Excerpted from No Less Than Greatness: The Seven Spiritual Principles That Make Real Love Possible By Mary Manin Morrissey
When Pat placed her mother in a nursing home, she confided to a sympathetic staff member, "This woman is not my favorite person."
The feeling seemed mutual. Whenever Pat visited her mother - about once a month, if that-Josephine would wheel herself over to the television and flip it on. When the two did sit face-to-face, Jos
Excerpted from Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts And You Don't Know Why By Susan Forward, Ph.D., Joan Torres
What Makes Families So Important
When we are children our families lake care of our basic survival needs; they are also our first and most important sources of information about the world. It is from them that we learn how to think and feel about ourselves and what to expect from others. Our emotional found
Excerpted from Life is Not a Stress Rehearsal: Bringing Yesterday's Sane Wisdom Into Today's Insane World By Loretta Laroche
Men Don't Ask for Directions
Of course not. If a man stops to ask for directions, the animal he's stalking will kill him. Not to mention that it is a clear indication that he is out of control and needs help. It literally forces him to make the admission, perhaps to another male, that "I'm lost." What could be farther from
Excerpted from How to Iron Your Own Damn Shirt: The Perfect Husband Handbook Featuring Over 50 Foolproof Ways to Win, Woo& Wow Your Wife By Craig Boreth
How to Appear Calm While She's Driving
Let's face it, digging your nails into the dashboard every time she takes the wheel is bad for your blood pressure and your car's resale value. You've got a few different options here: If you focus on the random stops, the distracted swerving, and ever}
Excerpted from Cinematherapy for Lovers: The Girl's Guide to Finding True Love One Movie at a Time By Nancy Peske, Beverly West
Since movies were invented they have been as much a part of our collective dating and mating game as candy, flowers, Frank Sinatra ballads, and big church weddings. In fact, movies may well be one of the most effective tools for achieving and maintaining romance ever created.
When love is new and we're feeling shy and a
Excerpted from If I'm Waiting on God, Then What Am I Doing in a Christian Chatroom? Confessions of a Do-It-Yourself Single By Kerri Pomarolli
Catholics were the coolest when I was growing up. My dad and his whole family are Irish and Italian Catholics. It didn't make me sound zealous or fanatical to say I was Catholic. It was cool and most of my friends went to (and slept through) Mass with their families just like I did. I couldn't stay awake. And when I was awake I sp
Excerpted from Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals By Stephen E. Ambrose, Ph.D.
Friendships stretch across the horizon-fathers, of course, and sons, as well as wives, career acquaintances of every type, many more. The serendipitous ones come from college, either classmates or students. With them you attend the same classes, read the same books, more or less learn the same things. If you are a male you rush and later join the same fraternity, date the same gi
Excerpted from How Can I Get Through to You? Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women By Terrence Real
The first phase of relational recovery, bringing the couple back into connection, requires the partners, as individuals, to move beyond gender roles that were imposed upon them, with or without their consent, as children. Relational recovery supports women in reclaiming their full authority and men in reclaiming connectedness. Once the partners can speak and list
Excerpted from Getting Love Right: Learning the Choices of Healthy Intimacy By Terence T. Gorski, M.A., N.C.A.C.
If you are among the millions of Americans struggling to get love right, the odds are you came from a dysfunctional family. In fact, in the United States today, more people come from dysfunctional families than healthy families. It is estimated that approximately 70 to 80 percent come from dysfunctional families. Consequently, being normal in the United State
Excerpted from The Divorce Remedy: The Proven 7-Step Program for Saving Your Marriage By Michele Weiner Davis
It's been estimated that 20 percent of married women and 37 percent of married men have been unfaithful to their spouses. There is little that is more devastating than the discovery that your partner has strayed. Affairs corrode trust, the basic building block of marriage. If your spouse has been unfaithful, I'm sure you have difficulty imagining moving beyond y
Excerpted from Against Love: A Polemic By Laura Kipnis
So are you the type who hadn't realized how unhappy you'd been until you found yourself in the midst of a serious life-shattering affair, diving headlong into this new person's arms to escape the rising tide of emotional deadness at home and in some ridiculously short space of time risking things you never thought you'd risk, without a clue how you've gotten yourself into this whole thing or what disasters might be
Excerpted from Healing the Heart of Conflict: 8 Crucial Steps to Making Peace with Yourself and Others By Mark Gopin, Ph.D.
Step Two involves a deepening of the process of self-examination to help us identify the emotions that lead to the conflict or conflicts in our lives. Now if you're involved in a painful situation, the last thing you might be inclined to do is to further engage and explore your own emotional life. Your feelings may be so strong that you can't imagi
Excerpted from The Conscious Heart: Seven Soul-Choices That Create Your Relationship Destiny By Gay Hendricks, Ph.D., Kathlyn Hendricks, Ph.D.
