Keeping the Love You Find

What it is about

Keeping the Love You Find is Harville Hendrix’s companion to Getting the Love You Want, written for people choosing a partner or just beginning, and using the same Imago account of repetition and repair. Partner choice is described as a pull toward the familiar unfinished business of childhood: the person who can both attract and reopen an old frustration. The work at this stage is to see that pattern in one’s own history before the power struggle is the only way it becomes visible. It does not promise that clearer sight will produce a frictionless match, and it is not a method for screening people without their knowledge.

Questions it can answer

• How does this book connect partner choice with unfinished childhood business?
• What is the work of seeing a pattern while one is still choosing, rather than only after the fight has started?
• What does Hendrix think cannot be skipped by finding a more exciting person?

What you will not find

• Evidence that every partner is a replica of a parent
• A screening tool for a dangerous relationship, used in secret
• The later short statement of household ideas written with Hunt