Want to use your time by the pool to learn more about intimate relationships? We present five authors that have written about love, heartbreak and sex. Depending on what you are looking for or need, choose between books that help you deepen your connection with your partner or heal from a betrayal. We also suggest books that can add some extra spice to life.
1. Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love by Sue Johnson
Sue Johnson is an expert in adult attachment. She developed a couples therapy approach, Emotionally Focused Therapy. In this book Johnson explains how couples can maintain and repair their emotional connection. When the couple connects on an emotional level they crate safety and security for each other.
2. After the Honeymoon: How Conflict can Improve Your Relationship by Dan Wile
Conflict cannot and should not be avoided. Instead, we can use conflict to start a good conversation about what matters. A good conversation has to shift from conflict to collaboration. This happens when we stop seeing our partner as an enemy and treat them as an ally. This book is by Dan Wile, an eminent couples therapist, author and developer of Collaborative Couples Therapy.
3. She Comes First: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pleasuring a Woman and Passionista: The Empowered Woman’s Guide to Pleasuring a Man by Ian Kerner
In these two books Ian Kerner, a sex therapist and psychotherapist, guides the reader to understand their own and their partner’s sexuality. Read these books if you have questions about sex that you dare not ask. Hopefully, they will also allow you to start a conversation with your partner about your sex life.
4. NOT “Just Friends”: Rebuilding Trust and Recovering Your Sanity After Infidelity by Shirley Glass
Shirley Glass was a leading expert on infidelity. In this book she explains how and when friendships develop into emotional and/or sexual affairs. The book describes warning signs that boundaries are being crossed. It also offers a step-by-step guide into processing an affair. There is a helpful chapter about healing alone in case your partner’s affair has ended your relationship.
5. Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships by Tristan Taormino
Read this book if you are curious about polyamory, considering opening up your relationship, or struggling to make your open relationship work. Writer and sex educator Tristan Taormino interviewed men and women in non-monogamous relationships. The emphasis of the book is on the need to be able to communicate well and set healthy boundaries.
None of these books interest you? Check out our bibliotherapy reading suggestions.
Matleena Vanhanen is a licensed Counselling Psychologist with over 20 years of experience working in Europe and the Middle East. She has a practice of couples and individual therapy at the MapleTree Center in Dubai.
