Making Love Last Forever »

For years Gary Smalley has helped millions of couples throughout North America enrich their relationships and deepen their bonds of love and companionship. In this extraordinary book, he shows you how to stay in love through all the stages of life. From first attraction to lifelong commitment, Gary's proven techniques and practical advice show you how to pursue and keep the love you want, and how to energize your relationship with enduring, passion-filled love.

In this book you'll learn how to:

• Understand and use love's best-kept secret
• Deal with the number one enemy of love
• Turn headaches into more love
• Increase your energy to keep loving
• Find the power to keep on loving your spouse
• Use normal conflicts as doorways to intimacy
• Read a woman's built-in marriage manual twelve ways
• Divorce-proof your marriage
• Develop the five vital signs of a healthy marriage
• Respond to your partner's number one request
• Find the powerful secret to great love
• Bring out the best in your maddening mate

With humor, empathy, and insight, Gary Smalley inspires you to fall in love with life and enjoy the deep satisfaction of a lifelong love. Down-to-earth examples, touching personal experiences, and inspiring spiritual principles will motivate you to bring about positive changes in your marriage-whether or not your mate is a willing participant. You'll learn how to tap resources at hand to help you follow through with your journey-and make your love last forever.

Publishers Weekly

In an age when the idyllic notion of everlasting love has been battered against the rocks of infidelity and divorce, ever-popular Christian counselor and writer Smalley (The Language of Love) offers his own tried and true methods for making love last forever. According to Smalley, the foundation of lasting love is falling in love with life itself. In the first section of the book, he explores principles for resolving anger, balancing expectations and reality and avoiding hurt. Using anecdotes from his counseling sessions and stories from his own marriage, Smalley fashions, in the second section of the book, a set of "forever-love" principles designed to help married couples improve their relationships. Some of the principles Smalley includes as essential ingredients for lasting love are better communication, understanding a spouse's personality type and using conflict to foster intimacy. Each chapter closes with a set of "forever-love" principles drawn from the topic of the chapter. In the end, however, Smalley's principles are not helpful because they are founded upon, and promote, conventional stereotypes of men as rational and aggressive and women as intuitive and passive. Unfortunately, only couples who accept these stereotypical gender roles are likely to benefit from his principles. (Aug.)