Whether your boyfriend/girlfriend has just ended things, you’re still going steady with them or you’ve been married for many years, you can always do with a good book on relationships. They’ll help you assess your relationship and see how you can improve it. At least, the good ones will.
But how do you distinguish the good books from the phonies in this world of quick money schemes and swindlers? This article will hopefully be able to help you along the way to being an informed reader when it comes to relationship books.
Often when I pick a relationship book off the shelf at my local bookstore, I see that the author has embellished their name with a whole bunch of titles and letters. Don’t ever fall into this trap - simply because an author looks certified to educate on a subject in no way means that they actually are.
Relationships aren’t something that are learned in a classroom, they’re learned with real-world experience. How much experience can this person have if they’ve spent all their time in a university? Always looks for the author who has had real world experience of the kind of relationship that you’re looking for. This person will know what it’s like to suffer through a bad relationship or fly with a good one. Plus, you won’t be getting stories of someone that the author has in their therapy class but someone whom the author truly cares about. This is a fundamental difference that it will be easy to pick out just by reading the back and inside covers.
At all costs you must avoid the books that will try and tell you the same old information that you could easily find anywhere else. These are, for the most part, books that will tell you to “put your relationship aside for thirty days and do some self-reflection”. Sure, that’s really easy to say – and almost all the books will say it – but it isn’t so easy when you actually set about doing it. Self-reflection time almost always turns into relationship-reflection time and that ruins the point of the exercise. These books are in no way worth any of your valuable time or hard-earned money.
You should try to look for books that will give you a new perspective and new ideas about how a relationship should work. These books detail things that your friends can’t pull out of a hat when you talk to them. It will come from authors who have had real-world experience but also who have had time to formulate their ideas in such a way that they’re fresh and exciting. These will truly help you along your way.
For example some books might show you what your ex was thinking when you forgot that anniversary. Or how your actions are affecting your loved one in ways that you’d never even thought about. If it looks like it has a chance to give you a new view on your relationship, then it’s a safe bet that the book is a good one.
Lastly, always look for the books that have good recommendations by people from all walks of life. If the book has two recommendations from the author’s best friend Doug and second cousin Sally then it’s likely not going to be a very good book. You should find books that have recommendations of people from very diverse backgrounds - the chap in England to the mate in Australia. This will show you that the book has been very widely read and is therefore probably helping people all over. It could mean that it has the first two attributes listed above.
Of all the relationship books around today, most of them aren’t worth more than two cents. The amount of repetitious garbage that authors load into them because they can’t make up their own ideas is horrifying. However if you play your cards right and read carefully, you can pick out the good, juicy apples from the poison ones.
Hopefully you’ve now become an informed buyer when it comes to relationship books. It can take a little work to find the right one but then, aren’t all relationships filled with work? The book that you buy will reflect how much work your willing to put into the relationship – shouldn’t it be a good one?
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