Product Description

For years Gary Smalley has helped millions of couples throughout North America enrich their relationships and deepen their bonds of love and companionship. In this extraordinary book, he shows you how to stay in love through all the stages of life. From first attraction to lifelong commitment, Gary's proven techniques and practical advice show you how to pursue and keep the love you want, and how to energize your relationship with enduring, passion-filled love.

In this book you'll learn how to:

• Understand and use love's best-kept secret
• Deal with the number one enemy of love
• Turn headaches into more love
• Increase your energy to keep loving
• Find the power to keep on loving your spouse
• Use normal conflicts as doorways to intimacy
• Read a woman's built-in marriage manual twelve ways
• Divorce-proof your marriage
• Develop the five vital signs of a healthy marriage
• Respond to your partner's number one request
• Find the powerful secret to great love
• Bring out the best in your maddening mate

With humor, empathy, and insight, Gary Smalley inspires you to fall in love with life and enjoy the deep satisfaction of a lifelong love. Down-to-earth examples, touching personal experiences, and inspiring spiritual principles will motivate you to bring about positive changes in your marriage-whether or not your mate is a willing participant. You'll learn how to tap resources at hand to help you follow through with your journey-and make your love last forever.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #148973 in Books
• Published on: 1997-09-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780849940866
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
In an age when the idyllic notion of everlasting love has been battered against the rocks of infidelity and divorce, ever-popular Christian counselor and writer Smalley (The Language of Love) offers his own tried and true methods for making love last forever. According to Smalley, the foundation of lasting love is falling in love with life itself. In the first section of the book, he explores principles for resolving anger, balancing expectations and reality and avoiding hurt. Using anecdotes from his counseling sessions and stories from his own marriage, Smalley fashions, in the second section of the book, a set of "forever-love" principles designed to help married couples improve their relationships. Some of the principles Smalley includes as essential ingredients for lasting love are better communication, understanding a spouse's personality type and using conflict to foster intimacy. Each chapter closes with a set of "forever-love" principles drawn from the topic of the chapter. In the end, however, Smalley's principles are not helpful because they are founded upon, and promote, conventional stereotypes of men as rational and aggressive and women as intuitive and passive. Unfortunately, only couples who accept these stereotypical gender roles are likely to benefit from his principles.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
After only a few chapters, it is obvious why Christian marriage counselor Smalley has sold more than 12 million copies of his videos and previous books. His presentation is highly organized, so that he can summarize each chapter in so many numbered points. He speaks plainly and inculcates his lessons with anecdotes from his clinical practice and his own life that workaday Americans, especially if they are in business and the professions, find easy to identify with and which Smalley weaves cunningly together so that some stories are told all at once, while others are parceled out to create narrative suspense and make the book compelling. Details and metaphors are the stuff of the popular culture: country singers, TV shows, and computer and VCR analogies. The authorities Smalley cites come from the best-seller lists: M. Scott Peck, Stephen R. Covey, John Gray, and Deborah Tannen, among others; not until well into the book are the Bible and Evangelical Christian resources invoked. It helps that the bedrock advice here--to assume personal responsibility for one's life and to love life itself as prerequisites to realizing a happy, permanent marriage--is just that, bedrock, for the modern counseling establishment. Smalley does what he does awfully well, making this the book for staunch Christian couples and an approachable one for enough others to justify Word's confident quarter-million-copy first printing and a 30-city author tour. Ray Olson

Customer Reviews

Required reading
This was one of the best books I have ever read. Perioid. Mr. Smalley's book really helped my fiance and I open up to each other and become much closer in our relationship to each other. It should be required reading during pre-marital counciling.

Helping families work things out
My aunt gave me this book to read because my father and I are having a terrible time right now. I am engaged and he doesn't approve of my fiance. My aunt thought this book would help me get through the anger I am experiencing with my father. It is great for couples, but also great for parents and children! I highly recommend this book to anyone regardless if you are married or single!

Excellent insight for lasting romance and love in your life
I have read several Gary Smalley books as well as many other marriage books. This is one of my all time favorites because of the easy reading, interesting personal stories and chapter synopsis. Smalley's book should be a prerequisite for all couples. Get it and enjoy!