Book Review: Getting the Love You Want: A Guide For Couples

This book review is part of a series that covers the topic of Love. The Official SelfGrowth.com Guide to Love is Dr. Charles and Dr. Elizabeth Schmitz.
Love encompasses a wide array of meanings, connections, and relationships which center on the emotions and experiences that create a sense of strong affection or profound oneness.

This book is available through Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

Amazon.com
When Harville Hendrix writes about relationships, he discusses them not just as an educator and a therapist, but as a man who has himself been through a failed marriage. Hendrix felt the sting of his divorce intensely because he believed it signaled not only his failure as a husband but also his failure as a couples counselor. Investigating why his marriage dissolved led him to start looking into the psychology of love. Marriage, he ultimately discovered, is the "practice of becoming passionate friends."

As a result of his research, Hendrix created a therapy he calls Imago Relationship Therapy. In it, he combines what he's learned in a number of disciplines, including the behavioral sciences, depth psychology, cognitive therapy, and Gestalt therapy, to name just a few. He expounds upon this approach in Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples. His purpose in writing the book, he says, is "to share with you what I have learned about the psychology of love relationships, and to help you transform your relationship into a lasting source of love and companionship."

Divided into three sections, the book covers "The Unconscious Marriage," which details a marriage in which the remaining desires and behavior of childhood interfere with the current relationship; "The Conscious Marriage," which shows a marriage that fulfils those childhood needs in a positive manner; and a 10-week "course in relationship therapy, " which gives detailed exercises for you and your partner to follow in order to learn how to "replace confrontation and criticism ... with a healing process of mutual growth and support." The text is occasionally dry and technical; however, the information provided is valuable, the case studies are interesting, and the exercises are revealing and helpful. By utilizing his program, Hendrix hopes you too will be able to solve your marital difficulties without the expense of a therapist. --Jenny Brown --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Ann Roberts
. . . a remarkable book — the most incisive and persuasive I have ever read on the knotty problems of marriage relationships.

Marion Solomon
Getting the Love You Want provides a road map for partners seeking a path to intimacy and passionate friendship.