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Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships |
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Reviews |
| | Fix your relationship by yourself  |
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In the middle of a relationship it becomes easy to focus on what your partner should be doing and there are a lot of books and therapists which will feed into this type of thinking. This book explains why you should work on yourself.
In most relationships the problem is that couples are too emotionally interconnected. They support each other but if this support is relied on then it hurts the individual. They become unable to reveal themselves as they are but instead as their partner expects them to be.
Only by validating themselves will people be able to free themselves and grow.
There's much more in the book... |
| | Wonderful Book, Great Information, Wish I read it year ago. |
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I will put it bluntly. My relationship was on the rocks. Outwardly we were the perfect couple and family, but one day my world crashed around me.
This book helped me understand that my relationship to myself is as important as my relationship to my wife. When I started to look inward and understand my own feelings, and then share them with my wife, our relationship started to turn around. (She was missing that part of me, and I was missing that part of her.) This book opened doors in my mind. It is a little hard to read, but stick with it.
If you are reading this, I assume you are struggling. I am sorry. Read this book, seek individual and marriage counseling. Also read "Intimacy After Infidelity" even if an affair hasn't happened. It explains the stages of a relationship, the causes of problems, and how to work through them. I wish I was given these books earlier in my life. They provide tools for living. Good luck. |
| | Not impressed  |
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The basic thesis of this book is that you need to be 'differentiated' in order to have good sex in marriage. Unfortunately, nowhere it is explained exactly what this means and only after having read through numerous case-studies it becomes slowly clear that 'differentiated' means something like self-confident. Why couldn't the author just say so? Instead of explaining his concepts we have to read page after page through verbatim dialogues of his sessions with his clients. I don't want to be too harsh but it appears as if these endless verbatim dialogues serve mainly the function of showing off, what a great therapist Dr. Schnarch is and how many clever things he says. The reader certainly would have benefited far more from some clear and concise explanations with some practical suggestions. What is worse, the vague and wishy washy approach of this book shows just how undifferentiated the author is himself. Instead of standing up for his ideas he throws bucket full of case studies at us which make us - the reader - totally 'enmeshed' (= mixed up) with him because it is near to impossible to take a stand for or against of what he says.
Unfortunately, my wife and I did not benefit from this book at all. But we found a big turn-around in this book: The 6 secrets of a lasting relationship by Mark Goulston. In just one chapter he gives advice of of how to rekindle your sex-life that really really worked for us. |
| | Dr. Schnarch in a nutshell |
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While I agree that this book is poorly written and messy, I throughly enjoyed reading this book (I've read it a couple of times). I think Dr. Schnarch's ideas are a bit complicated and the book is so messy, so many people (who like and dislike the book) have difficulty in putting the ideas in the book together. Here, I will summarize the main points of Dr. Schnarch's approach, and please feel free to comment me, so we can put all our ideas together.
1. As time passes within a relationship, two major problems occur: these are lack of emotion (relationship becoming too monotonous, void between partners), and too much conflict.
2. This problem arises because of a few reasons: first, deep emotional connection is anxiety provoking (the loved one may cheat, die, leave, etc) and as, in time, as people get closer, this anxiety grows. So, although we claim to seek intimacy, we also try to push our partner away, to reduce anxiety.
Another problem is, we all have conflicts about how we see ourselves and how our loved ones see us. We want to be seen by them in a certain way (we have a distorted self-image) and when they don't, we don't feel "loved", we get mad, or sad.
On one hand, we want to be accepted as who we are (unconditional love), yet mostly we are afraid that self-disclosure can get us rejected, hurt, etc. We dont take the risk of self-disclosure, so we dont have the possibility of feeling accepted.
3. We choose people with similar personal growth level to us in our relationships (and in our family, people already have similar growth levels), and sooner or later, we hit "the gridlock", which means a seemingly unsolvable conflict with deep emotional overtones.
4. The solution to this gridlock and the root of providing further intimacy is, to stop fighting our partner and confronting ourselves. However, this is hard because, it involves our very emotional hot-spots. It means going against your own weaknesses. The task is to discover who you are, and "getting yourself together".
5. Another problem with self-confrontation is that the society's values and opinions about love and relationships directly discourage self-confrontations and encourage conflict with your partnet. Yet, it is not possible that someone else accepts you for who you are, if you conflict with yourself abour who you are. We have unrealistic expectations of ourselves and relationships, mostly because things seem easier that ways (but in reality, it is much harder).
6. Sexuality is only an extention of a couple's emotional intimacy, not a biological function. Thus, self-confrontation and building true intimacy is good for a couple's passion and excitement (in and out of bed). |
| | A Great Resource |
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This book is just as much about personal development as it is about the marriage relationship. If you're looking for something that really gets at how & why relationships work the way they do & how to resolve things at a deeper level, this book is for you. It is *not* a how-to manual and is not full of tools & techniques. What I love about this book is that it isn't just about having great sex/chemistry/passion in general but about having those things with your partner. It's about resolving the issues in a relationship in a way that results in great sex, rather than the other way around. |
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