our own equally brave work in slowly trying (individually) to live what he articulates, my dear partner and I found a way of understanding that has plainly transformed us and the way we are for and with each other. We came so close to losing each other, and the preciousness of what we have instead continues to floor us. The PM approach is not something you pick up a few tips from and set aside... it is life-changing, and will flow into every relationship you have if you are brave enough to really take it in --- maybe most of all, or at least first of all, your relationship with yourself. I have recommended PM to everyone I love --- now I recommend it to any other reader who is truly prepared to grow up, develop, self-confront, and learn how to love and be loved with their whole heart.
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128 of 130 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
It offers a path to the best sex you and your spouse can have, but not necessarily to the sex you want, December 2, 2005
Couples with relationship problems that they cannot fix and do not even really understand may well find this book to be a lifeline, but they should not assume that following the Passionate Marriage approach will make them happy in the end. Dr. Schnarch's thesis (highly simplified) is that married couples often wind up in "emotional gridlock" because, as important differences between them (such as disparate sexual desire) arise in the marriage, they cling to the illusion that their partner can be their everything. In a doomed effort to perpetuate this illusion, they "manage" conflict by doing things that violate their own integrity (e.g. having sex they don't want to have) or by demanding that their partner do things that violate their partner's integrity (e.g. have oral sex when the partner doesn't really like it); the result, ironically, is that they wind up feeling farther apart rather than closer together.
Dr. Schnarch's solution to "emotional gridlock" is to encourage you to maintain your integrity -- i.e. to "hold on to" yourself -- without pushing your spouse away: to be who you really are, and to let your spouse see who you really are, while at the same time letting your spouse know that you love and value your spouse and the relationship. The result is that you feel authentic in the relationship and your partner is given a chance to know and love the "real" you (and vice-versa). Dr. Schnarch calls this process of "holding on to" yourself while simultanesouly "holding on to" your spouse "differentiation." It can be an extremely painful process because it forces you to confront that fact that no one -- including your spouse -- can every fully "complete you," but it is an extremely hopeful process because it opens the door for you and your spouse to really see and love each other other for who you really are.
My one quarrel with Passionate Marriage is that while Dr. Schnarch freely admits that "differentiation" can be an extremely painful process, he implies, misleadingly (and perhaps unintentionally), that it always has a happy ending. The vignettes in his book typically involve emotionally gridlocked couples who are having very little sex and/or crummy sex (among other problems), who go through the painful process of differentiation, and who then start having frequent and/or passionate sex. Although I am sure that is the way it works for many couples, Dr. Schnarch fails to warn the reader loudly enough that frequent and/or great sex is not an inevitable result of differentiation.
For example, a fully differentiated woman married to a man who craves frequent and/or experimental sex might well come to realize (and accept) that, even after changing as much as she can to satsify her husband, she still desires sex only once every two months and/or simply does not enjoy certain types of sex. Her husband then has only two choices: accept the painful reality that he will never have the sex he craves, or get that sex from someone else (with all the negative consequences for the marriage which may result). True, the wife may now be compassionate and understanding about her husband's sexual disappointment and frustration (rather than feeling pressured, resentful, inadequate, etc.), and the husband may cease blaming his wife and being angry at her for low sexual desire/arousal problems that she simply cannot help, but the fact remains that their sex life will never be anything like what the husband wishes it would be.
I do not at all mean this as a criticism of differentiation, which is a natural part of human development that cannot be avoided in healthy long-term committed relationships. I also don't mean it as a criticism of Dr. Schnarch, since I am sure that all authors of self-help books highlight positive outcomes in order to sell their approach (not to mention copies of their book) to skeptics. I do, however, mean it as a serious criticism of Passionate Marriage, because I think the book undermines its own goals by making promises it can't keep. Over and over again, the book promises that the pain of differentiation is worth it because you "may" or "can" wind up having great -- even "electric" -- sex; although this is certainly true, it is also true that many couples who go through the process will not wind up having great, let alone electric, sex.
Freud once said that the goal of psychoanalysis is not to make the client happy, but rather to replace the client's neurotic misery with ordinary unhappiness. For many couples, that will be the result of differentiation: the hurt, distance, and anger that has plagued their marriage and/or sex life will be replaced by the ordinary unhappiness of living with a real spouse with real limitations. Those limitations may include sexual limitations. Differentiation might well enable you and your spouse to have the best marriage, and the best sex, the two of you are capable of having together (which is no small thing!), but the sex you wind up having may be nowhere near as frequent, passionate, or "electric" as the sex shared by the successful couples described in Passionate Marriage.
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