Most likely you own a car. If you do, no doubt you change the oil every three to four months or so. Of course, your car needs maintenance. It should be just as obvious that marriages need maintenance. However, in view of the epidemic of divorce in our society, it’s pretty clear that maintenance of marriages is often neglected. This is a shame, because there are a lot of marriage counseling books on the shelf to help you improve your marriage. For a little time and not much money, you can make an investment that will pay huge dividends in your relationship. This is an easy, practical step you can take to prevent your marriage from ending up on the rocks.
There must be hundreds of marriage counseling books out there, and new ones are coming out all the time. But you don’t always have to go with the latest fad. In fact, it may be better to use a book that’s been around a while. It’s not as if the problems that couples face are new. In fact, we face the same issues our great-grandparents face: affection, control, money, kids, and so on.
One book to consider is “His Needs, Her Needs,” written by Willard F. Harley, Jr. Dr. Harley is a Ph.D. psychologist who approaches marriage as a relationship designed to fulfill the differing needs of husband and wife. Unfortunately, men and women have such different needs, that they’re often not even aware that they aren’t satisfying their spouses. Wives may not realize the extent of their husbands’ need for sex (which is number one on Dr. Harley’s list of men’s needs). On the other hand, men may not appreciate how much their wives need affection. Many men are awkward when it comes to showing affection, and it doesn’t come natural to them. At the end of the day, Dr. Harley urges both husband and wife to be sensitive and make sacrifices to make sure that their spouses’ needs are being met.
An alternative marriage counseling book is “Getting the Love You Want,” which takes a very different approach. The author is Dr. Harville Hendrix, a practicing therapist. Dr. Hendrix personally experienced a divorce, and as a result has a great empathy and understanding for other couples in trouble. According to Dr. Hendrix’ view, our attraction to our spouses is based on subconscious reasons that we aren’t even aware of. He states two main reasons as follows. First of all, we find people attractive when they have both the positive and negative traits of our parents (or childhood caretakers). Second, we find people attractive who make up for the things we missed during childhood. The upshot is that we often get married with the expectation that our husband or wife will be the parent-figure that we always wanted, and who will give us what we missed out on during our first childhood.
Although I don’t agree totally with Dr. Hendrix, I did enjoy reading the many case histories he cites to support his arguments. One of these involves John, a dull businessman (in his own words), who fell head-over-heels for Cheryl because she was emotionally expressive. However, although this attracted John to Cheryl at first, very soon he became overwhelmed by her outbursts.
In short, there are a lot of options out there, as far as marriage counseling books is concerned. But it’s worth the time to look around at the different options. Marriage counseling books aren’t that expensive. And don’t put it off, sometimes a big problems in a marriage can be avoided if little problems are nipped in the bud – and marriage counseling books can help with this. Your marriage is worth the investment!
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