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Summary: NOT JUST FOR MARRIED COUPLES!
Review: As a counsellor, I found this book to be an excellent book in dealing with relationships and intend to recommend it those seeking self-help material. You do not need to be a legally married couple to benefit from this book. It will prove just as beneficial to individuals in any committed relationship. In many cases, I have found the one basic element lacking in relationships undergoing difficulties is the ability to be able to communicate in an open, honest, respectful, understanding and loving manner. All thses elements make up the basis for effective communication. They are elements which come naturally for many couples, and for other couples, ones they never quite master."Passionate Marriage" provides some excellent suggestions on strengthening the bond in loving relationships. As time passes by, some couples tend to let the spark and excitement die, and committed relationships do not need to be that way. Part of the problem often lies in taking each other for granted; partners begin to feel too comfortable, too complacent in the relationship. As a result, they become less tolerant, less understanding, and sometimes...less loving. When some couples initially make that special commitment, they are often so blinded by what they truly believe to be love that they miss the mark and discover they are not really in love with each other at all. Rather, they are in love with the IDEA of being "in love" - in love with whom they have created that other person to be, only in their own mind. Even unmarried couples living together in loving relationships for many years often find significant changes in the relationship after they become legally married. So, life has no guarantees for happiness. The author makes a very valid point when he says, "A man is more likely to let the relationship suffer to hold on to his sense of self, while a woman is more apt to let her identity suffer to help strengthen it." Both of those principles can have a disasterous effect on the relationship and the individuals. I highly recommend this book to any committed couple experiencing difficulties in their relationship. The one important factor is that both parties must be willing and committed to making the relationship work. If only one is willing to try and the other is not (or wants out of the relationship,) it may be time to let go and start anew. By letting go of the past, you open the door to limitless possibilities of the future...and of finding true love and happiness. Perhaps this book will help strengthen your relationship or help you decide when it is time to let go. May you find lasting love, peace and happiness!
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Summary: This was my life raft when I was drowning in my marriage!
Review: My husband and I both have professional degrees from Ivy League universities. About 20 years into our lonely, workaholic marriage, I was seriously thinking about leaving him. Yet because I did not want to subject our son to the anguish of divorce, I started to search for books that could help us learn how to improve our relationship and deepen our love for one another. Two books helped tremendously: David Schnarch's Passionate Marriage, and William Van Horn's 7 Steps to Passionate Love. Each is brilliant in a different way. Schnarch's book helped us to see that "emotional gridlock" was inevitable in a longterm relationship, but that there were ways to grow individually and collectively into a much more satisfying relationship. Van Horn's book has helped us to see what we must do day-to-day to create a more satisfyingly loving experience. Van Horn's book is lacking re book design, editing, and proofing, but these are minor complaints. Today, we are a far happier couple because of the things that we learned from these two books.
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Summary: My Favorite So Far
Review: I am an avid reader of self-help material and this book is the best relationship book I have read to date. I have used it along with 500 Lovemaking Tips & Secrets to bring the passion back to a boil in my marriage.
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Summary: A minority viewpoint.
Review: .
There may be some helpful and meaningful information in this bloated (408 pages), poorly organized and poorly written book but I didn't have the patience to find it. To be fair, out of frustration I stopped reading after the first couple of chapters and stopped skimming altogether about midway through. The problems for me begin right at the beginning with the author's telling of a decision he made as a student to not compromise his principles for the sake of an overbearing professor. This, he tells us, is an example of "differentiation." How is this going to relate to passion in marriage? We're left clueless. The concept of differentiation pops up throughout at least the first half of the book and, given its importance to the author, you'd expect there to a chapter - or at least a section - explicitly devoted to clearly and succinctly defining and specifically discussing what it is and what it means. Alas, that is not to be. Instead we get a meandering tome littered with psychobabble and punctuated by interminable vignettes of couples in therapy within which our author miraculously seems to always say just the right thing at just the right time. Worse, the author presents his methods with an "I'm right and everyone else is wrong" attitude based, it seems, entirely on anecdotal evidence. What did I learn from this book? Having a Ph.D. does not make you a good writer.
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Summary: It'a About YOU, not the marrriage!
Review: I wrote a review of this book in Dec. 1999 which is still on here- So why am I commenting again? Because I have recommended this book to 8 friends in the past year and they have found it invaluable. Some were married, some were just out of a relationship and some single. In all cases they came back to me saying how much it helped them. You see, while this book's title includes Marriage, it is really about you and how you relate to your partner. Sure, there are some racy parts! lol... but it is really about how to discover yourself and how you can and will be able to participate in a relationship in a healthy way. Not everyone has agreed with every point made by Dr. Schnarch (even me), but he has made us all think and sparked personal growth to a degree far beyond the normal "self-help" book. Read it! I don't think you will be disappointed. Oh, and buy a spare - it's a great spontaneous present... especially because you won't want to lend yours. :-)
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Summary: Suspicious of "self-help" books? THIS IS YOUR BOOK!!!
