Love Shrinks

For twenty years, Sharyn Wolf, a practicing psychotherapist and “relationship expert,” helped revitalize the marriages of countless couples. But while she was being interviewed on Oprah and 48 Hours about her bestselling books on how to flirt, find mates, and “stay lovers for life,” she was going home every night to a disastrous marriage of her own. How bad did it have to get for her to finally leave? In fifteen years of marriage, Sharyn and her husband had sex twice. Despite the fact that she was a bestselling author, her husband couldn’t bring himself to read a single one of her books. Communication between them had failed so utterly that the simple domestic activity of buying a couch together escalated to disastrous proportions. Yet through it all, they stayed together. In an effort to explain why, Sharyn ends each chapter with a story about her husband that shows why she couldn’t bear to leave this man who made her so unhappy. Painted against the backdrop of her psychotherapy practice, real-life patients, and the wacky story of her career trajectory, Sharyn turns her analytical eye on herself and her husband and deftly depicts a marriage on its long last legs.