Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
Good Fit
- Couples who keep fighting about the same things and want to understand why
- People preparing for marriage or building a long-term relationship
- Readers interested in attachment theory and how childhood shapes adult relationships
- Family therapists and counselors who work with couples
Not a Fit
- Relationships involving violence or danger — these need professional intervention
- Anyone planning to do the exercises alone, without a partner — the book is for two
- Readers who tire of American therapy language and terms such as «unconscious agenda»
The introduction tells the book's history: weeks after its 1988 publication Oprah Winfrey featured it on her show, and it made the New York Times bestseller list eleven times. But the most interesting news in the new edition is something else: although Imago therapy was from the start the joint creation of Harville Hendrix and his wife Helen LaKelly Hunt, only Harville's name appeared on earlier editions. The authors openly acknowledge this as an example of women's invisibility and sign the book together for the first time.
The introduction also explains how the approach has changed over thirty years: traditional therapy explored each partner's inner world — memories and feelings — but the authors found that insight alone doesn't fix a relationship. The focus shifted to the «space between» partners — not what they say, but how they say it. The answer to why couples fight turns out to be simple: they fight «against difference», and a competitive culture pushes them into a contest to be «right».
«Lost Love» begins with the changing landscape of relationships: the average age at first marriage has risen from 23 to 30 for men and from 21 to 27 for women, young people spend five hours a day on mobile devices, and millions meet their partners online. But two things haven't changed: the magic of romantic love and the pain when love stumbles. Harville candidly describes his own divorce: despite being a family therapist, for a year he woke every morning with «an acute sense of loss».
The book's core mechanism is laid out here: the «old brain» (brain stem and limbic system) doesn't distinguish past from present and asks only, «Is this safe?» An example: someone whose parents were always busy relives the feeling of «abandonment» when a partner comes home late from work — and heads straight for the fridge. Our unconscious agenda is to hand our partner the task of giving us what our caretakers didn't.
«Childhood Wounds» shows that babies come into the world «fully alive and joyfully connected»: the authors describe how their daughter Leah and granddaughter Clare responded to eye contact in their first hours of life. The famous «Still Face» experiment — a baby moving from smiles to screams within two minutes when the mother holds an expressionless face — symbolizes the three stages of the human journey: it starts well, goes badly, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get back to where we began.
The authors divide parenting into two categories — intrusive and neglectful — and describe the two adult types they produce: «fusers» (fear of abandonment, need for closeness) and «isolators» (need for space). Ironically, the two tend to marry each other. The story of Sarah, a woman in her thirties who keeps saying «I can't think» — whose mother met her first report card full of A's with «I bet you can't do that again» — shows how parental «tools of repression» leave their mark on adult life.
- Theory is brought to life with real episodes from the authors' own marriage and clinical practice
- Neuroscience («old brain, new brain») is explained in plain language
- The book's third part is devoted entirely to step-by-step exercises
- Some sections are repetitive, and there are a lot of promotional blurbs (Oprah, Alanis Morissette)
A widely read, practical guide to how couples express love
Explains the unconscious motives behind choosing a partner — also reviewed on our site
At the end of the part read, the authors divide parenting into intrusive and neglectful care and describe the two types of adult it produces, the «mergers» and the «isolators»; ironically, these two types tend to marry each other. The story of Sara, in her thirties saying «I can't think» — her mother answering a high-marked report card with «you could never do that again» — shows the trace of parental «tools of suppression» in adult life.
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