Exploring The Options For Marriage Counseling Books

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 classic book that I like is “His Needs, Her Needs”. It was written by Willard F. Harley, Jr, a practicing psychologist. He focuses on the fact that husband and wife have differing needs. These needs are so different that it’s often the case that the husband doesn’t even realize that he is not meeting his wife’s needs, and vice versa. According to Dr. Harley, men’s greatest need is usually sex, which should come as no surprise. For women he ranks affection first, which is something many men find it hard to deliver. In summary, Dr. Harley’s encourages the husband and wife to make loving accommodations for each other’s differing needs, even if it requires some self-sacrifice.

Another good book is “Getting the Love You Want,” by Harville Hendrix, who is a practicing therapist. Dr. Hendrix himself is divorced, so he is personally acquainted with the pain of a failed marriage. His empathy and understanding shows in his writing. Dr. Hendrix takes the approach that we are attracted to our mates for unconscious reasons that we really don’t understand. He summarizes these motivations in two statements. First, we are attracted to people who have both the positive and negative traits of those who raised us. Second, we are attracted to people who compensate for things we were deprived of in childhood. In other words, we often enter into a marriage expecting our spouse to be a kind of “second-chance parent” who will make up for all the mistakes of the first.

I’m not sure that I agree completely with Dr. Hendrix’s theory, but he does have some interesting case histories to make his point. Like the case of John, a dull businessman (at least that’s how he saw himself), who was infatuated with Cheryl because of her emotional nature. But what initially attracted John to Cheryl quickly became too much for him to handle.

Whichever book you choose, I urge you not to avoid or put off consulting marriage counseling books. There is no relationship more precious than marriage, and it’s impossible to invest too much care into making it great.

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