The books included in this list represent some of the best self-help books on the topic of marriage. There are general guides, guides for couples going through crisis, and communication-specific guides. Regardless of the underlying issue or issues for partners, many of the techniques to heal and grow are the same. It’s up to you to determine the best format for you and your spouse to receive the advice.
General Guides for Marriage
The following are general guides on marriage. They focus on some of the common issues married couples face: lack of communication, lost intimacy, and showing love.
1. The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country’s Foremost Relationship Expert
Author John Gottman has observed married couples through a scientific lens for many years. The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work is the culmination of his research, filled with questionnaires and activities. If your relationship is under general strain and you want to get back on the path to harmonious living and loving, this is the definitive guide for you.
2. Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
Co-authored by Harville Hendrix, PhD, and Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples has provided millions of readers with practical steps to forge a more satisfying relationship. Using research based on behavioral science, social learning theory, Gestalt therapy, and interpersonal neuroscience, Getting Getting the Love You Want covers how to reignite failing intimacy, reduce negative interactions, and resolve power struggles. Additionally, Hendrix and Hunt delve into subjects like how to become better friends, laugh more in the relationship, achieve a common vision, and listen more closely to each other.
3. Marriage Rules: A Manual for the Married and the Coupled Up
Marriage Rules: A Manual For The Married And The Coupled Up uses a unique format to reach people who may want to improve their relationship. As a list of more than one hundred rules, it’s the perfect guide for today’s world of social media-sized attention spans and bite-sized content. It offers solutions to old and new problems, practical advice to navigate road bumps, and fuel to begin meaningful conversations that are necessary to building a successful partnership.
4. The Normal Bar: The Surprising Secrets of Happy Couples and What They Reveal About Creating a New Normal in Your Relationship
The Normal Bar is based on survey data from roughly 100,000 people. It offers readers a baseline for what could be considered “normal” in a relationship, helping them to achieve higher levels of understanding and engagement. Beyond providing a baseline, it also presents a peek behind the curtain, so to speak, helping readers in relationships get out of ruts and stay out. Author and wellness entrepreneur Chrisanna Northrup, along with sociologists Pepper Schwartz and James Witte, have designed an interactive look into how to preserve romance and trust, regardless of background.
5. Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts
This book is specifically for serious couples and the newly engaged, although it’s still applicable for partners in a long-term marriage. Saving Your Marriage Before it Starts, written by relationship experts Drs. Les and Lesli Parrott, is an award-winning approach to self-guided premarital counseling that comes with companion workbooks for men and women. Readers will learn about conflict resolution, money management, marriage misbeliefs, and more.
6. The Art of Loving
Author, psychoanalyst, and social philosopher Erich Fromm candidly explores all kinds of love in The Art of Loving. In addition to romantic love, he also touches on familial love, self-love, and, for religious readers, a love of God or some higher power. He believes all capacities for love feed into one another, so if you’re able to strengthen one relationship, it can help you naturally strengthen them all. Primary topics include maturity, self-knowledge, courage, and understanding.
7. Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love
The New York Times and Time both claim that Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversation for a Lifetime of Love has the highest rate of success in the category of self-help for married couples. Author Dr. Sue Johnson uses emotionally focused therapy to help readers re-establish emotional bonds and preserve a healthy level of attachment. Two specific topics she covers are “Recognizing the Demon Dialogue,” and “Revisiting a Rocky Moment,” offering practical tips, exercises, and touch points for transformative conversations.
8. We Do: Saying Yes to a Relationship of Depth, True Connection, and Enduring Love
We Do knows that committing to being a “we” is one of the most fulfilling things you can do in life; however, it’s also aware that nearly half of all first marriages end in divorce. As such, it provides a guide for those couples who want to set a strong foundation for their relationship. Author and psychotherapist Stan Tatkin says, “All successful long-term relationships are secure relationships. You and your partner take care of each other in a way that ensures you both feel safe, protected, accepted, and secure at all times.”
9. Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence
In this book, Esther Perel – one of the world’s most notable voices on eroticism – investigates the paradoxical relationship between domesticity (being in a settled relationship) and sexual desire. Mating in Captivity invites readers to take a deeper look into their marriage or long-term relationship, paying close attention to patterns of intimacy and connection. Perel’s wise, straightforward, insightful writing will convince you that exciting, beautiful, fun sex is entirely possible for couples who have been together for a long time.
10. The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work
Author Eli J. Finkel pursues the mystery of a successful marriage in The All-or-Nothing Marriage. He says that the best marriages today are better than the best marriages of bygone eras; however, despite how far we’ve come, there is still a lot to learn. Finkel uses this book as an opportunity to reverse engineer some of the most fulfilling marriages, spanning from traditional to completely non-traditional. He combines scientific research with practical tips, advice, and guidance.
11. How to Be Married: What I Learned from Real Women on Five Continents About Building a Happy Marriage
When nationally bestselling author Jo Piazza got engaged, she found herself asking the question: “How do you make marriage work in a world and era where women don’t need to be married?” In this provocative, feminist memoir, Piazza travels to five continents, looking into what a modern marriage really is, hearing the wisdom of women of different ages and cultures. How to be Married is an inspiring, honest, and hilarious look at what it means to have an equal partnership with another person.
