Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples: Third Edition

Life’s hard these days, and it takes a toll both individually and especially on relationships. Throw kids into the mix and it gets even harder on steroids. My wife and I are pretty empathetic and forgiving people, but even we found ourselves struggling with the demands of everyday life. We finally decided to try couples therapy, and our therapist recommended this book. I’m not a huge fan of books like this because I usually find them to be high minded, overly theoretical, and lacking in effective tools and practical solutions. This book is none of these. It is very approachable and written in an easily-digestible and conversational style, but most importantly the information is extremely insightful and helpful in understanding ourselves and how this affects and plays out in our relationships. And it provides very doable and effective tools and techniques that can be enacted easily and that yield fast and significant results. The first few chapters alone have improved our relationship 10 fold as we now better understand where each other is coming from AND WHY, along with how this impacts our communication, behaviors, and feelings. And the tools are there to help us incorporate positive strategies into our daily lives to help keep us on course going forward instead of just lapsing back into our old ways over time, which is the downfall of many other books like this. I wish we had read this book before we got married as it would’ve helped to avoid lots of needless and hurtful arguments and bad feelings that lead to unproductive and harmful walls that just get harder and harder to break down over time. Frankly, I think this book should be required reading for every couple as it would help prevent so much unnecessary pain and suffering, and probably divorce as well. I’m a guy and hate talking about feelings, emotions, etc., but even I have enjoyed reading this book and certainly the happiness and joy that has returned to our lives. Life’s too short to deal with the stress and negativity of a struggling and strained relationship, so get this book and put your relationship on a happy, healthy course. It’s really life changing with relatively little effort.

Great book. Helpful explaining and things to implement to make your life better.

This should be mandatory for all people who are dating or want to get married. This will guide you through everything you will go through in a marriage.

I got this book for my partner and I to read while they’re incarcerated. We like to read and discuss the content. The first half of the book was not super impressive to me, I didn’t feel like I learned a lot of information. But the second half was good and had good topics to share with a partner!

Such a helpful book, with concrete tips for improving communication in relationships. I find myself returning to this book whenever things become challenging in a relationship. I also attended a retreat based on the book’s teachings. Incredibly helpful.

'5*'s. Good bedtime story out loud reading? The work-book you use with it matching the edition you're reading of the book is of key importance important I bet? Recommendation of the highest level to read at least this book, by itself, though.'

I have recommended this book to all my friends. It is a must read for healthy relationships. Great content and instruction.

This one’s the 500-pound gorilla of the healthy-couple self-help genre, with thirty years in print, scores of Oprah appearances by the authors, thousands of therapists practicing the Imago framework. The main thing that I need to tell you about this updated edition, from the year 2019, is that it does not mention or acknowledge the existence of queer or same-sex couples even one time. In fact, it really doubles down on the husband and wife stuff, takes gender roles pretty seriously, which is not a thing I realized we did anymore, except as a joke. Anyway, talking only to straight people is not too relevant to my interests, and while the conservative Christian viewpoint is pretty subtle in the advertising, just be aware of that PROBABLY NOT ACCIDENTAL omission going in, queer friends. (This is made even more impressive by the fact that the heart of the Imago approach is based on childhood trauma, about the ways in which our parents caused us to suppress or hide or ignore parts of ourselves in order to be accepted and loved. Just let that sink in, because I’ve been reading this book for the past week and I am still reeling from the irony that people who have been thinking for the past three decades about the ways that parents cause trauma to kids by failing to accept parts of them have missed the VERY OBVIOUS AND RELEVANT EXAMPLE of queer folks.) That aside, for me the book was a mixed-bag of some interesting and provocative ideas (I’d put these in the category of poetic notions, or interesting narrative ideas), alongside some really kooky 20th century neo-Freudian stuff (rooted in part in Freud’s theory of repetition compulsion.) I’m no fan of Freudian approaches, and after I started this book, I decided to see how empirically-validated this Imago approach is: based on what I found, there seems to be basically no evidence that this therapy is effective. Am I glad I read it? I think so?? It was thought-provoking, with the pretty significant grain of salt that there’s not much evidence to support that Imago therapy is much better than doing nothing at all. Also, I feel a little gross giving my money to relationship experts who (in 2019!!)) won’t even acknowledge the existence of queer people, even when doing so would obviously strengthen their core arguments and provide better examples than some of the meek ones they give.

This book is a true masterpiece, weaving togheter themes of love, magic and self-discovery

This book explains in a very simple and understandable manner the reason we behave and interact with people. We should be taught this at school and home. I wish I knew earlier. Also it offers very simple ways to fix certain problems, so not only explaining but also fixing. And you can teach your children too. Book for every human being.

Conteúdo ótimo, uma pena que a entrega seja feita com tamanho descaso que o livro é entregue deteriorado.

I haven't finished it just yet, but it is in many ways the book I have needed to read for years. I'm surprised that something which is so popular and assumedly informed so many books after it still seems so fresh to my mind. Maybe it is because many of the techniques are trademarked under their therapy name that it still seems so revolutionary. Anyway, it's probably the greatest book I have read on relationships and dealing with trauma and I'm very excited to use the (structured, detailed and well reasoned) techniques outlined in the book. Having such a clear structure to the book is a blessing, and it remains emotive when explaining how the techniques work: together this makes for very powerful reading. It hits you like: why haven't I known this before and how quickly can I start implementing it? From my own perspective I am quite young but have been struggling to get what I need from my partner, and frantic googling about why I am so unhappy only led to Cosmo and EliteDaily articles about relationships which were more confusing than helpful. Numerous times I have nearly shut down the relationship totally because I cannot accept his otherness to me. Well, this book didn't coddle me, it told exactly what I needed to do to get off my high horse and start respecting his differences like I had before and stop projecting my own fears (of abandonment) onto him. It's been a wake-up call that I needed having gone to therapy alone and looked after myself yet still feeling lost about this relationship. The two in tangent are very powerful! Anyway, that isn't to say this is the end of the story and we will love happily ever after, but I'm now going give him the book and hopefully we can work together to maintain a safe space between! Honestly if you're in doubt, just buy it, no matter your age sex or creed!! I am also atheist and baffled at a review which bemoans the couple of references to religion in the book. The authors use this sparingly to tell their own story (their BG is religious), the book is not at all religious it is very scientific :)

As a therapist I would recommend this to anyone seeking to improve their relationship or just wanting to understand who they are in one. The exercises at the back are practical and so insightful as well