How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk: The Foolproof Way to Follow Your Heart Without Losing Your Mind - Softcover

VAN EPP, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0071548424 ISBN 13: 9780071548427

Verlag: McGraw Hill, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

AVOID THE JERKS AND FIND "THE ONE" WHO'S RIGHT FOR YOU

Over 200,000 Copies Sold!

"An insightful and creative contribution to managing the complexity of choosing a life partner. I heartily recommend it."
--Harville Hendrix, Ph.D., author of Getting the Love You Want and Keeping the Love You Find

"Don't be part of the 'where-was-this-book-when-I-needed-it?' crowd. It's not too late--read it now!"
--Pat Love, Ed.D., author of The Truth About Love and Hot Monogamy

Based on years of research on marital and premarital happiness, How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk (previously published in hardcover as How to Avoid Marrying a Jerk) will help you break destructive dating patterns that have kept you from finding the love you deserve:

• Ask the right questions to inspire meaningful, revealing conversations with your partner
• Judge character based on compatibility, relationships skills, friends, and patterns from family and previous relationships
• Resolve your own emotional baggage so you're ready for a healthy relationship

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Van Epp, Ph.D., conducts seminars and workshops worldwide on marriage and relationships. His popular video program, "How to Avoid Marrying a Jerk," is being taught by certified instructors internationally in thousands of churches, singles organizations, educational and agency settings, and throughout the military. Visit his website at www.johnvanepp.com.

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How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk

The Foolproof Way to Follow Your Heart Without Losing Your MindBy JOHN VAN EPP

McGraw-Hill

Copyright © 2007 John Van Epp
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-07-154842-7

Contents

Chapter One

Follow Your Heart Without Losing Your Mind

* * *

How Did Something So Right Go So Wrong?

Meet Charlotte, twenty-five, who has just ended a two-year relationship:

When I first met James [twenty-seven] at the insurance company where I worked, he was easygoing, charming, and funny—he turned out to be all that and more. He moved in with me after seven months of spending almost every free moment together. I would have sworn that I knew him better than anyone in the world. But then he changed; he went out with his friends more and became less interested in me. When I tried to talk with him about keeping balance in our relationship, he would become defensive and detached, as if he just didn't care. I kept trying for the next year and a half, thinking that he would change, but he only became worse. Looking back, I wonder if I ever really knew him.

Then there's Marc, thirty-eight, at the end of a three-year relationship:

I felt sorry for Jenell the first time we talked. She was going through a divorce from a real jerk who cheated on her. I wondered how any guy could do something like that to her; she was so beautiful and nice. She told me she had never been treated or loved in the ways that I took care of her. When I heard about her screwed-up family, I realized why she seemed to feel so "at home" with jerks. It felt great to give her love, something she said she never really had. Around the fourth month of dating, however, Jenell became moody and picked fights with me, as if she wanted to be mad. I kept trying to make things better, and they were, for a while, but then she would go back into her shell. I should not have stayed with her so long. Why do I always get into relationships where I am the giver?

Listen to Tasha, twenty-eight, at the end of a five-year relationship:

The thing that impressed me most when I met Duane [thirty-one] was that he was so good with my six-year-old son. He always talked to him, horsed around and played with him, and would even bring him surprises when he came to my apartment to see me. Being a single mother, I easily fell in love with the father my son never had. I was bothered by the way Duane became harsh sometimes with me, but I wrote it off as just a bad mood. And anyway, you've got to take the bad with the good. We married on our first anniversary of going out, but from that time on he was never the same. He had frequent rages and treated me just like his father had treated his mother. I never thought he would act like that; he had been so different before we married. How did I miss the signs of what he was going to be like in marriage?

What do Charlotte, Marc, and Tasha have in common? All three ended up with something different than what they thought they had originally. They minimized incidental problems that became damaging patterns, not recognizing the signs. It is easy to get fooled when you are feeling in love.

The problem is not that you are unsure of what you want. According to a recent national survey by researchers at Rutgers University, 94 percent of singles stated that they want to marry their soul mate. However, many of them acknowledged a lack of confidence in being able to achieve this goal. You're probably reading this book because you've noticed a pattern in your own relationships—a pattern you want to break—and you're asking yourself this: I know what I want, so what am I doing wrong?

You know what you want, but

• Why are you always attracted to jerks?

• Why do you keep picking partners who have the same problems?

• How can you really know what someone will be like as a marriage partner?

• Why are you so desperate?

• How can you see so clearly what you want in a soul mate but be so blind to a realistic view of what your partner is really like?

• Why does your partner change so much in just three months?

• Why do you think more clearly, feel more confident, and act more assertively when you are not in a relationship?

• You were told that the ex was such a jerk ... but now you wonder?

• Why did you overlook so many signs of problems?

• Why do you always end up trying harder than your partner to make the relationship work?

• What are you supposed to do to protect yourself from trusting too much?

• How long does it take to really know someone?

• How can you feel so loved and yet so betrayed by the same person?

• How can you love and hate the same person?

• Why did your partner change as soon as you married?

• Is this as good as it gets?

Can you relate to some or all of these questions? If so, then you are not alone.

My Ten-Year Courtship

I have been dating this book for almost ten years. My friends and family begged me to take the plunge and get published. But I kept telling them I needed to test things; I was not quite ready—just a little more time, maybe next year. Am I starting to sound like a commitment-phobe?

In my defense, this ten-year courtship has paid off. It allowed me the time to test the ideas in this book in my clinical counseling practice. Even more important, it allowed me to turn those ideas into a curriculum, the PICK a Partner program (or PICK for short) that has been validated with research conducted at Ohio State University and road tested in seven countries, forty-eight states, and by thousands of instructors in military bases, churches, and social agencies. This book presents the successful and scientifically proven PICK program that, if followed, guarantees you won't marry a jerk.

Love Is Blind

It all started with a collection of comments by my hurt and dismayed patients who thought they had the best partners, only to discover later that they had either overlooked or minimized significant problems. I was in the habit of asking them to look back on the early stages of their relationships and tell me if they could see any signs of these problems. Invariably, they said yes.

Haven't you wondered why so many people overlook issues and differences in their dating relationships only to have these problems plague their marriages years later? You are dumbfounded when your friend forgives her boyfriend (or his girlfriend) for that destructive and repeating pattern of behavior that everyone else can see ... but then it happens to you. You become struck by love and everything blurs. Not until after a breakup (or sometimes after the wedding) does the lightbulb come on, and then you feel really stupid because all those warning signals you ignored in the beginning of the relationship seem so clear in hindsight. Why is it that love is blind?

Two reasons emerged when I asked my disillusioned patients why they did not pay attention to those early warning signals. Combined, they capture the essence of what causes the love-is-blind syndrome.

First, many of these patients said, "If I only knew then what I know now." They lacked the head knowledge of what to look for in a prospective partner. It is not surprising that most of us are greatly misinformed about the characteristics that predict marriage material, seeing that few of us have ever been formally taught about relationships. Our classrooms have been our...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: McGraw Hill
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0071548424
• ISBN 13: 9780071548427
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 2
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland