Books to Read

Here are some interesting relationship books to read. No, they are not the typical relationship books nor are they self-help books; I am rarely writing about a typical approach nor do I really care to help you, my dear readers!

Instead these are books that outline some underlying research that Jenny and I found useful in the construction of our relationship principles. It may seem like a strange assortment of books, but we have found them useful:

Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert, a book citing some of the scientific studies that indicate the limitations of our ability to imagine, predict, and remember, and how this strongly undermines our struggle to be happy. The Amazon link includes an interesting review by Malcolm Gladwell. We found this helpful in understanding why we instinctually strive to undermine our rational relationship frameworks. It helped create sensors to warn us when we are falling into destructive patterns and ways to tempt us away from them.

Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking, by Thomas E. Kida, a book that illustrates how we fail to think rationally even when we think we are, and how such tendencies can be exploited by advertising, media, and other persons. In order to understand how to build a reliable and robust relationship it is important to understand the failure modes of the individuals in the relationship. Knowing these patterns tends to move us away from blame and toward constructive remedies.

The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships, by Temple Grandin and Sean Barron, actually a book  written to help people with autism or Asperger syndrome but illuminating what most of us take for granted in the expectations in relationships. By forcing us not to assume, we can construct some new sensors, effectors and interaction patterns based on these simple underlying interaction rules.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, Stanley Milgrim. A more updated view on the newer and more well known Stanford Prison Experiment and its context in the Abu Ghraib incidents is in The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, but I found the latter book to have more grandstanding. Useful to understand some of the roots of misbehavior: authority, assumption, privacy, and so on. I have directly or indirectly referenced such warning indicia in earlier posts concerning the challenges to fidelity.

Sometimes the underlying research citations are more illuminating, but higher level thematic guide such as these can be a good place to start for those who are serious about thinking about their relationships. I will add to this as I recall other texts we found useful.