cover image You're Not What I Expected: Learning to Love the Opposite Sex

You're Not What I Expected: Learning to Love the Opposite Sex

Polly Young-Eisendrath. William Morrow & Company, $23 (416pp) ISBN 978-0-688-11434-3

Along with reciprocal trust and shared power, dialogue between equals ``on a personal and public level'' is essential to the experience of full intimacy in heterosexual relationships. So argues Jungian therapist and feminist Young-Eisendrath ( Hags and Heroes ) in this persuasive guide. In accessible language, she demonstrates that culture, not biology, promotes the gender-based stereotypes that, along with shattered dreams, often prevent couples from establishing true intimacy. The reader sits in on intensive sessions of ``dialogue therapy'' as practiced by the author and her social worker husband, Ed Epstein, with four composite couples. In addition to aiding the husbands and wives in facing their own and each other's limitations and negative feelings, these dialogues are intended to foster ``mature dependence'' and to lead the couples to the recognition that attachment and suffering go together. (May)