The Couple's Workbook: Homework to Help Love Last - Hardcover

The School Of Life

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1912891263 ISBN 13: 9781912891269

Publisher: The School of Life Press, 2020

Synopsis

Therapeutic exercises to help couples nurture patience, forgiveness and humour.

Love is a skill, not just an emotion and in order for us to get good at it, we have to practice, as we would in any other area we want to shine in.

Our research has discovered that almost a third of the British population (32%) expect their romantic relationships to be like fairy tale romances; but realistically, after a heady and passion-filled start, many of us end up in unions that are a confusing tangle of hope, distance, boredom, loyalty and betrayal. Here is a workbook containing the very best exercises that any couple can undertake to help their relationship function optimally, exercises to foster understanding, patience, forgiveness, humour and resilience in the face of the many hurdles that invariably arise when you try to live with someone else for the long term.

Couples are guided to have particular conversations, analyse their feelings, explain parts of themselves to one another and undertake rituals that clear the air and help recover hope and passion. The goal is always to unblock channels of feeling and improve communication. Not least, doing exercises together is at points simply a lot of fun.

The notion of exercising is well understood in many areas; we should grant that it applies equally to love. No one can be intuitively good at relationships. We all need to do some homework to become the best partners and couples we can be.

About this title

About the Author

The School of Life is a global organisation helping people lead more fulfilled lives. Through our range of books, gifts and stationery we aim to prompt more thoughtful natures and help everyone to find fulfilment. The School of Life is a resource for exploring self-knowledge, relationships, work, socialising, finding calm and enjoying culture through content, community and conversation. You can find us online, in stores and in welcoming spaces around the world offering classes, events and one-to-one therapy sessions. The School of Life is a rapidly growing global brand, with over 7 million YouTube subscribers, 389,000 Facebook followers, 239,000 Instagram followers and 163,000 Twitter followers. The School of Life Press brings together the thinking and ideas of the School of Life creative team under the direction of series editor, Alain de Botton. Their books share a coherent, curated message that speaks with one voice: calm, reassuring, and sane.

From the Back Cover

Love is a skill, not just an emotion--and in order for us to get good at it, we have to practice, as we would in any other area we want to shine in. Here is a workbook containing the very best exercises that any couple can undertake to help their relationship function optimally, exercises to foster understanding, patience, forgiveness, humor, and resilience in the face of the many hurdles that invariably arise when you try to live with someone else for the long term.

Couples are guided to have particular conversations, analyze their feelings, explain parts of themselves to one another, and undertake rituals that clear the air and help recover hope and passion. The goal is always to unblock channels of feeling and improve communication. Not least, doing exercises together is--at points--simply a lot of fun.

The notion of exercising is well understood in many areas; we should grant that it applies equally to love. No one can be intuitively good at relationships. We all need to do some homework to become the best partners and couples we can be.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

6. The Secret Lives of Other Couples

A question that rarely leaves us alone in love is: What exactly are other people’s relationships like? This is far from a piece of disinterested sociological curiosity. What we urgently seek to know is: Are other people in as much trouble as we are? After a furious row over nothing very much at eleven at night or after yet another month that has unfolded with almost no sex, we wonder how statistically normal our case might be – precisely because it threatens to feel like a unique curse.

Most of us have a handful, maybe four or five, relationships that we know and keep in mind as standards of what we understand by normality. Perhaps we met these couples at university, or they live on our street and are at a comparable stage of life. Without knowing they are playing this role, these sample couples’ function for us as our secret spirit level of love. At tennis, we notice how kind they are to one another, as well as how energetic and lithe they remain. Over dinner, we note how much respect they show to one another’s opinions. In the taxi on the way home, we spot the tender way they hold each other’s hands. And, naturally, we feel both highly abnormal and very wretched as a result.

But our assessment of our love stories suffers from a basic and unfair asymmetry: We know our own relationships from the inside but generally only encounter the relationships of others in heavily edited and sanitised form from the outside. We see other couples chiefly in social situations where politeness and cheeriness are the rule. We trust their blithe summaries of their lives. But we don’t have access to footage from the bedroom, the uncut transcriptions of their rows or their raw night time streams of consciousness.

However, we have all this and more about ourselves. We can’t help but be intently aware of our own relationship’s sorrows and absurdities: the cold silences, harsh criticisms, furious outbursts, episodes of door slamming, bitter late-night denunciations, simmering sexual disappointments and times of aching loneliness in the bedroom.

Because of this asymmetry, quite understandably, we come to the conclusion that our own relationships are a great deal darker and far more painful than is common. In times of distress, we fling a definitive accusation at our partner: ‘No-one else has to put up with this.’

We need, to be fairer on ourselves and our beloveds, to create space in our minds for the scale of our ignorance. We simply don’t know. We are lacking data. We owe ourselves a richer picture of love than we have yet secured. This isn’t prying or cruel, we just need to better understand the true nature of the task we’re undertaking.

The truth is that misery – or at least some kinds of very serious longing and scratchiness – is the rule, far more than public sources will ever admit. It’s not that we as a couple are strangely awful or damned, it’s that relationships themselves are an essentially and inescapably difficult project.

Part of the reason we get it so wrong is that we have the wrong kind of art: the movies we watch are oddly coy, the novels don’t tell it how it is. It’s a mark of the problem that we almost never leave a cinema or close a novel thinking: that’s just like my life.

The dominant emotion in most relationships is ambivalence; that is, a complex mixture of love and hatred, contentment and confinement, loyalty and betrayal. Most loves are too good to leave, yet too compromised to generate profound contentment. They subsist in a grey zone, where moments of joy bleed into stretches of melancholy, where at points we sob and are certain our partner has ruined our lives and then, the following morning, assisted by sunshine and a brisk coffee, we recover a feeling that things are basically fine.

If we could properly see – via tenderly accurate films and novels and chats in group therapy or with older honest couples – the reality of pretty much any relationship, we might arrive at a surprising and deeply heartening conclusion: that our own relationship is, in fact, two things above all – very normal and good enough.

To help us get a more accurate picture of what all couples go through, we’ve made a wide survey of the complaints that couples from around The School of Life community have made about one another…

Edition details

• Publisher: The School of Life Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1912891263
• ISBN 13: 9781912891269
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160