Why do you recommend the book 'How to be an Adult in Relationships'?

November 10, 2009 5:34 AM

What did you get out of reading How to Be An Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving? It's recommended here all the time and I just can't slog through it.

I've tried starting this book at least 3 times and I can never get into it. AskMe is usually great with consistent recommendations, so I'm assuming that there is something valuable in there that I'm missing.

When does it get to the good stuff? What did it teach you about relationships? About yourself? What do you hope people will learn when you recommend it to them?

posted by heatherann to human relations (25 comments total)

I completely agree as well. I've read a bunch of Gottman's books as recommended by MeFi, and also Hold Me Tight by Sue Johnson, all which were great books. But I was never able to get into How to Be An Adult because it didn't seem as scientific as the others.
posted by ajackson at 7:09 AM on November 10

Could not get into it either. Way too "ethereal"
posted by teg4rvn at 7:11 AM on November 10

I got it on recommendation here and I'll say this: I think it needs to be taken in chunks. It's A LOT of info and it's hard to process it all in one go. I read a bit at a time - whatever I turn to that resonates with me, and then let it integrate some.

The info is, IMO, very, very worthwhile but it needs to be integrated as you go. It's not a "Hmm, that's logical and now I will do everything it says" kind of book. More along the lines of "Hmm. How does that play out in my life? Are there parts I can take in and make things better? Are there parts that don't resonate?" I suspect it generates a lot of questions for those that want to go down that path.

Teg4rvn: what do you mean "ethereal"? (Caveat: I'm a woo-woo chick so what I term as ethereal (meaning, not grounded in the physical and/or floaty) might mean something else entirely to you and I'm curious.
posted by Mysticalchick at 7:23 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

"Mindful" is a keyword for buddhism / San Francisco (not that there's anything wrong with that); there is a strong contingency of this on askMe, and it only takes one person recommending it in every relationship thread to make it a hot topic. Just throwing that out there as an explanation.
posted by gensubuser at 7:30 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

mysticalchick: It has been a couple of months since I tried to read this book. While I cannot quote specific passages, I got the overall feeling that the author was trying to ask the reader to contemplate the meaning of life and our role in the universe as a pretext for understanding why my wife and I have difficulties in our marriage. So, yes, too floaty and not grounded in the physical....ethereal.
posted by teg4rvn at 7:40 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

Relationships are hardly ever "scientific". YMMV.

I found it to be kind of cut-throat about stuff. It doesn't pull punches in it's search for truth, and personal honesty. It can be gut-wrenching to read if you are in a relationship that is failing.

I found that while it did have slight Buddhist leanings, the central concepts were not dependant on that.

I too read it in chunks, not all at once. It's a great book and it is recommended because it speaks to many people. If it doesn't speak to you, then maybe it isn't for you. Find what speaks to you and helps you. HTBAAIR spoke to me.

Cheers, and good luck.
posted by Espoo2 at 7:59 AM on November 10 [2 favorites]

I've read and recommended it. It has generated, for me, an interest in mindfulness and Buddhism that I didn't have before.

When does it get to the good stuff?

I found it chock full of good stuff from the beginning. My copy is bristling with bookmarks tagging significant passages. Obviously, YMMV. But I did read it over the course of a couple of weeks -- not days.

What did it teach you about relationships?

To begin with, it gave me a framework for understanding what I (and other people) tend to seek in intimate relationships, i.e. attention, acceptance, affection, appreciation, and the somewhat strained allowing, by which I think he means freedom or permission, except that neither of those begins with A. Such a framework for understanding basic needs is very helpful when I think about dynamics of others' or my own relationships, and makes it easier to recognize and describe problems. It helped me understand the limited degrees to which other people can realistically be expected to satisfy such needs, and shed a great deal of light on the differences between relationships that are fundamentally healthy (even if challenging) and those that are fundamentally hopeless or destructive (even if comfortable).

About yourself?

Without getting too specific and personal, certain sections resonated very strongly for me. It helped me see where I'd gone wrong, made unreasonable demands, and accepted and even created destructive patterns, in current and past relationships. A relevant aspect of my personal situation is that my first marriage was terribly unhealthy and abusive, with aftereffects I still hadn't shaken off more than a decade after the divorce. The book helped me redraw some personal boundaries around what I could and couldn't do for, and what I would and wouldn't accept from, someone else.

What do you hope people will learn when you recommend it to them?

The one time I've recommended it here, I hoped it might help the OP to overcome some destructive habits and rebuild a sense of personal integrity.
posted by jon1270 at 8:53 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

I remember finding it to have some annoying gender stereotypes and then throwing it away in a fit of pique. Thereby demonstrating my childishness in relationships.
posted by yarly at 9:02 AM on November 10 [7 favorites]

So, yes, too floaty and not grounded in the physical....ethereal.

