The book will help you realize that relationships are hard. That good relationships don’t just happen by chance or are a matter of “good chemistry”. We need better tools, and habits, to create the relationships that we want. This book will give you these tools and habits.
Flow: 4/5, it might take a couple of weeks to read and digest.
Actionability: 5/5, the book shares specific steps you can take to transform the insights into value.
Mindset: 5/5, it will help you expand your perspective when thinking about what it takes to have a great relationship.
Some of My Highlights:
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“Romantic love was all about attachment and emotional bonding. It was all about our wired-in need to have someone to depend on, a loved one who can offer reliable emotional connection and comfort.”
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“Most of us no longer live in supportive communities with our birth families or childhood friends close at hand. We work longer hours and longer hours, commute farther and farther distances, and this have fewer and fewer opportunities to develop close relationships.”
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“Inevitably, we now ask our lovers for the emotional connection and sense of belonging that my grandmother could get from a whole village.”
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“He discovered that the isolated infants were so hungry for connection that when given the choice between a “mother” made out of wire who dispensed food and a soft-clotch mother without food, they would choose the squash rag mother almost every time.”
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“The notion of the invulnerable warrior who faces life and danger alone is long ingrained in our culture.”
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“When we feel safely linked to our partners, we more easily roll with the shirts they inevitably inflict, and we are less likely to be aggressively hostile when we get mad at them.”
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“Openness to new experience and flexibility of belief seems to be easier when we feel safe and connected to others. Curiosity comes out of a sense of safety; rigidity out of being viligant to threats.”
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“It is long been known, too, that married men and women generally live longer than do their single peers…. Having close ties with others is vital to every aspect of our health – mental, emotional, and physical.”
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“…emotional isolation is a more dangerous health risk than smoking or high blood pressure, and we now warn everyone about these two!… Negative relationships undermine our health.”
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“Distress in a relationship adversely affects our immune and hormonal systems, and even our ability to heal.”
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“Eventualy, the what of any fight won’t matter at all. When couples reach this point, their entire relationship becomes marked by resentment, caution, and distance.”