Committing To Full Expression and Truth-Telling
In our families of origin, people did not tell the truth about their feelings. Instead of speaking about their fears, sadnesses, dreams, and desires, they often hid them inside. Like most people, they had had no education or modeling about telling the truth
Excerpted from Winning Points with the Women in your Life One Touchdown at a Time By Jaci Rae
As you probably already know, the defensive lineman's job is to sack the quarterback. As the quarterback, if you want to sidestep the defensive lineman and "scramble" in your relationship, you will need to learn the difference between actively hearing and passively listening to the woman, i.e., "the defensive lineman" in your life.
Just as the head coac
Excerpted from The Highly Sensitive Person in Love: Understanding and Managing Relationships When the World Overwhelms You By Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D.
"I fall in love so damn hard."
"I feel like an alien sometimes. Everyone else seems to be in a relationship. But what they call love just doesn't appeal to me."
"Investments, cars, sports, getting ahead at work-I don't say it, but I've zero interest in those things compared t
Excerpted from In Search of the Proverbs 31 Man: The One God Approves and a Woman Wants By Michelle McKinney Hammond
Several years ago I worked for my cousin, who was a bishop from Africa. He was a great man of prayer who spent hours in the presence of God daily. I knew he had Gods ear. When I had a need, I was quick to ask him to pray for me. When we traveled, sometimes upsetting circumstances would arise, but I always knew things would work out because I was with a ma
Excerpted from World Wide Search: The Savvy Christian's Guide to Online Dating By Cheryl Green
Look Inside Before You Log On Know Yourself before Making an Introduction
If you want to maximize your success in online dating, take time to prepare yourself before you log on. Be honest about what you're hoping to achieve, why you are drawn to meeting others online, and whether you have the emotional and spiritual foundations to be discerning and wi
Excerpted from Opening to Love 365 Days a Year By Judith Sherven, Ph.D., James Sniechowski, Ph. D.
Apologies
What's the big deal about apologizing? So many of us have such a hard time getting the words "I'm sorry" out of our mouths, much less with sincere, loving feeling. Is it that we'll lose pride, or tenderize some of the toughness around our heart? What do you lose? What makes it so hard to say "I'm sorry"?
If you ca
Excerpted from Let's Face It, Men Are $$#%$: What Women Can Do About It By Joseph Rock, Psy.D., Barry L. Duncan, Psy.D.
Men can't commit. Men hate women. Men can't communicate. Men "don't get it." Men want to be Peter Pan. Men are from Mars.
You see it on TV talk shows, you read about it in women's magazines and self-help books, you hear it from your friends. Men are doing lots of things that make it hard for women to relate to and understand t
Excerpted from It's A Guy Thing : An Owner's Manual for Women By David Deida
Why Do We Fight So Much?
Often, arguments arise because women want their partners to be more like them. Women typically want men to make more of a commitment to the relationship and to express their feelings about the intimacy. Women want men to pay more attention and spend more time with them in an intimate, romantic and loving way. That is, women want men to be more l
Excerpted from Compelled to Control; Recovering Intimacy in Broken Relationships By J. Keith Miller
At the very foundation of human experience there rages a silent hidden battle for self-esteem, for the unique identity and soul of each individual. We experience the combatants in this inner struggle as different parts of our selves, almost as two warring factions or personalities. One combatant is our private, inner person who wants to be authentic and develop into the b
Excerpted from Living in the Comfort Zone; The Gift of Boundaries in Relationships By Rokelle Lerner
Few of us in our western culture know where our comfort zone is. Indeed, what it is probably provokes some confusion. We are raised to live the American Way, the way of the warrior, the pioneer, the manifest entrepreneur. This has served us well for centuries! To go where no one has gone before, to paraphrase Star Trek, helped our foreparents to stretch beyond their limi
Excerpted from The Intimacy Struggle: Revised and Expanded for All Adults By Janet Woititz
You have been living with many myths generated and perpetuated by your family system. Because of this you put such enormous pressure on yourself that you wonder whether having a healthy, intimate relationship is worth paying the price.
You are torn apart by push-pull issues which may be illusionary to others, but are very real, and sometimes paralyzing, t
Excerpted from E-Mail Etiquette: Do's, Don'ts and Disaster Tales from People Magazine's Internet Manners Expert By Samantha Miller
Is it okay to ask for a first date via e-mail? To break up via e-mail? What 's the proper way to take an online relationship into real life? Is cybersex really cheating?
A few years ago, I wrote a story for People about married couples who had met on the Net. Some of the people we interviewed had gone online looking