Making Marriage Simple: Ten Truths for Changing the Relationship You Have into the One You Want Author: Harville Hendrix | Language: English | ISBN:
B009C5XLUU | Format: PDF
Making Marriage Simple: Ten Truths for Changing the Relationship You Have into the One You Want Description
Change the relationship you have into the one you want.
Welcome to the Relationship Revolution! Making Marriage Simple is the accessible, essential road map to building a strong marriage in the modern world. Bestselling authors Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt distill into ten essential truths what they've learned about how to create a successful and satisfying relationship—both from their decades of “R&D” in the marriage lab of their workshops, and from their own relationship journey. In each chapter, Harville and Helen introduce a simple truth—such as “a frustration is a wish in disguise,” “incompatibility is grounds for marriage,” or “conflict is growth trying to happen”—and then walk couples through easy yet effective exercises to help them apply each truth in real life, every day.
Harville and Helen have spent their careers helping couples transform their marriages through research, workshops, and counseling. But marriage—even for marriage experts—is never easy, and a number of years ago they found themselves on the brink of divorce. Harville and Helen put themselves back through the exercises they’d coached so many other couples through, saving their marriage and helping them achieve a true partnership.
This book is for all couples. It offers the practical tools needed to transform one’s relationship into a rewarding and joyous marriage. Written with humor, compassion, and honesty, and illustrated throughout with engaging line drawings, Making Marriage Simple is a strategic blueprint for creating a stronger, more satisfying partnership in today's world.
- File Size: 2531 KB
- Print Length: 208 pages
- Publisher: Harmony (March 12, 2013)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B009C5XLUU
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #82,406 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
I really liked Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt's breakout book Getting the Love You Want in which these accomplished marriage and couples therapy innovators explain Imago Relationship Therapy. So I came to this book inclined to like it and happily I did. In Making Marriage Simple, H&H lay out 10 basic principles that will keep your marriage on a solid foundation--and more. These principles point us to go below the surface, to investigate what the deeper meanings and causes are that create marital harmony. They explore the evolutionary psychology and deeper hurts driving our behavior or "mis"behavior. Those familiar with Hendrix and Hunt's work, won't be surprised to learn they direct us to the way the wounds of our childhood drive us and how our partners are the ideal person to help us heal those wounds.
Though Making Marriage Simple is applicable to all married couples in various stages of couplehood. It is mostly written as a growth guide. If you're struggling just to stay together,The Couple's Survival Workbook: What You Can Do To Reconnect With Your Partner and Make Your Marriage Work (r) is a valuable companion or starter book.
One thing I like about this book is that H&H are willing to reveal themselves and talk about the difficulties they've had in their own marriage. As they write, "When we first started focusing on our own healing process, our relationship was a mess. We both knew a lot about marriage--in theory. But we didn't know how to live what we knew.
This is a hard review to write. I feel like the kid in The Emperor's New Clothes. Harville Hendrix has many fans, and based on his book Getting the Love You Want, I count myself among his fans. But this book, like the unclothed emperor, is an embarrassment. In an attempt to make marriage simple, Hendrix and his wife, Helen LaKelly Hunt, have made marriage simplistic.
I will start with a brief summary and then provide details for readers who are interested. (My copy was an uncorrected proof of the book, so it is possible that some of the quotes and page numbers following them differ from those in the final edition.) Making Marriage Simple is a small self-help book about how to improve your marriage. Some of the assumptions are questionable at best, and almost all of the fixes have been better articulated in other books. The book is quite short, less than 200 pages, and it includes lots of line drawings and some blank spaces for doing suggested exercises. Every drawing features little creatures that look like eggs with stick-figure arms and legs. Captions and text bubbles reiterate what's in the text, but the core concepts of this book are not complex and do not require repetition (often verbatim) by little cartoon creatures that resemble peanut m&m's.
Now for the criticism.
In the first chapter after the introduction, the authors advise: "You can even purchase two copies of this book (after all, we don't want you fighting over which one of you gets to read it at a particular time!)" (9). That seemed like a pretty self-serving suggestion. In my experience, it is the rare husband who is willing to read a self-help book about marriage, and I don't think the problem is lack of an extra copy.
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