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.