I agree. I was glad I read it just to see what it was like, but I can't say I would recommend it.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 9:02 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

Huh. I would never have described this book as 'floaty' or 'ethereal.' Relationships not being objects, the notion of a relationship book 'grounded in the physical' is a bit counterintuitive to me.

Anyhow, it's Scody's attention you want to get on this question. I think she's the most frequent, enthusiastic promoter.
posted by jon1270 at 9:51 AM on November 10

Huh. I would never have described this book as 'floaty' or 'ethereal.' Relationships not being objects, the notion of a relationship book 'grounded in the physical' is a bit counterintuitive to me.

Yes, me too.

If you want somethng more "sciencey", I recommend John Gottman and Pepper Schwartz.

I thought that How to Be an Adult in Relationships talked very effectively about the ways people feel in relationships, and the ways they express their feelings productively and unproductively.

But, yeah, it's about feelings. And his prose style is a little hippy-dippy. Still, it has some advice that really helped me.

I remember finding it to have some annoying gender stereotypes

Huh. Well, there you go. There are as many different readings of any book as there are people who have read it. I did not find that.
posted by Sidhedevil at 10:04 AM on November 10

Sorry, John Gottman and Pepper Schwartz are separate researchers in intimacy and relationship, not a writing or research team. They've each published buttloads of books.
posted by Sidhedevil at 10:04 AM on November 10

Well, I'm one of the ones always recommending it, so I'll chime in. (Sorry that this gets long.)

First off, the title of the book is ALL WRONG, and I genuinely think the publisher ought to reissue it with a different title. It is not a "how-to" book. This seems like a general problem because I think this sets up a series of expectations for many readers that the book does not actually fulfill. Simply put, there are no lists of quick, practical, immediate suggestions for "improving communication" or "rediscovering intimacy"; there aren't really any relationship "hacks" as found in this recent (and awesome) thread.

But here's the thing: I almost certainly would have never developed my own hacks in that thread if I had not read (and re-read) Richo's book. That's because the book helped me rewire what I expect of relationships in a pretty fundamental sense; indeed, I'd say that it's a sort of literary, buddhist-y meditation on the very purpose of relationships. Most radically, it helped me get -- in a deep, intrinsic, intuitive way -- that the purpose of a romantic relationship is not to make up for the things I may have felt I didn't get the way I wanted or needed it from my family or from previous relationships.

More simply: the purpose of a relationship is not to fill you up in the ways you feel empty. A new relationship is not there to redeem any of your old relationships.

Now, this might seem fairly obvious when stated so directly. But in practice, I see evidence all around me that this is not a common realization. The assumption that a relationship will fill you up in the ways you are empty is practically built in to every RelationshipFilter queston on the green; indeed, I had spent virtually my entire adult life building that assumption into my own relationships. This meant I kept repeating the same patterns over and over again -- even in relationships with partners who appeared to be wildly different from each other -- because my most fundamental assumption about relationships was flawed.

Let me be even more personal about it. I grew up in a family where negative feelings were actively suppressed. We were actively discouraged from feeling or expressing sadness, anger, frustration, or fear. These are, obviously, part of the full range of human normal emotion -- but in my family, they were pathologized; we were praised and lavished with affection only as long as we were sunny, happy, upbeat, successful, cheerful, and "stiff upper lipped" our way through trouble; anger, sadness, and confusion were met with dismissal or outright coldness. This is a pretty hard charade to pull off under the best of circumstances, but when you start showing signs of clinical depression -- like I did, in my teens -- it's lethal to the development of mental health.

So as an adult, one of the key things I wanted (but couldn't even articulate!) in a relationship was a safe harbor to express sadness or anger. And yet... I found myself over and over and over again in relationships with men who -- wait for it -- tended to withdraw coldly the very moment I started to show sadness or anger. I would then spend all my energies trying to figure out how to "fix" myself so that either I wouldn't be sad or angry anymore, or to "fix" the relationship so that my partner would one day realize he loved me enough to finally allow me to feel sad and finally comfort me in return. One example: in my early 30s, my then-boyfriend locked me out of a hotel room to go "cry it out in the lobby" after I got upset because he and I had had a fight plus I had just gotten word that my dad was back in the hospital and was seriously ill.

But the real kicker to that anecdote is that this kind of extreme emotional withholding did not strike me as particularly unusual. It was painful, to be sure -- but, then, I had been experiencing that sort of pain repeatedly throughout my entire life; being locked out (whether literally or figuratively) for feeling sad was normal, right? In fact, it almost became perverse incentive to stay in the relationship -- I believed that I would finally redeem the failure of all my old relationships by finally succeeding in this new relationship. Needless to say, this was a fool's errand.

