This book was recommended by my wife's therapist... from time to time each of our therapists mentions something that they read in a book and, being the nerd that I am, I'm always like, "Well I'll just pick up a copy of that book and see what it's all about!" Sadly, the author found out a way to make even this subject matter boring and tedious. It was quite amusing for a couple of reasons though...

First, this book is only available in hardcover and paperback. There's no Kindle or other ebook format to be found. I discovered that the reason for that is because the author "doesn't believe in digital copies of books" or some crap like that. It sounded like a very curmudgeonly position to take on the sale and availability of one's own book, so I was wondering if that attitude was going to translate into the way he wrote his book. Let me tell you, I was not disappointed in that department.

Second, the author spends most of the book bragging about how right he was in his earlier textbook. Back in 1991 he wrote a psychology textbook called Constructing the Sexual Crucible: An Integration of Sexual and Marriage Therapy which - to be fair - is considered one of the authoritative textbooks in the area of sex/intimacy therapy. But in this book, written six years later as a more accessible (i.e., less academic) book, he basically sums up every major point he makes in each chapter by basically saying, "So, really, I was correct when I wrote my other book and in the past six years I've just validated my theories even more."

Third, I do have to give this guy credit for some of the best chapter titles I've ever read:

          Intimacy Is Not For The Faint Of Heart
          Love & Foreplay Aren't Blind, Unless You Insist On It
          Fucking, Doing, And Being Done
          Normal Marital Sadism

I mean, come on... as tempted as I was to DNF this thing for not really communicating anything new on the topic, I couldn't not read a chapter called "Fucking, Doing, And Being Done."

Overall, I can't say this was a terribly useful book in the sense that I had some great revelation of something I didn't know before reading... and yes, the author is pretentious AF (all of his clinical examples were also stories of how he expertly diagnosed his patients and told them just the thing they needed to hear and how they profusely thanked him for changing their lives)... but if you do happen to be someone who is struggling to regain the sexual spark in their relationship (a position many of us find ourselves in at one time or another), and you simply have no idea where to begin, this is a book that offers some practical ideas about how to regain interpersonal intimacy that will, ideally, lead back to sexual intimacy.

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Created Mar 06, 2024 at 5:39pm • Submit your own review...