Book Review: This is Your Brain in Love

I am always looking for ways to improve my relationship with my dear hubby. I have read numerous relationship books such as...Why Mars and Venus Collide: Improving Relationships by Understanding How Men and Women Cope Differently with Stress , and The Love Dare . I was recently given the opportunity to read This is Your Brain in Love: New Scientific Breakthroughs for a More Passionate and Emotionally Healthy Marriage.

This is Your Brain in Love is written by Dr. Earl Henslin and promises to offer scientific breakthroughs and scientific reasoning that will allow for you to have a more passionate and healthy marriage. Dr. Henslin argues that in order for you to be in a healthy, loving relationship you have to begin with the brain. He argues that different people have different brain issues and that these lead to different love styles. Once you can identify the way that your brain works and the way that your spouse's brain works, then you can move toward a healthier, more fulfilling marriage. Dr. Henslin argues that there are 5 common lover styles and that by using techniques that he gives, any couple can overcome these obstacles and become even more in love.

In This is Your Brain in Love,  Dr. Henslin categorizes these 5 lover styles as: the scattered lover, the Over-focused Lover, the Blue Mood Lover, the Agitated Lover, and the Anxious Lover. He offers a quick quiz before each analysis that allows the reader to identify their own style or the style of their spouse. Dr. Henslin offers stories from his practice of marriages that have been helped by his research and he offers hope that marriages can be made stronger. He also offers tips for the lover as well as tips to help your lover depending on their loving type.

I enjoyed this book in the respect that it made me think about my own relationship with my husband. I believe that we have a happy marriage and that we are very much in love. However, I am always looking for ways to make it even better. I was unable to pinpoint one style of lover for myself or for my husband as we both seem to have traits of several of the lover styles. However, I was able to take some ideas away from the suggestions that Dr. Henslin offers as ways to help yourself and to help your mate. I also greatly enjoyed his final chapter where he discusses the secret to everlasting love, which he identifies as kindness, patience, forgiveness and honesty. I found this chapter to be enlightening and very thought provoking.

As much as I enjoyed aspects of this book, there were other aspects that I did not enjoy. There was a TON of very scientific, technical language that was hard to digest. If I was a therapist, or someone in the medical field I would probably have enjoyed it much more, however, as a lay person I found the language to be a distraction and at times hard to understand. Dr. Henslin seems to assume that all of the loving types comes as a result of a head trauma of some kind. He shows the extreme of each style (ie. extreme anxiety, extreme depression, etc.) and seems to be selling brain scans and supplements. This took away from the validity of his arguments.

The book also seemed choppy in it's writing style. The first couple chapters were very spiritual in nature and talked about the coupling of husband and wife as the ultimate way of love. However, the next chapters that describe the different types of lovers, goes very much away from the spiritual and to the extreme of the technical. The final chapter returns to the spiritual side of love. It was very hard to find a continuum in the book.

Like most relationship books, This is Your Brain in Love,  is a mixture of practical advice and stuff that doesn't apply to my life. I take away from it some things, and other things I just forget. I would say that this would be a great read for priests, pastors, therapists, or anyone in the medical field that is into counseling married couples.



DISCLAIMER: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze.com  book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.