Unpacking literally decades of this sort of baggage took years -- years of therapy, years of yoga, and, yes, years of reading and rereading this book. It is the only relationship book I've ever read (and I'm embarrassed to admit I've read quite a few) that speaks with such insight and compassion to the deeper complexities of how the dynamics our families of origin wind up forging the dynamics of what we expect from ourselves and from our partners long after we think we've separated from our families. The first time I read it, I found myself underlining passages on nearly every page or scribbling OMG YES!!!!! all over the margins.

It also encourages mindfulness -- a buddhist principle, which I think is where some of people's sense of the book being "ethereal" may be coming from? -- in our daily lives to learn how to attend to our own needs and to the needs of others. It encourages not just lovingkindness but also the development of real clarity and responsibility in our personal relationships. These are not easy skills to develop. The book requires a kind of mental and emotional work, even beyond working with the writing exercises at the end of some of the chapters. Because, the fact is, there aren't a lot of shortcuts for facing up to the ways in which you bring your own bad habits into relationships, breaking them down to their very roots, and using buddhist principles to rewrite your expectations and behavior so that you don’t create the same old shit, just with a brand-new person.

(I, for example, lettered in pouting and sulking in high school the way others might letter in track and field, and kept at it into my 30s the way others might go for their morning jog. Early in my relationship with my current boyfriend, though, I realized that my pouty/sulky habits were alienating him very badly, very quickly. Either I could knock that shit out once and for all, or I could fuck things up yet again. The stuff I learned from Richo’s book made the first choice not only obvious, but it made it possible in a way it wouldn’t have been otherwise for me.)

I remember finding it to have some annoying gender stereotypes

I found just the opposite -- in fact, it kind of explicitly rejects the whole "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" mindset that's built into the vast majority of relationship books. What I actually found fascinating about it is that Richo sees the extrovert/introvert dynamic to be a far more important binary than male/female, which was really eye-opening for me. He also suggests that two major unspoken fears in relationships -- the fear of abandonment vs. the fear of engulfment -- drive a whole host of seemingly paradoxical behaviors. Again, for me... it was stunning, because it was like 20 years of various relationship questions/conflicts/anecdotes that had previously seemed random or inexplicable were suddenly brought into very clear, stark focus.

Ultimately, the book took the blinders off for me, and pointed the way to a much more content, loving, serene way of relating to others. In a nutshell, it did help me to finally become an adult. And my own relationships -- with myself, my family, my friends, and my partner -- have all changed forever for the better.
posted by scody at 12:14 PM on November 10 [27 favorites]

You win, scody, I'll dust my copy off and try to read it again :)
posted by teg4rvn at 12:26 PM on November 10

One example: in my early 30s, my then-boyfriend locked me out of a hotel room to go "cry it out in the lobby" after I got upset because he and I had had a fight plus I had just gotten word that my dad was back in the hospital and was seriously ill.

But the real kicker to that anecdote is that this kind of extreme emotional withholding did not strike me as particularly unusual.

This story (and I am so sorry it happened to you) is particularly resonant in the light of this post from yesterday.
posted by Sidhedevil at 12:31 PM on November 10

You win, scody

Woot! :)

Oh, and I do have a few other minor caveats: the language does indeed wander dangerously into hippy-dippy territory at times (one of my margin scribbles is something like "dude, NO ONE REALLY TALKS LIKE THIS")... I just let them kind of roll off my back (an easy skill to learn in SoCal, where you can be surrounded by hippy-dippy talk a lot of the time), but I do get that other people's mileage may vary on that score. Also the writing exercises can sometimes feel a little tedious. (Confession: I didn't do them all.) I think they're definitely useful if writing's your thing, but I also get that lots of people don't necessarily process thoughts and feelings that way.
posted by scody at 12:34 PM on November 10

Sidhedevil: yep, exactly!
posted by scody at 12:35 PM on November 10

OP i am really glad you asked this question if only for scody's answer.

i am checking my library now to see if they have this or can get it.

i thought i was the only who's family thought happy/neutral was the only way to go and sad/hurt/confused was bad.

wow.
posted by sio42 at 1:07 PM on November 10 [1 favorite]

I've recommended this book in the past, after reading it as a result of one of scody's numerous endorsements of it. I'd already been doing a great deal of work on myself and relationship issues such as letting go of baggage and improving communication, so it was more evolutionary than revolutionary for me, but I found it very valuable, especially in regard to three specific aspects: 1) recognizing what needs I have and what it's reasonable to ask of myself and others in filling them, 2) recognizing patterns of need stemming from childhood in ways that other resources didn't help me see, 3) talking about and negotiating boundaries and need fulfillment. Lights started going on from the first chapter.

