Mars and Venus Starting Over: A Practical Guide for Finding Love Again After a Painful Breakup, Divorce, or the Loss of a Loved One - Softcover

Perhaps the book's most crucial chapter posits that the best way to get over the loss of love is to focus on the "love" more than the "loss." That may seem impossible, especially if the bum took off with your best friend, your life savings, and your Lyle Lovett CDs, but Gray didn't get to be a household name because the advice in his Venus and Mars books doesn't work. Remembering only the bad parts, Gray says, leaves you with an important part of your emotional being closed to new business.

As for the Venus and Mars stuff, that comes in the second half of the book, when Gray looks at how men and women start new relationships from different points of view, with different priorities (a man might want to have fun with no strings attached; a woman might carry with her a lengthy list of requirements for her next partner, a list that excludes virtually all available men).

If you've never read Gray's work before, you have to be prepared to check your cynicism at the door. This is earnest stuff, but it's also based on decades of experience counseling clients. He's not one of those photogenic, nine-times-divorced shrinklets who's telling you how to conduct your relationships without any real clue of what makes love last. This is the real package: nothing glib, nothing quick and easy, nothing you could've figured out from a "Love Is..." cartoon.

John Gray has helped millions of men and women develop better relationships with his phenomenal New York Times bestseller Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.

Now he turns his attention to the millions of people who find themselves single again and compassionately presents a process for healing a broken heart. Here are just some of the issues and challenges John Gray covers in this supportive and practical guide to becoming whole again:

• Emotional Lag Time

• Grieving the Loss of Love

• Getting Unstuck

• Good Endings Make Good Beginnings

• Saying Good-bye with Love

• Processing Our Hot Spots

• 101 Ways to Heal Our Hearts

• Glorifying Our Past

• Over-Romanticizing

• Focusing on the Negative

• Who Needs a Man?

• Women Who Do Too Much

• Fear of Intimacy

• My Children Need Me

• All or Nothing

• Work, Money, and Love

• Positive Addictions

• We Don't Have to Stop Loving

• Soul Mates Are Not Perfect

• Can't Live With Them and Can't Live Without Them

• HoldingBack

• Bigger Is Better

• Self-Destructive Tendencies