“Every Day Love” Book Review

“Every Day Love” is a Cleis Press published book written by Judy Ford that is a book about “The Delicate Art of Caring For Each Other”. The book is small in size – seven inches tall and five inches wide. It’s a paperback book with black and white pages. The book touches on sex, but very rarely – it just focuses on love between two partners. There are 263 pages in this book – all with comfortably large text to read. There’s a lot of the same decorations on the pages – including pictures of leaves, birds, and hearts. They end up decorating the free space. The front of the book shows flowers and other decorations while the back just shows reviews for the book. This is easily a book you can read in public.

While this is a pretty good book, it’s not intended to be read like a regular book. If you read it like a regular book, it’s a horrible read. With this book, there are different “life lessons” followed by some challenges to do to put those love lessons in practice in your regular life. In order for this book to be useful, you need to choose to spread this out a bit. I’d recommend reading one “life lesson” a week and attempting to put the challenges in place in your life throughout that week.

Basically, the life lessons all give good lessons. However, since each lesson is only a page and a half long, if you breeze through them, you aren’t going to take anything out of it. Each lesson is extremely short, easy to read, and takes less then five minutes of your time. Because it’s so short, everything is to the point, and if you do attempt to read more than one lesson, you are going to find yourself not really paying attention to any of the lessons.

The lessons themselves contain a lot of real-life stories about some of the clients Judy Ford has worked with. The stories are usually only about a paragraph in length, and unfortunately, sometimes she doesn’t give the “resolution” to the story which means that I’m left wondering what exactly happened to the couple. The stories usually relate to the lesson being taught, but sometimes I feel like I would have enjoyed having more detail about the couple in the story. However, the stories do get the point across and appear in a good majority of the life lessons contained in this book.

Along with the life lessons are the challenges, the challenges are a page long at the end of every life lesson. Since there about (about) 80 life lessons, there are also about 80 different challenges. Each challenge consists of five different things that Judy Ford things would be good for you to do to help drill in the point of the lessons. She says that the challenges are what she uses in her own therapy to help couples learn to get along and improve their love. The challenges include things like speaking to your partner, writing journal entries, and thinking about your feelings on certain issues.

As a note, all of the lessons in this book do assume that you and your partner aren’t have any deep issues. If you two need couple’s therapy, you need a lot more than this book provides. This book is intended for those couples who already have pretty good love with each other but want to bring that love to a whole new level. The lessons are only intended to strengthen the love you have – not add love that isn’t there.

I will make mention of the fact that Judy Ford really looks at love in an abstract, flowery manner. A lot of the discuss of love in this book is very hippie-esque. (I seriously can not think of another way to describe this. Pardon me if that sounds bad.) Love isn’t really discussed in terms of logical benefit, but instead, there is poetry and softened discussion about love and how it improves your soul. So if discussion of love in an abstract manner bothers you, it’s something to keep in mind. It usually doesn’t get in the way too much though I can easily see how it might bother a male since females usually discuss love in such a flowery manner.

So what do I think? I think “Every Day Love” is a good book if you don’t want to read it cover-to-cover. If you are okay with taking a long time to get fully through this book, and if you are seeking a stronger, closer relationship with your partner, “Every Day Love” provides an extremely easy, organized way to bring you and your partner together. Thanks to Cleis Press for sending me this book for review, so pick up your own copy of “Every Day Love“.