Review: "Passionate Marriage" is a challenge to the best in all of us. We CAN grow up and take responsibility for ourselves, Schnarch assures us. And he provides a blueprint, a philosophy of growth -- with case histories of "hopeless" marriages that became vital and hot solely because both particuipants were willing to put themselves on the line and grow the hell up. He includes fascinating and inspiring examples from his own marriage -- he dares to present it as a work in progress rather than a fait accompli, which enhances, not undermines, his authority. I devoured this book; it made sense out of so much that "traditional" marriage manuals have obfuscated or overlooked. This book is NOT a compendium of quick 'n easy foreplay techniques, or ways to listen and make yourself. The main point is this simple: to have a passionate marriage, you've got to learn to stand on your own two feet. He throws the touchy-feely empathy-and-listening model out the window and proposes something more radical: personal integrity must be upheld at all costs, including a marriage which compromises it. Divorce isn't the end of the world, but according to Schnarch's extremely wise and insightful model of crises and communion in marriages, staying married and learning to "differentiate" is a joyful, sexy, deep and spiritual experience for which there is no substitute in adult relationships. It has changed, at a very deep level, the way I view problems in my own marriage. Becoming more "differentiated" (quotation marks are to avoid sounding jargony and self-helpy -- it really means separating emotionally, remaining my own person and not succumbing to the temptation to have a mind-meld marriage) from my husband began almost as soon as I'd read the first chapter, and has translated -- and this is the mysterious part -- into the most amazing sex we've ever had.
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Summary: My Favorite So Far
Review: I am an avid reader of self-help material and this book is the best relationship book I have read to date. I have used it along with 500 Lovemaking Tips & Secrets to bring the passion back to a boil in my marriage.
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Summary: Required reading for a loving lustful marriage
Review: My wife and I have read all David's books and this one is the most effective presentation of his ideas and material. David is part of a group of cutting edge scholars/therapists that has unlocked the mysteries of human dysfunction and behavior. We have read this book no less than 6 times each and have reread passages dozens of times. We coupled this with counseling from one of his clinical partners and have revolutionized all of our relationships, both intimate and casual. The ideologies presented in this book changed our lives. Life can be a lot better even if you think it's great now. This isn't a read for the fun of it, it's about you and who you can become.
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Summary: Serious Help for Real 15+ Year Marriages
Review: This guy has done a lot of personal clinical research and come up with some ideas that really make sense. It is definitely new material that I have never heard explained before (and oftentimes diametrically opposed to the typical "counseling" that's going on out there). Namely, one of his principle premises is that you can't separate marriage counseling from sexual therapy. Well, that should have been pretty obvious about 2 centuries ago, but it goes to show you why we should all be a little skeptical of the typical "counselor" out there. As Schnarch points out, "Why would you want to go to a marriage counselor who has no better marriage than your own?" Good question. I was looking for something new to help us find an extraordinary marriage and I, personally, think this book has some excellent explanations and ideas to do just that. Some of the couples' problems really do look pretty hopeless in the beginning, and I can see that it must be very rewarding for Schnarch to see where he can help couples go within a few months' time. It also gives quite a bit of hope to all of us that if these guys can do it, so can we. But it takes some courage and some motivation and some understanding to simply read this book and then go try this stuff on your own; however, I have been stepping out of my comfort zone and feel a lot better about myself and my marriage as a result. This book is even helpful if your partner refuses to get involved; although certainly not as helpful to actually change things, at least you have some understanding of why things are the way they are, and maybe how you can help your spouse move forward as well. Warning: the 1st 100 pages or so were a bit slow as the author obviously felt it was absolutely necessary that the reader understand his initial premise concerning what he calls "differentiation." By the time I finished all those pages, however, I knew I really understood it so I guess his repetition of the concept served its purpose. Stick with it--the later chapters are really helpful, at least for us. 2nd warning: there is a lot of sexually explicit sex in this which was rather shocking to me at first (but might serve to interest a disinterested spouse for a few pages!!), but by the time I got to the end, I understood that this is the way he conducts his sessions and so this is the way he shares it with the reader. I concluded this is probably the way most people talk about sex, but I never talk about sex with people other than my spouse and we use far less slang than Schnarch shares in his interviews. All in all, the content is any discomfort the slang might cause.
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Summary: Counting the Strike Outs!
Review: Although it's always worth a try - many, in fact. The difficulty of self help books is that too often, couples find that either one or both are never quite ready for the ultimate fix at the same time, much like the realm of sexual desire. It also happens that despite the fact that it takes two to tango, each may be on a separate platform with the prospect of what is seemingly the grand canyon between them. Since most people can't fly, the task seems worthy of what might be required of a world class gymnist, or aerial acrobat to arrive together on the same platform, assuming each decides that that location is the ideal place to unite or reunite. If they can overcome gravity, and desire to, the reality may be worth it, but the trip over may well be treacherous, and even defy the odds. In that case, however ideal it may be, this advice may help that prospect, but is, in no event, made for cowards. Hence, it may well be the decision to try to fly by sheer willpower, and one that society doesn't exactly understand or support, which, of course, encourages the self questioning of whether it is worthy of the extravagant effort. Since only discomfort tends to "move" people, the odds are much like winning the lottery with the extraordinary odds against that probability. But, people try daily to win, don't they, in hopes of winning the big one?
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