By Freelance Writer and Books Author Denise Turney
Reading good books is a great way to escape the world’s rigors. You learn, grow, exercise your brain, enjoy virtual travel, are introduced to favorite characters and much more. If you read a lot of books, you can shortcut the time it takes to understand new material at work and school. One of the greatest rewards gained from reading books may have escaped you. When you read good relationship books, you can open to love more.
How so?
As you read fiction or nonfiction relationship books, your guard drops. It’s not like you’re reading a draft of your biography or autobiography. Fear of being criticized or judged is reduced, perhaps isn’t present at all while you read, allowing you to gain what is being shared more fully.
That’s a huge benefit.
Good Relationship Books Drop Your Guard to Love
After all, if you don’t retain what you read, it’s akin to looking at computer code you don’t understand. More ways that reading good relationship books opens you to love follow:
- Novels not only help you drop or remove an internal mental guard, they show couples interacting and communicating with each other up close. Witnessing these couples engage can offer tips on what you could do to strengthen your relationships.
- Of course, communication is key to healthy relationships. This is an area where nonfiction relationship books can yield a wealth of positive results. While reading nonfiction, you can learn communication techniques such as how to be an active listener and the importance of thinking before you speak. PsychAlive also shares that additional solid communication techniques include sticking to the facts when communicating with your partner, being honest and being sincere.1
- Books make it easy to take in information together, keeping couples free of feeling as if one person in the relationship is offering most of the information or “telling the other person what to think, feel or do”.
- You can learn about you and your partner’s attachment styles while reading good relationship books.
- Even more, you can discover you and your partner’s communication style.
- Opportunities to identify how couples express and receive appreciation is also unearthed through reading.
Relationship Books with Quality Research on Love
Fortunately, in today’s book market there are many relationship books that are built upon years of quality research. This is how you get access to volumes of survey responses and empirical science. In other words, you can quickly learn what works in healthy relationships.
To be healthy, relationships also require that each person in the bond love themselves and continue to evolve and awaken to love. Both fiction and nonfiction books dig into the importance of loving yourself. Should you be tempted to focus on your partner more than yourself, reading good relationship books could be a relationship saver, not only as a couple but for you, as an individual.
After all, you’re not just in a relationship with your partner. You’re forever in a relationship with yourself. Hopefully, the communion you have with yourself is loving, healthy and not dysfunctional. If that incredibly important union is dysfunctional, here’s to hoping that you are working to heal gaps or injuries in the union that you have with yourself.
Spotlight Relationship Love and Goodness
Today’s book market also has lots of titles, particularly fiction, that spotlight dysfunctional relationships. Bookstores and libraries, online and offline, shelve novels that focus on physically, psychologically and emotionally abusive relationships.
Gain from reading these books by focusing on what “not to do” in your relationships. Steer clear of believing that dysfunctional relationships are “normal”. Instead of reading books to convince yourself that every couple hits each other, curses one another or belittles each other, focus on what you want from a coupling.
Get clear about how you want to be treated. Then, read books that share effective techniques and strategies you can use to start treating yourself that way and how you can encourage your partner to treat you this way.
Reading to Gain Loving Interactions
Because experiences, including loving interactions, aren’t linear in this world it’s helpful to get introduced to couples who have overcome great odds. Nonfiction and fiction books have facts, stories and background information to help you pull this off.
You’ll probably spot the win early into the book. For instance, a character may have had a troubling childhood or a character might have gone through a challenging intimate relationship earlier in her life. In addition to giving you hope that you too can overcome childhood or past relationship challenges, reading these books could strengthen your belief that you can go on to enjoy being in a healthy, rewarding love connection.
Books Helping Readers Open to Love
Whether you’re reading fiction or nonfiction, a key is to commit to open up to love. In other words, make opening up to love more a primary goal. You could do this by:
- Pick books that deal with forgiveness if you know you need to forgive to remove an internal block and open up to love
- Join a book club to get diverse insights and perceptions
- Complete worksheets in nonfiction relationship books. Talk about a way to learn, grow and awaken. Effective worksheets can help surface parts of yourself that greatly impact your relationship, parts of yourself that you had repressed or kept hidden out of your conscious awareness for years.
Celebrate successes that you have in your relationship with yourself and with others. Recognize that good relationships extend beyond marriage and dating. If you live alone, you’re in communication with neighbors, family, colleagues and friends.
Celebrate Relationships and Greater Love
Reading good relationship books that showcase personal and interpersonal connections can help you grow as an individual and as a relationship partner. At the end of each year, consider how much you have gained from the relationship books you read.
Continue the process of reading books that help you deepen your understanding, awareness and growth. This single decision saves you years of research and trial and error. Additionally, as you complete activities in nonfiction books that aim to remove internal blocks, you can open to love more each day.
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