ogd5XOt reviewed Receiving Love by Harville, PhD Hendrix
Amazing Ideas, Dense Writing
4 stars
This book took quite a while to work through, for both good and bad reasons.
The good reasons: there are some amazing ideas in here, some of which I will go so far as to call "profound". Numerous sections of the book caused me to pause, think, re-read / pause, think, re-read again and again. It's easy to get lost in the implications of a single paragraph and this is a long book.
The bad reasons: there's some seriously highfalutin writing that's just difficult to work through. One of the authors has a background in philosophy, and a lot of the text has that sort of nebulous, "I think I know what you're saying...(?)" quality to it that's so often found in philosophy. Subsequent examples make the concepts clear, and preserving the original terminology is an aspect of giving credit to the originator, but portions of the book are so …
This book took quite a while to work through, for both good and bad reasons.
The good reasons: there are some amazing ideas in here, some of which I will go so far as to call "profound". Numerous sections of the book caused me to pause, think, re-read / pause, think, re-read again and again. It's easy to get lost in the implications of a single paragraph and this is a long book.
The bad reasons: there's some seriously highfalutin writing that's just difficult to work through. One of the authors has a background in philosophy, and a lot of the text has that sort of nebulous, "I think I know what you're saying...(?)" quality to it that's so often found in philosophy. Subsequent examples make the concepts clear, and preserving the original terminology is an aspect of giving credit to the originator, but portions of the book are so Ivory Tower that I'd be reluctant to recommend it to someone who doesn't actively think of themselves as an intellectual.
That’s a shame because - again - there are really, really big ideas in here that a person could apply to themselves as readily as whatever relationship they happen to be in. My spouse and I both took a lot from the text and we plan to revisit it periodically as we continue the (mis)adventure that is our marriage.
It’s worth the slog, I just wish more emphasis could have been put on the readability.