The key ideas

Getting the Love You Want

Harville Hendrix, 1988

Why does falling in love feel like recognition, and why does the same person start to drive you up the wall a couple of years later? Harville Hendrix shows that we choose a partner by an image formed in childhood, and secretly expect them to give us what we missed back then. You will learn how to turn the power struggle into a conscious partnership: with a special kind of dialogue, a request instead of a reproach, and care that brings the romance back.

Who it is for

For couples who love each other but keep having the same fight over and over. And for anyone who keeps being drawn to the same kind of person and wants to understand why.

He thought he was in love with a person, but in fact he was in love with an image projected onto that person.

A question he could not answer

In 1975 Harville Hendrix walked out of the courthouse where he had just been divorced and went to teach a class on marriage and the family. After the lecture a student who had also recently divorced came up to him and asked: why is it so hard for couples to stay together? Hendrix answered honestly that he did not know. And he added that he would probably spend the rest of his life on that question.

Two years later he met Helen LaKelly Hunt, and they went looking for the answer together. They created a method of working with couples that they called Imago, and in 1988 this book came out. In later editions Helen became its co-author.

The book's main idea is a surprise. We do not choose a partner by chance, and not only by taste. We are drawn to someone who in some way resembles the people who raised us, in their good traits and their difficult ones alike. Hidden in that choice is an attempt to finish what was left unfinished in childhood. So in the authors' logic, the fights that feel like the end of love are its next stage.

You will see why falling in love feels so much like recognition, why a struggle follows it, and how a couple can turn that struggle into growth. The book also has simple tools: a special way of talking, a request instead of a reproach, and a return of romance that starts with a short list.

"I feel like I've known you all my life"

Hendrix noticed that people in love say almost the same words to each other, and he boiled them down to four feelings. The first is recognition: "We've only just met, but I feel like I've known you for ages." The second is timelessness: "I can't remember a time when you weren't in my life." The third is reunification: "With you I'm not lonely anymore, as if a missing piece has come back." The fourth is necessity: "I can't live without you."

These words are usually taken as a sign of fate. Hendrix reads them differently. You can only recognize what you have already seen. If someone feels like family from the first evening, they remind you of something. The person in love usually does not know what it is.

That is where the feeling of wholeness comes from, too. In the author's view, next to this person something long lost seems to come back to us: warmth we were missing, or a trait we had to hide in ourselves. That is why being apart feels unbearable, even though you have known each other for only a month.

The mistake is to take the strength of the feeling as a guarantee. Its strength tells you how precisely this person matches something inside you. It tells you nothing about how the two of you will be together a year from now. To understand what exactly they match, Hendrix suggests looking back at childhood.

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About the author

Harville Hendrix is an American couples researcher and teacher. Together with his wife, Helen LaKelly Hunt, he created Imago, a method now used with couples in many countries.

All books by this author: Harville Hendrix

Terms from the book

  • Empathy
  • mirroring
  • Projection
  • Power struggle
  • Validation
  • Hunt: Helen LaKelly Hunt, an American researcher and public figure, Hendrix's wife and co-creator of the Imago method. Later editions of the book name her as co-author.
  • Imago: Hendrix's concept, not a scientific term: an unconscious image made of the good and the difficult traits of everyone who raised a person. In Latin, imago means "image".
  • Old brain: An image from Hendrix's model, a greatly simplified picture: the ancient parts of the brain that handle survival, have no sense of time and barely tell a partner from a parent. Not exact anatomy.
  • Fuser: A role in Hendrix's model: the partner who needs more closeness and chases the other one. Not a diagnosis and not a personality type.
  • Isolator: A role in Hendrix's model: the partner who needs more space and retreats when chased. Not a diagnosis and not a personality type.
  • Lost self: Hendrix's concept: the traits and feelings a person had to suppress in childhood in order to be accepted.
  • False self: Hendrix's concept: the mask a person built to protect themselves and to be liked by others.
  • Disowned self: Hendrix's concept: the unpleasant traits a person has but does not admit to having.
  • Conscious partnership: Hendrix's concept: a relationship in which two people understand their childhood expectations and help each other on purpose, instead of making blind demands.
  • Behavior change request: A tool from the book: a complaint becomes a concrete, doable request for a limited time, which the partner can fulfill as a gift.

All terms

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