12. Choosing Marriage: Why It Has to Start with We>Me
Choosing Marriage knows that marriage can be a reality check for couples – a stark difference between expectations and real life. This candid, compassionate book by licensed counselor and relationship expert Debra Fileta walks readers through what marriage really entails, providing insight gained from thousands of survey results. It reveals truths about complex topics like love, sex, conflict management, desire, and communication.
Self-Help Books for Marriages in Crisis
All marriages need maintenance, but sometimes, there is a specific issue or underlying problem—a crisis that requires focused attention. The next three books are helpful for partners going through decidedly tough times.
13. Loving Your Spouse When You Feel Like Walking Away: Real Help for Desperate Hearts in Difficult Marriages
This is the book for people in marriages who feel like giving up. Author and experienced marriage and family counselor Gary Chapman believes that in a troubled marriage, both partners can “take positive steps that have the potential for changing the emotional climate in their marriage.” He teaches readers how to recognize and reject marriage myths, understand their partner’s actions, and take responsibility for their own. Whether you’re learning to communicate and connect with a partner who is uncommunicative, a workaholic, unfaithful, or depressed, Loving Your Spouse can help.
14. Toxic In-Laws: Loving Strategies for Protecting Your Marriage
For some partners, toxic in-laws are a problem. From New York Time bestselling bestselling author Susan Forward, ToxicToxic In-Laws: Loving Strategies for Protecting Your Marriage presents a powerful opportunity to help couples cope with troublesome in-laws like “the critics” or “the controllers.” Forward shares real-life stories of men and women struggling to manage these frustrating, sometimes hurtful relationships. Her aim is to give readers the tools they need to find peace within chaos.
15. Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love
Authors and leading marriage researchers John Gottman and Julie Schwartz Gottman present readers with eight conversations on key topics like money, sex, and trust. Their step-by-step guide draws on forty years of the Gottmans’ research on make-or-break issues including spirituality, curiosity, and sense of adventure. Readers will encounter interactive prompts and activities, skills needed for intimate conversations, validation of their efforts, and encouragement to either fix what’s been broken or make stronger what is already strong.
Communication-Based Self-Help Boks for Marriage
Good communication is the foundation on which to build any marriage, but we’re not all born with skills in that area. It takes work to understand your own style of communication, your partner’s, and how you both could improve.
16. Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner’s Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship
Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT, uses neuroscience to explain how our brains process the concepts of security, attachment, and rituals differently. From there, he teaches partners how to rewire their brains to be more loving and attuned to each other’s methods of communication. Readers will learn Tatkin’s ten principles to creating a lasting relationship built on trust. He also explores concepts like the “couple bubble,” morning and evening rituals, and “the loving brain.”
17. The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts
Since this book from Gary Chapman was published, the term “love language” has become ubiquitous. Chapman’s approach to showing and receiving love in a personalized way has helped couples everywhere to connect, communicate, and discover more intimacy. As a #1 New York Times international bestseller, The 5 Love Languages includes a personal profile assessment, so readers can determine their love language and that of their significant other.
18. On Love: A Novel
On Love is a bestselling debut novel by Alain De Botton. While it is fictional, the profound storytelling presents an underlying truth in the way that only fiction can. De Botton explores each stage of a relationship, illuminating universal issues like communication, and celebrating mature conflict resolution in the face of hardship. Couples counselors and therapists have been recommending this book to their clients since it came out, recommending it as timeless reading for those who are in love and want to communicate that love with their partner.
19. The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Know to Make Love Work
The New Rules of Marriage embraces the fact that times have changed and so has marriage. Women are no longer subservient in a marriage, and men are no longer expected to be absent in the name of providing. Author and therapist Terrence Real offers tools for both women and men to create the relationship they crave and deserve, and repair any damage that might have been done in the past. At the end of this book, readers can expect to know more about setting limits, articulating wants and needs, listening and responding, and seeking outside help.
20. Marriage Meetings for Lasting Love: 30 Minutes a Week to the Relationship You’ve Always Wanted
The secret to building a long-lasting relationship is fairly simple according to author, psychotherapist, and clinical social worker Marcia Naomi Berger. She says you need to have weekly meetings—a designated time to show appreciation, coordinate chores, discuss new ways of having fun with your partner, and manage healthy conflict resolution. Her tips and techniques have helped hundreds of couples develop a deeper and more meaningful connection.
21. The Hard Questions: 100 Essential Questions to Ask Before You Say “I Do”
Susan Piver’s The Hard Questions presents 100 thought-provoking questions for couples who need a little structure and guidance in their effort to build a strong, lasting bond with their partners. Reviewers call it “simple yet profound” for couples at any stage of their relationship, focusing on topics like home life, money, work-life balance, and family. Readers can expect this guide to walk them through important conversations that will lead to a happier, healthier life together.
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