How To Make Love Simple Every Day
Living Your Love Every Day -
Reviewed By Steven Svoboda
Living Your Love Every Day: How to Keep Romance Alive from Beginning to End. By Judith Sherven, Ph.D. and James Sniechowski, Ph.D. 3-Volumes $24.97. www.judithandjim.com/livingyourlove.
Married psychotherapist/author couple Judith Sherven and James Sniechowski have produced another book to help men and women to survive and thrive in their relationships with each other. As far as I know, Living Your Love Every Day is only available through Judith and Jim’s website page given above.
As with all their books, now numbering a half-dozen by my count, Living Your Love Every Day provides much value. While they are both therapists with doctorates and are excellent writers, in the end, their most valuable skill is their ability to sift through their own experiences to find material that will translate to and even enlighten their audience. And their most critical qualification is not their degrees but their success at fostering happiness and renewal in their own marriage despite their own differences and challenges. Living Your Love Every Day parcels outs its wisdom and insights in bite-size pieces, usually two pages long.
The reader will get a flavor as early as the second chapter of the authors’ heartful, self-disclosing approach, as they tell the audience of their dramatic, somewhat impulsive relocation from urban Santa Monica, California to a 200-year-old farmhouse sitting on two acres with its own pond in rural New York. “Jim is learning how to put up wallpaper. Judith is learning to wear hiking boots and ‘farm’ clothes. We’re being changed in so many ways—and loving it!”
A bit later Judith and Jim remind us that growing up entails letting go of the habits of childhood. Easier said than done, and probably often said. But see how quickly they turn their advice in fresh directions: “To do this [to let go of the habits of childhood], you must at first be quiet. Not just silent, but still. The craving for outside stimulation needs to cease being dominant. Initially it will feel as if nothing’s happening, as if your life has just shut down. At this point many people panic and go looking for an energy fix. . . . When things shut down, it’s time to turn your attention inward and listen—with your imagination, your intuition, your sense perception.”
The authors contribute snippets of their real life experience with each other that can hearten and inspire all of us through their down-to-earth groundedness in daily reality. Judith’s computer mouse starts working, “touch[ing] an old nerve of feeling betrayed. So when Jim came in to ask a question, Judith was weeping in desperation, trying to make the mouse do her bidding.” Fortunately, Jim managed to avoid reacting and to react calmly and gently, accepting Judith’s reaction, disproportionate though it was. Later we learn of how Jim needlessly broke a lampshade and Judith was luckily able to recall her various moments of “stupidity” and react not with the anger that tempted her, but with love.
Judith and Jim have written an entire wonderful book about “the magic of differences” and here one chapter tells us how it played out with them: “When we met, Jim was super laid-back, read and wrote poetry, loved dogs, and hated his job as an investment banker. Judith was compulsive and controlled, loved to travel, and was a successful psychologist. . . [who] also felt cloistered, seldom getting out of her office into the larger world.” Today, Jim has greatly improved his organization and professional vision, while Judith is much more easygoing and helps teach people to rejoice in their differences. The couple has helped each other to fertilize their respective worlds.
So if life nothing but a series of blissful, perfect moments with the Doctors S? Hardly. Toward the end of their third date, Jim asked Judith if she would follow him to the car repair shop near his home so he could drop his car off. She considered the idea and said, “No. I have an early morning client and that won’t work for me.” Happily, Jim chose not to sulk but rather accepted her direct response.
We also learn of a “stupid misunderstanding” in a hotel lobby where they had their first fight. As they were just leaving a vacation spot they had both loved, Jim proposed returning a few months later for a jazz concert and was put off when Judith didn’t respond immediately. After some initial stumbling, however, the conflict opened doorways to “real romance, richer love, and a sweet sympathy for one another that guided the rest of our trip home and continues to inform our marriage all these years later.”
Holding your own space when your partner is out of sorts can be very healing. “When Jim is going through a rough time, for example, Judith gets to recognize that she doesn’t have to adopt his mood, nor does she have to fix Jim. That is self-respect. And respect for Jim.” The next time your partner flips out, you might want to do as Judith and Jim do and give their spouse a big squeeze, open to curiosity about what is going on. “Keep in mind that you are different and distinct from your spouse/partner, and that you are more helpful and comforting when you retain your own identity, rather than losing yourself to the other’s mood.”
From a broken air conditioner that Jim was able to fix, Judith learned that her partner could succeed at repairs even though her father usually failed (and her mother then scorned him behind his back). She was able to share her feelings with Jim, who in turn was able to hear them without taking them personally. The moral? “Trust your truth. Listen to your partner’s truth. Only then can you build trust in your relationship, open to what you have, and receive more and more from it.”
Like Judith and Jim’s other books, Living Your Love Every Day offers invaluable rewards to those willing to learn from it and take it to heart.
