Love. We devote songs to it, lose sleep over it, and, sometimes, we spend our entire lifetimes searching for it. Growing up, we’re taught that one day, we’ll magically find our special someone—without a clue as to how to make it all happen. It’s not like “Love 101” is taught in school (or, at least it wasn’t at my all-girls preparatory high school). Sure, we might glean a few questionable love how-tos from Cosmopolitan or from the stories our buddies spill over a few beers, but is this really the best way to navigate our love lives? It’s no wonder that, as adults, we make colossal messes of our relationships—and end up very jaded about love indeed. There’s a user manual for just about everything these days. Where’s the user manual for love?
That’s the goal of an inspiring new book by spiritual scholar Cyndi Dale and psychotherapist Andrew Wald, called Togetherness: Creating and Deepening Sustainable Love (2012, $16.95). This duo certainly has the credentials to write about relationships: together, they have over 35 years of professional experience and have held more than 80,000 client sessions with singles and couples alike.
Stop and think about those stats for a minute. Just what could a person learn from 80,000 client sessions? (I can only assume that the majority of these sessions were about the four-letter “L” word.) Thanks to Dale and Wald, the answers have been condensed for you in one compact book.
The tone of Togetherness is very much like a deep conversation you’d have with good friends over dinner. Dale brings a spiritual perspective to matters of the heart, while Wald balances the equation by pulling from the worlds of academia and psychotherapy. This blended viewpoint shines through brilliantly in the authors’ combined definition of “togetherness.” On one hand, togetherness is the physical and emotional closeness we share with a partner. But it’s also a way to describe the emotional depth and heart-to-heart connections we seek out in other relationships—not just our intimate ones.
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