Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner's Brain Can Help You Defuse Conflicts and Spark Intimacy

"What the heck is my partner thinking?" is a common refrain in romantic relationships, and with good reason. 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 rituals, making it possible to actually neurologically prime the brain for greater love and fewer conflicts.

Wired for Love is a complete insider’s guide to understanding your partner’s brain and enjoying a romantic relationship built on love and trust. Synthesizing research findings on how and why love lasts drawn from neuroscience, attachment theory, and emotion regulation, this book presents ten guiding principles that can improve any relationship.

Strengthen your relationship by:

• Creating and maintaining a safe “couple bubble”
• Using morning and evening rituals to stay connected
• Learning to fight so that nobody loses
• Becoming the expert on what makes your partner feel loved

By learning to use simple gestures and words, readers can learn to put out emotional fires and help their partners feel more safe and secure. The no-fault view of conflict in this book encourages readers to move past a "warring brain" mentality and toward a more cooperative "loving brain" understanding of the relationship. This book is essential reading for couples and others interested in understanding 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 can discover how you and your partner are wired differently, you can overcome your differences to create a lasting intimate connection.

Stan Tatkin, PsyD, is a clinician, researcher, teacher, and developer of the psychobiological approach to couple therapy. He teaches and supervises family medicine residents at Kaiser Permanente in Woodland Hills and lives with his wife and daughter in Calabasas, CA.

Foreword writer Harville Hendrix, PhD, is a clinical pastoral counselor, cocreator of imago relationship therapy, and author of Getting the Love You Want.