Love Shrinks

A highly successful couples therapist reveals the true story of her own failed marriage—and reflects on why we stay so long in unhappy relationships.

For years, Sharyn Wolf was a practicing psychotherapist and “relationship expert” revitalizing the marriages of countless couples. But while she was being interviewed on Oprah and other shows and writing bestselling books, instructing millions on how to flirt, find mates, and “stay lovers for life,” she was going home every night to a dark secret: a totally failed marriage of her own to a good man she just couldn’t leave.

In a memoir that ranges from poignant to horrifying to side-splittingly funny to heart-rending, Wolf explains how it is possible for two good people to make each other miserable and yet still be unable to leave. In fifteen years of marriage, she and her husband had sex twice. Despite the fact that Wolf was a renowned self-help author, her husband couldn’t bring himself to read a single one of her books. Communication between them had broken down so utterly that the simple domestic activity of buying a couch together escalated to disastrous proportions. Yet through it all, they stayed together—even though neither one knew why.

With touching anecdotes that help reveal why she could never bear to leave this man who made her so unhappy, Wolf turns her analytical eye on herself and her husband, and deftly depicts a marriage on its long last legs. The result is a sad yet beautiful tapestry that ultimately sheds a universal light on the human condition.