Couples
On Loving Another

Quotes

“As a Buddhist teacher once confided to me years ago, the secret to happiness in a long term relationship is ‘letting go even when you know you’re right.’ Orna Guralnik’s invaluable book shows us how. Many couples will be grateful for the help.” —Mark Epstein MD, author of Going to Pieces without Falling Apart and The Zen of Therapy

“Coupling is knit by love and desire, just as love and desire unravel through hostilities, disappointments, socio-political strife, and lingering traumas. No one shows us how to hold love and trouble in mind better than Orna Guralnik. Her extraordinary devotion – alone - is a masterclass. Couples is destined to become a classic. It reads like a set of heartfelt short stories. You will look for Couples on a potential partner’s bedside table. If you don’t see it there, you’ll know to head for the door.” —Ken Corbett, author of Boyhoods and A Murder Over a Girl

Orna Guralnik’s Couples is a ravishing, unrestrained journey to the very heart of love. She moves effortlessly from the down-and-dirty traumas of daily relationships to Freud and Winnicott, to Hegel, Proust, and beyond. She shows us not only that it’s possible to walk a line between compassion and laser-eyed clarity, but that the line often doesn’t exist at all. Couples should be required reading for everyone who’s been in love, who’s in love now, or who hopes to fall in love. It should, in brief, be required reading for every human being on the planet.” —Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours

“This is an outstandingly good book taking us from understanding couples to trying to heal societies. Orna writes so well about these dilemmas and frozen conflicts as she points us towards compassion, connection and acceptance of ourselves and of our fellow humans.” —Susie Orbach, author of In Therapy and Fat is a Feminist Issue

“For a book called Couples, this is ultimately a book about the self. Orna Guralnik shows us how our most intimate relationships become the place where we encounter not only another person, but ourselves—and how the real challenge is learning to see the person we love clearly, beyond the distortions of our own histories, defenses, and fears. With extraordinary intelligence, compassion, and psychological depth, Guralnik reveals how love can become a path toward greater self-knowledge, empathy, and connection.” —Lori Gottlieb, bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

“Orna Guralnik’s Couples arrives like a godsend into a world strangely saturated with both ‘therapy speak’ and growing feelings of disconnection and dissatisfaction. By drawing on multiple models and methods at once – as well as on riveting real-life examples – Guralnik offers us a read that feels omnivorous, lucid, and most of all, supremely helpful (I couldn’t stop highlighting!). A must-read for those of us struggling to ‘land together on earth’ and love one another - which is to say, all of us.” —Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets and The Argonauts