This is not a long book, yet packed into its pages is a lot of experience, setting the record straight that indulgence leads to the sorrow of loneliness rather than happiness. During the first part of the book, I copied out a few of the things that I especially liked. For the rest, you will need to read the book yourself. (It's not that long.)

As a clinical worker, he is familiar with the research on marriage and relationships. He found that sociological researchers often fail to capture information about good marriages, and thus their conclusions are pessimistic and give a severely slanted view of what marriage is and ought to be.

"Those looking for easy recipes for intimacy will be disappointed. This is not a marriage handbook, nor a handy 10 step guide to fulfilling friendship, and not a weekend change your life program." (Page XV)

"My experience suggests that intimacy has two main components: Risk and commitment." (page 12)

"The pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud is an example. Much of his work, though presented as science, was actually creative and literary. Biographer Peter Drucker point out that 'Freud was deeply hurt by any hint that his theory was poetry and not science ... [yet] Freud was a very great artist, probably the greatest writer of German prose in this century.' Drucker also quotes novelist Thomas Mann, who on Freud's 80th birthday call psychoanalysis 'the greatest contribution to the art of the novel.' Another biographer, Frank Soloway, recently presented the troubling proposition that the theories of psychoanalysis may be 'the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the 20th century.'" (Page 19)

"The same reservations hold as we contemplate the influential philosophers and sevens who shaped the scientific method and educational process that has molded the current educational behavioral scientist. Many of those philosophers, eloquently constructing models for life's meaning, were unable to establish healthy, intimate relationships in their own lives. ...Their disservice to us is not that they were troubled or aloof but that they – or their disciples – implied they knew something which, in fact, they did not. With finite ideas, which even that their finite experience contradicted, they tried to overturn the infinite." (Page 20)

"Any relationship that can be 'terminated' just 'like any friendship' is not very satisfactory even as a definition of friendship. It certainly has no legal and cultural standing as a definition of marriage. Marriage is formal, exclusive, and intended to endure." (Page 21)

That is not all this book has to offer, but for the rest of it, I just enjoyed reading without taking notes. Perhaps the most important point is that intimacy is much more than sexual. A sexual relation without truly caring for the other person is hollow. That is pale satisfaction compared with the deeper and broader joy of a deeply committed caring relationship.
( )