Wired for Love

The complete “insider’s guide” to understanding your partner’s brain, sparking lasting connection, and enjoying a romantic relationship built on love and trust now with more than 170,000 copies sold.

“What the heck is my partner thinking?” “Why do they always react like this?” “How can we get back that connection we had in the beginning?” If you’ve ever asked yourself these questions, you aren’t alone, and it doesn’t mean that your relationship is doomed. Every person is wired for love differently with different habits, needs, and reactions to conflict. The good news is that most people’s minds work in predictable ways and respond well to security, attachment, and routines, making it possible to neurologically prime the brain for greater love and connection and fewer conflicts. This go-to guide will show you how.

Drawn from neuroscience, attachment theory, and emotion regulation, this highly anticipated second edition of Wired for Love presents cutting-edge research on how and why love lasts, and offers ten guiding principles that can improve any relationship. This fully revised and updated edition also includes new guidance on how to manage disagreements, as well as new exercises to help you create a sense of safety and security, establish healthy conflict ground rules, and deal with the threat of the third any outside source which threatens the harmony in your relationship, including in-laws, alcohol, children, and affairs.

You’ll find proven-effective strategies to help you strengthen your relationship by:

• Creating and maintaining a safe “couple bubble”

Using morning and evening routines to stay connected

Learning how to see your partner’s point of view

Meeting each other halfway in a fight

Becoming the expert on what makes your partner feel loved

By using simple gestures and words, you’ll learn to put out emotional fires and help your partner feel appreciated and loved. You’ll also discover how to move past a “warring brain” mentality and toward a more cooperative “loving brain.” Most importantly, you’ll gain a better understanding of the complex dynamics at work behind love and trust in intimate relationships.

While there’s no doubt that love is an inexact science, if you understand how you and your partner are wired differently, you can overcome your differences, and create a lasting intimate connection.

About the Author

Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT, is a clinician, researcher, teacher, and developer of the psychobiological approach to couples therapy. He is assistant clinical professor in the family medicine department at the University of California, Los Angeles and is on the adjunct faculty of the masters psychology program at Antioch University in Santa Barbara, the masters psychology program at the California Lutheran University of Thousand Oaks, and the doctoral pre- and perinatal psychology program at Santa Barbara Graduate Institute. He teaches and supervises psychology students at Kaiser Permanente in Woodland Hills and is the creator of A Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy, or PACT. He is coauthor of Love and War in Intimate Relationships.