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How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It | 
 enlarge | Authors: Patricia Love, Steven Stosny
Publisher: Broadway
List Price: $14.00
Buy New: $11.20
You Save: $2.80 (20%)
New (35) Used (9) from $7.47
Rating:  40 reviews
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0767923189
Dewey Decimal Number: 306
EAN: 9780767923187
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Men are right. The “relationship talk” does not help. Dr. Patricia Love’s and
Dr. Steven Stosny’s How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It
reveals the stunning truth about marital happiness:
Love is not about better communication.
It's about connection.
You'll never get a closer relationship
with your man by talking to him like you
talk to one of your girlfriends.
Male emotions are like women's sexuality:
you can't be too direct too quickly.
There are four ways to connect with a man:touch, activity, sex, routines.
Men want closer marriages just as much as women do,but not if they has to act like a woman.
Talking makes women move closer;
it makes men move away.
The secret of the silent male is this:
his wife supplies the meaning in his life. The stunning truth about love is that talking doesn’t help. Have you ever had this conversation with your spouse?
Wife: “Honey, we need to talk about us.”
Husband: “Do we have to?”
Drs. Patricia Love and Steven Stosny have studied this all-too-familiar dynamic between men and women and have reached a truly shocking conclusion. Even with the best of intentions, talking about your relationship doesn’t bring you together, and it will eventually drive you apart.
The reason for this is that underneath most couples’ fights, there is a biological difference at work. A woman’s vulnerability to fear and anxiety makes her draw closer, while a man’s subtle sensitivity to shame makes him pull away in response. This is why so many married couples fall into the archetypal roles of nagging wife/stonewalling husband, and why improving a marriage can’t happen through words.
How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It teaches couples how to get closer in ways that don’t require “trying to turn a man into a woman.” Rich in stories of couples who have turned their marriages around, and full of practical advice about the behaviors that make and break marriages, this essential guide will help couples find love beyond words.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 35 more reviews...
 Another book that encourages women to adapt to men - and not vice versa October 28, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is another one of those books that holds women ultimately responsible for the success or failure of relationships.
The premise is that women want to talk and men don't. That may be true. But the answer provided by this book? Men need to be accommodated and women should accommodate them! Gee - what a novel concept! Who would have thought!? Truly groundbreaking!
Then there is the whole "women are motivated by fear and men are motivated by shame" thing - which is pure stereotyping - and manages to make women responsible for both their own and men's failings by implying that women evoke the shame response in men whereas women's fear response is due to their own weaknesses. (We need men to protect us from, uh, ... other men?)
This book trades on women's willingness to accommodate others, and it also plays on men's terror of being thought effeminate. (Asking your man to communicate with you is really asking him to be a woman! Horrors! We'll be asking them to clean the toilet next!)
I for one am sick of these "Men and Women are From Different Planets" type books. We aren't. Isn't it time we expored our similarities?
 ENOUGH TALKING ALREADY! October 10, 2008
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
Thank goodness somebody finally made it clear what real communication between couples is. That it is not always talking, talking, talking until you are worn out. Once you learn from this book how to UNDERSTAND each other, then take it a step further, and show each other how you feel. The Sensuous Couple's (Flip Over) Guide to Seismic Oral Sex will create more communication than you ever thought possible, and you won't be doing any talking. Give both books a try, and bring you and your husband closer than ever.
 Everyone in a relationship should read this! September 21, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is the best insight into male-female patterns I have ever read. Dr. Love hits the nail on the head with common mistakes people make when interacting with each other in their relationships. This is a must read for any age when dealing with the opposite sex. It opened my eyes!!! Now if I could only get my husband to read it!
An important book August 21, 2008
Unlike Steven Stosny's other book, Love Without Hurt: Turn Your Resentful, Angry, or Emotionally Abusive Relationship into a Compassionate, Loving One, which seemed to encourage victim mentality thinking, How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It is very positive, and contains genuinely new insights that make you think. This book helps both man and woman understand the other better, and makes it possible for ordinary couples to find their way through difficult issues in their marriage in clever, pain-free ways. It explains why talking is such torture for so many husbands, and it also explains how many husbands inadvertently make their wife feel scared, etc. A really fascinating, very human book with a lot of good ideas and information that can help in the real world. See also Michele Weiner-Davis's Getting Through to the Man You Love: The No-Nonsense, No-Nagging Guide for Women.
Simplistic and negative July 31, 2008
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
There may be a few kernels of truth to be had, but the overall effect this book has is negative, in my opinion. The vast majority of the book focuses on what is going wrong with the relationship and little attention is given to what can be done to improve the relationship, despite the title's promise. I found the idea that the shame/fear dynamic is driving all that is negative in male/female relationships to be very simplistic. While there are legitimate differences between men and women, I felt a great deal of negativity toward women in this book. I am a big believer in gender equality. Our society already handicaps men by training them to turn off their emotions. This book just gives men more permission to be out of touch. Then it stereotypes women negatively and makes several comments that imply that it would be an unfortunate thing to be a woman. There are much more worthwhile books available that will genuinely help to improve marriages by consistently reinforcing positive behaviors and thought patterns versus the negative aspects of many relationships. For example, saying that trips and dates can be detrimental to a relationship when the book is touting connection is hypocritical. Instead this could be reframed it in a positive light showing couples how to make the most of trips and dates, while making sure that it is understood that special outings are not necessary for a couple to feel connected. The day to day connections matter far more! I think this was their point, but again, it was framed in the negative. To anyone considering buying this book to improve their marriage, I would recommend that they keep shopping.
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