“Love is Profound Interest” according to authors Mark Michaels and Patricia Johnson. They write about love and relationships with a fluidity born of their own great experiment in marriage and committed love. As they explore common themes of love and sex, they consistently model a very different way of being in relationship. A way that is not based upon the June and Ward Cleaver mythology that still informs our morphic field, but is based instead upon themes of experimentation and play, intimacy and mystery, expectations and explorations.
I will not outline the book or address specific chapters, other reviewers have done an excellent job of that. I will say that the wisdom reflected in these pages, when applied within a relationship, will result in greater joy within the relationship. This is not a quick fix book (“Ten Steps to the Romance of Your Dreams!”) but neither is it a WORKBOOK. It is, instead, a way to deeply reframe expectations, responses, and our own availability within our relationships.
I will recommend this book to friends, those newly in relationships and those who have been happily together for years. I will recommend this book to students of Tantra, as a living illustration of bridging spiritual practice with relationship. I will especially recommend this book to those who are “slogging it out” in their relationship, and to those who council couples who are “slogging it out.”
I often found myself underlining sentences or paragraphs. I occasionally thought about various events in my own life, and how they may have turned out differently if I had applied this or that particular point of view. I wish I had read it years ago.