Conscious Loving

Conscious Loving — Summary

The moment you never even notice

Picture this scene. A woman, let's call her Barbara, is sitting on the first big date of her life with a man she adores. Everything is perfect. Then the man orders a third drink, and something shifts in his eyes. They go dark, suspicious, vengeful. Barbara's breath catches for a second, because she knows that look. It was exactly the look her father had, the father who died drunk behind the wheel of a car when Barbara was still in grade school.

And now comes the half second that decides her whole life. Barbara could say, "Your anger scares me. I don't want to see you again if you don't stop this." But she doesn't. She swallows it. She smiles. She thinks she'll save this man with her love, the way she wished she could have saved her father. Twenty years go by. The man loses his job, Barbara supports the family, the man has an affair with Barbara's best friend. Twenty years of suffering, all of it hinged on a single swallowed sentence.

Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks, a married pair of psychologists who spent more than twenty years working with couples by the thousand, put exactly this moment at the center of their book. *Conscious Loving* rests on one bold claim: relationship pain doesn't come from choosing the wrong person. It comes from a particular moment when closeness brings up your old wounds and you hide instead of saying what's really inside you. This book is about how to notice that moment and what to do differently.

You'll get answers to three big questions. Why do you fall for the same pain over and over, even though you swear every time that this one will be different? What is the single skill that makes most arguments unnecessary? And why is it that you tend to start a fight precisely when you feel your best? Let's set out on this road together.