Romancing Your Better Half

Johnson, Rick. Romancing Your Better Half: Keeping Intimacy Alive in Your Marriage. Grand Rapids: Revell, 2015.

Johnson has written a book to help marriages, particularly newer ones, survive and thrive. When I first began reading the book, I had the impression that the book was pretty negative. Everything seemed to involve things "not to do" rather than focusing on what to do. As I got a few chapters into the book, this began to change. As the book became more optimistic, I began to enjoy it more. Johnson seems to quote heavily from other authors on the topic. I saw similarities to Willard Harley's His Needs, Her Needs and Gary Chapman's The Five Love Languages that I read in a graduate course for a unit on pre-marital counseling. He also quoted Gary Thomas, a well-known Christian marriage author, several times. While I don't think there is a lot of new material here, I do think it is presented in a practical way that many couples may appreciate. There are bullet-pointed tips at the end of each chapter to help couples apply the material in the chapter. There are also some practical lists at the end of the book following the end notes which may be overlooked by many readers who stop when they reach the references. This review is based on an advance e-galley provided by the publisher through NetGalley for review purposes.