The author of Relationship Intelligence is Richard Panzer, a writer and developer of family life education programs used in 70 countries and throughout the United States. He is a graduate of Yale University and a popular speaker in high schools and colleges throughout the U.S. He is married and the father of 4 children.
Read more about Richard.
160 pages paperback, $8.95 plus $3.20 s&h
Group rates available.
Relationship Intelligence
ISBN 1-888933-11-9
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Being smart is important, but having love smarts is essential for your emotional, physical and even financial health. A lack of love smarts is damaging our country's families and its future.
Relationship Intelligence: why your RQ is more important to your success and happiness than your IQ will tell you about:
- New trends in the U.S. towards Committed Relationships, Less Sexual Risk-Taking
- What new brain research says about: Male/Female Differences, Stages of Love and Intimacy
- Why people who fall in love are "on drugs" and why they need to be careful about becoming "love addicted"
- How monogamy benefits your love life
- Why "living together" isn't a good idea
- Why "good girl/bad girl" stereotypes persist throughout the world
- How 20th century myths on sexuality hurt men, women, and children and how many college courses flunk the Relationship Intelligence test
- Why the Victorians may have been more right than wrong
- Which surprising group in the U.S. has the best health, most happiness, and best sex lives
Excerpt from the book
These research results stand in stark contrast to what advocates of sexual
freedom promised. Instead of more sexual fulfillment, swinging singles get
less. Instead of greater emotional satisfaction, they are less emotionally
fulfilled. Instead of more freedom, many find themselves trapped in poverty.
In the minds of many, marriage is desired but also feared. It represents a
closing off of options, of choices. What if I meet someone better? they
think. If we just live together, I can always leave if things turn negative,
they tell themselves.
Besides the statistical odds against cohabiting couples forming a viable and
permanent union, the commitment of marriage is a life-transforming one. One
of the best explanations why marriage is preferable to living together with
an escape hatch comes from author and marriage therapist Harville Hendrix who
explains: the ingredients necessary for full growth and healing-attention,
concentration, security, time, deepest intimacy, and full mirroring of
ourselves-are possible only in marriage. We cannot heal ourselves, and we
cannot heal in open-ended, precarious relationships.
Are men transformed by marriage? Are male tendencies towards aggressiveness,
recklessness and promiscuity changed by a long-term commitment to a woman?
The man is asked in marriage to sacrifice the joys of new conquests, and to
settle down for life and to be responsible. Admittedly, this is a scary
thought for a lot of guys.
But a man gains by entering the emotional universe of intimacy with a woman
and with children that would otherwise be inaccessible. Another way of saying
it is that he becomes necessary. A single man can do whatever he wants, even
things which might get him killed, and it may not concern him very much. But
a married man must evaluate every action in terms of how it may affect his
family.
There are other reasons most adults choose to get married even when society
minimizes the importance of marriage. The reason is that the human desire for
intimacy, to be fully known and to fully know another, cannot be fulfilled in
a half-hearted, half-way relationship. It’s like flying in an airplane. You
have to be all the way in or you’ll never get off the ground!
If you have any experience as a lifeguard, you know that people usually drown
because they panic and expend a lot of energy trying to raise their bodies
out of the water. They become so exhausted that they drown. If they relaxed
and accepted being in the water, their bodies would naturally come to the
right level for floating. In a similar way, many people are afraid of making
a lifelong marital commitment. Fearing the worst about what might go wrong,
they always keep an escape hatch open in their minds, but this damages their
ability to grow into deeper love.
Read more excerpts from the Relationship Intelligence book.
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