16 Relationships Books Everyone Should Read
Make the most of the relationships in your life. That might mean discovering how to leave an unhealthy relationship or get closer to your spouse. It could mean exploring other relationship styles, like being in an open marriage or being a submissive. It could also mean learning how to fight better, make lasting friendships, or understand your attachment style in relationships. This collection has something for everyone looking to strengthen their connections, whether platonic or romantic.
Research shows that the secret to a long and healthy life lies in forging and maintaining good, close relationships with other people, and at least one book on this list will help establish, end, or enhance yours.
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Add to BookshelfAttached
by Amir Levine, M.D. and Rachel Heller
If you’ve ever been asked, “What’s your attachment style?” find your answer in this book. Though Attached was published in 2012, it’s still one of the most popular books on relationships over a decade later. In reading, you find clarity into what attachment style you and your partner (or potential partner) follow, whether secure, anxious, or avoidant. You’ll also learn how understanding adult attachment (a field pioneered by psychologist John Bowlby in the 1950s) can help you find and sustain love. Most notably, when you pick up Attached, you’ll figure out how to navigate your relationships with ease by understanding the science behind your attachment style.
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$17.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Fight Right
by Julie Schwartz Gottman, PhD and John Gottman, PhD
Turn conflict into closeness with Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict Into Connection. While most of us know conflict is a natural part of any relationship, we don’t realize that how we fight tends to predict the future of our relationship, and this book helps couples evade a win-or-lose mentality in favor of a collaborative approach. Fight Right comes from world-renowned researchers and clinical psychologists Julie and John Gottman, who share five secrets to harness conflict to build stronger, healthier relationships based on decades of research. One reviewer (and fellow bestselling author Lori Gottlieb) calls it “an indispensable resource that couples will use over and over again.”
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$30.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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It’s Not You
by Ramani Durvasula PhD
If you are or were in a relationship with a narcissistic person, It’s Not You could be the first step toward healing. In It’s Not You, you’ll learn the telltale behavioral patterns that indicate you may be dealing with a narcissist and discover what a healing path forward could look like. By working with survivors and drawing on more than two decades of studying narcissism, Dr. Ramani explains how to become gaslight resistant, chip away at the trauma bonds that keep you stuck, grieve the loss of these painful relationships, create and maintain realistic boundaries, discern unhelpful behaviors from narcissistic behaviors, and recover your sense of self after constant invalidation. Start reading It’s Not You to stop blaming yourself.
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$29.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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A Beautiful, Terrible Thing
by Jen Waite
Have you ever been a part of a fairy tale romance that suddenly became a nightmare? If yes, you’re not alone, and this book may be one you’d relate to — or one wish you never have to. A Beautiful, Terrible Thing reads like a psychological thriller but is a harrowing memoir about a woman discovering her marriage is built on an illusion after reading one email that raised her suspicion. While racing between the Before and Afters, Waite analyzes her relationship as she uncovers lies, infidelity, and betrayal. A Beautiful, Terrible Thing is a riveting tale about how someone can go from a soul mate to a sociopath.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Somehow
by Anne Lamott
Uncover love’s transformative power in Somehow: Thoughts On Love. In her twentieth book, Anne Lamott explores how love surprises us, forces us to confront uncomfortable truths, reminds us of our humanity, and guides us forward. Each chapter of Lamott’s #1 New York Times bestseller explores another facet of love, from the unexpected love for a partner later in life to the bruised love for a child who disappoints. Lamott’s lessons within Somehow: Thoughts On Love underscore how love enlightens as it educates, comforts as it energizes, sustains as it surprises. Sounds quite lovely, right?
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$22.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Remember Love
by Cleo Wade
Calling all poetry lovers! Explore how you can find light in periods of lostness, okayness amid change, strength in letting go, and love for yourself after heartbreak in Remember Love, a gorgeous collection of prose and poetry. In Remember Love, the New York Times bestselling Cleo Wade shares how the heart work you do for yourself is not done to avoid the tough stuff. Instead, Wade suggests that to live is to get lost and how to learn to love yourself so that you can handle periods of discomfort. In reading Remember Love, Wade’s intimate, uplifting words serve as an anchor, making you feel less alone.
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$26.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Come Together
by Emily Nagoski, PhD
Let’s talk about sex. Rather, let’s read about how to maintain a long, happy sex life — in Emily Nagoski’s latest bestseller. In Come Together, Nagoski takes on sex in long-term relationships, breaking down the obstacles that impede us from enjoying sex — from stress and body image to relationship difficulties and gendered beliefs about how sex “should” be — and presents the best ways to overcome them. Nagoski also dispels the myths we’ve been taught about sex, provides the vocabulary for talking with partners about how to get in “the mood” (and how not to take it personally when “the mood” isn’t there), and, essentially, provides a roadmap for how to have great sex — for decades.
