The Best and Most Recommended Books for Couples Wanting to Improve Your Relationship

Although reading a book often isn’t enough to significantly change the quality and direction of a relationship long-term, I have found in my 15+ years of practice that books can be an excellent resource to enable couples to stabilize and improve their relationship more quickly, in combination with our work in couples therapy.

As a result, I am always looking for and reading books and other helpful resources to potentially recommend to my clients. Thus, I have read a LOT of books over the years and continue to do so.

With the desire for you to experience the benefits of quicker relationship improvement, and to make it easier for you to identify the specific books I most highly and most often recommend as the best books for couples, I’ve created this short list with links where you can purchase each book, along with a short summary of each to help you choose the one that’s best for you and your relationship:

1. The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work

by John Gottman Ph.D. and Nan Silver

As a Gottman Method Couples Therapist, this is the Gottman research-based book I recommend most often and most highly to couples.

This book talks about the predictors of relationship breakup and divorce, and the antidotes to each of those predictors, that were identified by John Gottman and his colleagues in their research.

It provides multiple exercises to do with your partner to strengthen your friendship, information about positive and healthy communication and interaction, and information for improving your understanding of the conflicts in your relationship and what you can do to respond to those conflicts more effectively.

I genuinely believe that nearly every couple would benefit from reading and applying this book to themselves as individuals and to their relationship.

2. The New Rules of Marriage

by Terrence Real

This book takes things to the next level, and is a great tool for after you have mastered the skills in the two books I have recommended above.

This book will enable you to evaluate your intimacy as a couple in the intellectual, physical, emotional, sexual and spiritual domains.

It provides a lot of information for helping you to better understand your perceptions of and reactions to your partner, how to more clearly express what you want and need in your relationship, communication errors to avoid, and guidelines for how to better listen to and respond to your partner.

This book will provide guidelines for creating a healthier, stronger, more passionate and romantic, deeply connected, life long partnership with your best friend and life-long lover.

If you are unhappy in your relationship, don’t feel like a team, or feel like your partner has shut you out, this could be an excellent book for you.

This book tends is especially popular among women.

If you recognize that you could use additional assistance, support and professional guidance beyond what these books can provide, please contact reach out to me using the contact form on this page to reach me most quickly, or you may also email or call to request to schedule a 45 minute phone consultation to explore how I can assist you.

Buy on Amazon

Buy on Amazon

Please note that I will receive a small amount on purchases made from my website in return for directing people to the books I recommend most highly as an experienced therapist. However, I have been recommending these books and others to my clients, friends and family as long as I have been in practice, and will continue to recommend these particular books even if I don’t receive any compensation whatsoever.

How to Find a Therapist in Salt Lake City, Utah

In my experience, most people don’t seek out therapy as a first resort when they are faced with a problem in their lives or relationships.

You are, of course, an intelligent and self-sufficient person.

So, you first use the coping skills you know of, such as researching the problem online, talking with friends or family, reading self-help books, exercising or maybe practicing yoga.

And it is only when you have exhausted all of your coping skills and are still struggling, that you reach out to see if counseling or therapy might help!

So, how do you find a therapist in Salt Lake City, Utah?

I highly recommend asking friends and family members for the name and contact information of any therapists with whom they’ve had a great experience.

A referral from someone you trust, who knows you and who can share their experiences is often the very best way to find a therapist who is likely to be a good fit for you as well.

Or you may choose to go online to do a Google search. However, in doing an online search, you may be overwhelmed by the number of different counselors and therapists in our area.

It can be very challenging to determine from the many listed which counselors or therapists specialize in treating the problem you are struggling with, use the treatment method that will be the best fit for your unique problem, and which therapist you will feel most comfortable in working with.

Perhaps most important, you’d like to know what other clients have experienced in working with these potential counselors and therapists in order to make an educated decision in selecting the therapist that is the best fit for you and what you’re looking for.

A great website and resource which provides this information about the counselors and therapists is www.healthgrades.com.

Healthgrades provides specific information about each counselor’s specializations, conditions they treat, treatment approaches they utilize, and it provides anonymous client reviews to give you a better understanding of whether that counselor or therapist might be a good fit for you and your needs.

You can review my Healthgrades profile by clicking on this link below:

UPDATE and Public Service Announcement: Healthgrades.com has unfortunately chosen to contract with the disreputable and unethical tech company, BetterHelp, which is often falsely claiming that the therapists on the Healthgrades.com website are not accepting new patients and re-directing site visitors to contact BetterHelp therapists instead.

I strongly recommend that you don’t use BetterHelp due to their selling clients’ names and diagnoses to third parties, among other things. See this link for more info about the FTC case and this link for more info about the FTC order and $7.8 million fine of BetterHelp.

Instead, of using BetterHelp, I strongly recommend you call or email the therapists you find on Healthgrades.com who sound like they might be a good fit for you, in order to inquire directly about whether or not they are accepting new clients.