The Last Relationship Book You'll Need

Straight Talk

The title of this book, The Last Relationship Book You'll Need, has been challenged on several levels. Some have suggested it is pretentious and even arrogant. I have seriously considered these concerns and I respect them. I selected a bold name because I claim this is a bold book. In it, I want to challenge our historical way of understanding what a relationship is and how we learned, or did not learn, to relate with others. My goal is to help you learn how you create the context for all of your meaningful relationships so you can form relationships on purpose, without relying on chance, good fortune or the good intentions of friends.

The word I want to emphasize in the title is NEED. I don’t mean to say or imply that this is the last relationship book you will ever read. Of course, you will read more books. Most of my insights came from reading other authors. I believe that our present understanding of relationships traps us in the concept that what we NEED is more information, more background and more tips. We think that knowing more facts, statistics, anecdotes or theories will somehow allow us to understand relationships better. This is our historical model of education and learning. The unhappy truth is that such a model enables us to explain the past, but it doesn't necessarily help us build better relationships in our future.

Once the novelty of sex gets out of the way, you quickly discover that relationships are about LEARNING and COMMUNICATION. If you don’t learn how to learn, you can’t listen. If you can’t listen, you can’t communicate. Most books I have read present good and useful information but don’t emphasize the importance of learning as an action.

True learning leads to more than expanding your ability and capacity to act. Learning and action go hand in hand. If you ‘learn to learn,’ as I discuss in this and the next two chapters, you will develop for yourself the ability to apply what you read here to what you already know from past reading, therapy and seminars.

Information won't fix you; you have to learn how to put what you learn into action. Learning to learn, becoming an observer, and bringing forth meaningful actions are the three real skills you NEED. In order to design and create the relationship of your dreams, you are going to have to learn how to become an observer of your own actions and the actions you desire in a relationship before you can KNOW how to go about creating it. Gaining competence in these fundamental skills of learning is my first priority for you. That is why I don’t get into the Five Universal Principles of Relationship until Chapter Five.

This book requires you to take action for it to work for you. If you don’t want to take new actions, don’t read it. Continue doing or not doing just as you have in the past. Life repeats itself unless you commit to moving forward. Yogi Berra says in the title of his new book, When You Get To A Fork In The Road—Take It! You’ll never get to Bliss unless you move forward and have an idea of what it looks like.

Confronting the Challenge

I remember when I first read James Michener’s book, Hawaii. The first chapter was very difficult to plow through; it was volcanoes erupting again and again, rocks being eroded to make dirt, birds depositing seeds to create a paradise of plants, trees, and so on. The whole chapter described the evolution of an island chain that would be the foundation supporting all following civilizations. It was fifty pages of “in the beginning—a creation story.” It was only after I got into the story that I began to appreciate the first chapter and the foundation it provided for an understanding of the unique environment that is the Hawaiian Islands.

We have no similar creation story to help us understand human relationships. We are born into relationships, live in them, seek them, work on them, and ultimately die in them. We are so wrapped up in our relationships that we really can’t see them. In our blindness, we don’t know how they came to be, nor are we conscious of the evolutionary steps involved in their creation.

Because of our lack of knowledge and understanding, we often build our relationship house on soft dirt, with a weak foundation, and not on hard rock that provides stability and endurance.

This chapter and the next two are evolutionary, designed to support all of your relationships. They will help you build the firm foundation you must have in order to design and create your house of relationships. These pages will get you down to bedrock. Much of what I introduce may be unfamiliar to you, partly because I will use words in ways you may not have seen them used before.

Another basic point: learning is a repetitive exercise. To become competent you must read, hear and act many times over. Therefore, I will often repeat concepts—on purpose and for emphasis. Just as my experience in reading the first chapter of Hawaii had its payoff as I read further into that book, I am certain the challenge of this book will be worthwhile for you. Be patient; hang in there.

Relationships are not fluff. If you truly want to live in empowering relationships, you must be willing to challenge all you think you know and commit to a new way of learning, one that builds a foundation to support action, not one that just feeds you more knowledge. Let’s face it, explaining life isn’t nearly as much fun as living it.

Learning begins as the ability to make new observations about life situations. Throughout this book, my emphasis will be on encouraging and enabling you to become a new observer of life and relationships. Becoming an observer of your present life allows you to see your past in new ways and to step into the future as multiple possibilities, not predetermined facts. To be an observer means to learn a New Language of Relationship —new distinctions that allow new actions, not just new definitions.

What is needed to enjoy blissful relationships is learning as a context that leads to purposeful action. If you build on a strong foundation, then purposeful action will produce purposeful results! The starting point for our journey to