I came to this from a somewhat similar upbringing to scody's, except instead of the praise and affection for good cheer and dismissal or outright coldness for confusion, fear, anger, in my family it was generally numbness or dismissal for good cheer, and corporal punishment, timeouts, loss of priveleges, or rejection/abandonment for anger, sadness, or other less pleasant expressions of emotion. If your upbringing taught you healthy attitudes toward the full range of emotion and healthy boundaries, this book may not have as much to teach you.

All that said, the language is woo to the two and very heterocentric. I found some bothersome gender stereotyping. I also found that a lot of the exercises simply could not be completed by someone working on improvements solo. On the other hand, the book is also a decent introduction to mindfulness, which is a generally useful practice no matter how woo the framing might be.
posted by notashroom at 1:53 PM on November 10 [1 favorite]

I've gotten this book (mainly because of Scody's recommendation - she's someone whose answers I always love in relationship threads, and I've met her in real life and consider her a friend), and I too have had trouble getting into it because of my low tolerance for hippy-dippy language (although generally I am in favor of Buddhism and mindfulness). After reading her answer above, I'm inclined to give it another try.

I do also highly recommend John Gottman, though.
posted by matildaben at 4:21 PM on November 10

OP i am really glad you asked this question if only for scody's answer.

Me too! :)
posted by heatherann at 11:22 AM on November 11

I have this book and I've now read it cover to cover. Though I do admit that I was unable to get past the first 20% on my first attempt at reading it.

So I agree that it can be a hard read, especially if you aren't in the right frame of mind. For me, a recent break-up was what allowed me to stick with it, and I'm glad I did. But when life was grand and love was new... it wasn't so gripping a read.

He has an interesting take on what a relationship can be, in the vein of psychological and spiritual growth. He does point out, in the book, buried somewhere in the middle, that not everyone wants a relationship of this style. Some relationships are nothing more than a lighter associations between two folks; nothing wrong with that.

However, if you do want to go deeper into your psyche, your emotional history and relationship dynamics, in the context of an intimate relationship, this book is phenomenal IMO.

I think Scody summarizes it best when she said:

Because, the fact is, there aren't a lot of shortcuts for facing up to the ways in which you bring your own bad habits into relationships, breaking them down to their very roots, and using buddhist principles to rewrite your expectations and behavior so that you don’t create the same old shit, just with a brand-new person.

And really, that's a big part of what the book did for me; it helped me re-examine my expectations, my behaviours and my needs in relationships past.

John Riccho does have an earlier, smaller book "How to be an Adult". It focuses more on people as individuals, though it does discuss some relationship stuff... and fair warning: It can be even more woo-woo than HTBAAIR.
posted by Sustainable Chiles at 1:15 PM on November 11

Ok... so the author's name is David Richo and my brain is infested with alien termites.... I stand be everything else I said...

Going to reboot my brain now...
posted by Sustainable Chiles at 3:45 PM on November 11

Oh, hey, chiming back in one more time, because I found myself quoting this line from the book (buried somewhere about a third of the way through) to a friend today:

"Once we love ourselves, people no longer look good to us unless they are good for us."

I have been amazed over the past 5 years or so to find how much it applies to non-romantic relationships as well. Once I got my shit (reasonably) together, once I started cultivating compassion for myself as much as for others... well, I found that not only did my patterns change in terms of who I dated and what dating was like, I was no longer willing to put up with bad/toxic/overwrought friendships, either, and I stopped trying to fix/barter/wish away the toxic dynamics that exist with certain family dynamics, as well.

It's a pretty neat trick: the more you take care of yourself in a healthy, loving way, the more you will cultivate positive relationships with others who are equally capable of being healthy and loving to themselves and others, and the less energy and time you will spend on people who aren't. Quality of life increases, drama and stress decreases. Win!
posted by scody at 11:59 PM on November 14 [2 favorites]

I had just come out of this awful friends-with-benefits falling-in-love rejection boondoggle in 2007, and I was ready to examine why I had let myself get into that in the first place. So, with a very receptive mindset, I read it and slowly digested it over about two months. That was a period of solid grieving and personal restructuring that allowed me to be in the amazing relationship that I'm in now. The language is a little hippy-dippy at times but if you can get through that, I think it's pretty specific about feelings and behaviors that are healthy. Even though I grew up in a loving family and had a great relationship model from my parents, I never felt like I had concrete words and ideas of what I should be looking for in a romantic relationship. Richo's book helped me with that.
posted by emkelley at 10:16 AM on November 15