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$20.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Relationship Goals
by Michael Todd
Make the most of your meaningful relationships with Pastor Michael Todd’s Relationship Goals. Based on the viral, multi-million-view sermon series about dating, marriage, and sex, this bestselling book is a guide to finding lasting love and sustaining a healthy relationship by getting real about your goals. In Relationship Goals, Todd discusses what it means to choose intentional dating over recreational dating, how to move on from past mistakes, what the Bible says about sex, why love strengthens after marriage, and why the best friendships have God at the center. There’s something for everyone in this book, whether you’re married, single, or “it’s complicated.”
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$17.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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How to Know a Person
by David Brooks
Foster deeper connections in your relationships with David Brooks’s How to Know a Person. This New York Times bestseller is for anyone keen to develop stronger connections at home, at work, and everywhere in between. In How to Know a Person, Brooks draws from psychology, neuroscience, theater, philosophy, history, and education to present a welcoming and hopeful approach to human connection that could also be a remedy for a society riven by fragmentation, hostility, and misperception. Prepare to become more understanding and considerate toward others, and find the joy that comes from being seen when you read this book.
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$30.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Platonic
by Marisa G. Franco, PhD
Unpack your attachment style and learn how to create attachments that last with Platonic. Friendship is one of the most crucial relationships that elevates our daily lives and supports our natural need for connection. Consider this your blueprint for making and keeping friends in an era rife with distraction, burnout, and chaos. This book is especially for you if you want to put your attention toward building bonds outside of romantic love to fulfill that other (critical!) need in your life. In understanding the science of attachment, you can discover how to not only find your person but also find your people.
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$30.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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More: A Memoir of Open Marriage
by Molly Roden Winter
Open your mind to different marriage styles because not all relationships look alike. And they don’t need to because how you relate and connect is entirely up to you. So, see what an open marriage looks like from Molly Roden Winter’s point of view. Winter’s memoir follows her journey as a happily married mother as she explores sex and relationships outside her marriage. From sex in public places around New York City to establishing ground rules with her husband, this book provides an open look at an open marriage that, according to one review, “is going to blow up your group chat.”
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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We Over Me
by Khadeen Ellis and Devale Ellis
Discover how to create a legacy with your partner and stay married with We Over Me. From the stars of The Ellises and hosts of the Webby Award-winning podcast, Dead Ass with K&D, learn how focusing on your partner’s needs instead of your wants can help your relationship thrive. Devale and Khadeen Ellis offer their take (with humor and transparency) on how to create a strong union, including learning how to function as a team, how to keep talking about sex, and how to stop comparing yourselves to other couples. Read this to make your own marriage rules while building an enduring relationship.
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$17.99Buy from Other Retailers:
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Diary of a Submissive
by Sophie Morgan
Glimpse what it’s like to be a submissive in this (true!) erotic story of female submission. In this true story, Sophie Morgan explains what an independent, 21st-century woman gets out of relinquishing her power and personal freedom in a submissive relationship with a dominant man for their mutual sexual pleasure. Follow Sophie Morgan through her early erotic experiences and experimentation to the dark places she goes after meeting a real-life ‘Christian Grey,’ a place where her boundaries and sexual fetishes are pushed. Daring, controversial, and sensual, you won’t want to put Sophie Morgan’s story down.
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$24.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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The Love Playbook
by La La Anthony and Karen Hunter
Learn how to take control of your relationships, rise above adversity, and live your life by your rules. Star of VH1’s La La’s Full Court Life, actress, entrepreneur, and wife of New York Knicks star Carmelo Anthony, La La Anthony shares her one-of-a-kind rules on matters of the heart in The Love Playbook. Based on her own experiences and life lessons, Anthony offers empowering and no-nonsense advice to help you create healthy relationships and a happy life. Read this one if you want a guide to dating, finding love, building healthy relationships, and staying true to yourself along the way.
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$24.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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It’s Called a Breakup Because It’s Broken
by Greg Behrendt and Amiira Ruotola-Behrendt
Healing from heartache? This is for you. From Greg Behrendt, the co-author of the smash two-million copy bestseller He’s Just Not That Into You, comes It’s Called a Breakup Because It’s Broken. This is the ultimate breakup survival guide that’ll teach you how to put yourself through “he-tox,” how to throw yourself a kick-ass pity party, and how to reframe reality to see the relationship for what it was. Not all relationships are meant to last, and this book will leave a lasting impact on how to get through what’s been broken. Go from breakup to breakover with this hilarious, must-have manual.
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$15.99Buy from Other Retailers:
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Us
by Terrence Real
Stop working on yourself as an individual and start working on your relationship as a couple with the help of the renowned family therapist and author of The New Rules of Marriage. With deft insight, humor, and charm, you’ll find how to transform your relationship based on compassion, collaboration, and closeness rather than knee-jerk reactions and dysfunction. If you and your partner are backed into corners of “you” and “me,” this book will show you how to get back to “us.” Don’t just take it from me, though; take it from Gwyneth Paltrow, founder and CEO of goop, who calls this book “a road map for all of us who seek true intimacy.”
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