Love More, Fight Less Review: A Kitchen-Table Workbook Test for a 31-Year Marriage

Glen and I have been married 31 years, and for most of them I would have told you we were fine. Then around year 24, with the kids out of the house, we looked at each other across the kitchen table and realized we mostly talked about logistics. Who was picking up the filter. Whether the gutters could wait. The same argument about money and his long work weeks kept coming back, and we kept having it the same way. So when I picked up Gina Senarighi's Love More, Fight Less workbook, I was not looking for a rescue. I was looking for a way to have a different conversation.

This review is about what happened when two tired people actually sat down with the book. We worked through it for eight weeks, one or two exercises a week, usually Sunday evening. Some of it felt like common sense dressed up nicely. Some of it started a fight. And a few pages changed the way we talk to each other in a way I did not expect from a workbook.

How I've Used It

I am Marlene Osterhout, a retired middle-school librarian in Bend, Oregon. Glen is a land surveyor who works long weeks and comes home tired. We are not counselors, and this review is not therapy advice. We are a married couple who has read a lot of relationship books and tried a lot of tools at our kitchen table, and this is the one we kept coming back to for two months.

We started on the first Sunday of January, after the holidays, when the house finally felt quiet. The kids were long gone by then, both grown and moved out, so the table was ours. I had bought the workbook on a whim after a friend mentioned it, and I left it on the counter for three days before Glen picked it up and asked what it was. That is how I knew he was willing. He does not ask about books he does not want to try. Before this book, we had tried other things. There was a question deck a friend gave us, the kind with prompts like 'what is your favorite memory of us?' We used it twice. It felt like an interview, not a conversation, and we both quietly stopped suggesting it. There was also a famous marriage book that Glen fell asleep in during chapter three and never picked up again. The difference with this workbook was the writing. It did not ask us to reminisce. It asked us to work, and that suited Glen better than any deck of cards ever did.

Our routine was simple. Sunday after dinner, we cleared the table, put the mugs down, and opened the workbook. I read the prompt out loud. Glen answered first sometimes, I answered first other times. We set a timer for fifteen minutes so the exercise did not turn into a marathon. Some weeks we did one exercise, some weeks two. If a page made one of us uncomfortable, we said so and skipped to the next one. That flexibility is built into the book, and it mattered. The first session was the hardest. The workbook asks you to name what you actually want from your partner, not what you want them to stop doing. Glen sat quiet for a long time. Then he said he wanted to come home and not feel like he had already failed the day. I almost cried. That single exchange, in the first twenty minutes, told me this book was going to be different from the ones that just list communication tips.

What the Workbook Actually Asks You to Do

Gina Senarighi organizes the book around communication skills rather than grand theories. Each chapter has a short explanation, then a set of written exercises, then a section for you and your partner to compare answers. The writing is warm and direct, the kind of voice that says 'try this tonight' instead of 'research suggests.'

The core skill is what Gina Senarighi calls listening to understand rather than listening to reply. I know, I know, every relationship book says that. The difference here is that the workbook makes you practice it on paper before you try it out loud. You write down what you think your partner just said, in your own words, and then they read it back and tell you where you got it wrong. Glen and I discovered I had been summarizing his feelings into my own categories for years. Our first attempt at the exercise was clumsy. Glen told me about a survey job that was running behind because the county was slow with permits. I wrote down 'he is frustrated with the county and worried the money will be late.' He read it and shook his head. 'It is not the money,' he said. 'It is that I told the crew we would finish by Friday and I do not like breaking a promise to them.' I had heard money because money is my anxiety, not his. Writing it down made the gap visible.

Another chapter that stuck was about the stories we tell ourselves about our partner's behavior. The book asks you to write the story you tell yourself when your partner is late, or quiet, or short with you. Then it asks you to write three other possible stories. Mine about Glen's long work weeks was 'he would rather be at work than here.' One of the alternatives was 'he is terrified of not providing for us and does not know how to stop.' I had never once considered that. That exercise alone was worth the book, and it is the one I recommend to friends.

The requests versus complaints chapter came later, and it is the one we still use. The workbook defines a complaint as a statement about what your partner is doing wrong and a request as a statement about what you need going forward. It sounds like a vocabulary lesson. On paper, it forced me to rewrite 'you never help around here' as 'I need you to take the trash out on Thursday nights without me asking.' Glen looked at the two sentences side by side and said the first one made him want to argue and the second one made him want to agree. He is not a man who talks about his feelings easily, so hearing him say that out loud meant something.

How It Held Up Over Eight Weeks

The first two weeks, we were diligent. The third week, Glen came home late on Sunday and I almost said 'never mind, we can skip it.' We did it anyway, and it was the best session we had. The exercise that night was about requests versus complaints, and I finally heard the difference between telling Glen what he was doing wrong and telling him what I needed. I wrote down 'I need you to tell me by Thursday if the weekend is going to be swallowed by work, so I can plan the rest of my weekend.' Glen wrote back that he could do that. It sounds small. It is not small.

Week four was when the money argument showed up, which I should have expected. The chapter asked us to describe a recurring fight in neutral language, without blame. Glen wrote about our disagreement over the boat he wanted to buy, the one I kept calling a luxury. I wrote about the same boat and called it 'a plan we never discussed together.' Reading our two versions side by side, the fight was not really about the boat. It was about who got to make the big decisions and who felt left out of them. We did not solve it that night. We did stop having the same shouting match about it, because we finally had words for what the shouting was covering.

Week five was the low point. The chapter on conflict styles asked us to rate ourselves on a scale, and Glen and I disagreed about what my score meant. I thought I was being direct. He thought I was being harsh. We had a real argument about a workbook page, which felt ridiculous and also felt like exactly the point. The book does not prevent fights. It gives you a shared language for what the fight is actually about.

Week six was the one I almost skipped for a different reason. I had a long, draining afternoon, the kind where every small errand felt heavy, and by the time the table was clear I was done. Glen said we could skip, and something in how he said it made me want to do the opposite. The exercise was short, maybe ten minutes, about acknowledging your partner's feelings before you offer a solution. Glen is a fixer. He hears a problem and starts solving it. That night I told him I was worn out and he just said 'that sounds exhausting, tell me more.' No advice. I nearly cried again. It took a workbook prompt to get him to do what he probably would have done naturally if I had ever asked for it. By week seven, the exercises were taking less time because we were doing the skill without the prompt. I would catch myself starting a sentence with 'you always' and stop, and Glen would say 'that is a complaint, try the request version.' We were coaching each other with the book's vocabulary. That is when I knew it had stuck.

The exercise that asked us to write three other possible stories about each other's behavior changed more in one evening than a year of good intentions had.

What I Liked and What I Did Not

The biggest surprise was how much Glen, who has never kept a journal and rolls his eyes at the word 'feelings,' came around to the writing. He grumbled through the first two exercises, but by week four he was the one who reminded me on Saturday nights that we had not picked a prompt yet. The book did not turn him into a different person. It gave him a format that did not feel like a lecture. He is a man who likes a clear task, and the workbook gives you one every time.

What did not work as well? The book is dense, and some chapters feel like they are making the same point twice. I also found myself wishing for a few more examples of what a completed exercise looks like. The workbook tells you what to do, and then it trusts you to do it. Most of the time that is a strength. Some nights, when we were tired, a filled-in example would have gotten us started faster.

Who This Is For

This workbook is for couples like us: married a long time, not in crisis, but stuck in the same loop. If you have the same argument about money or work or the kids every few weeks and you are tired of it, Gina Senarighi's exercises give you a way to name what is actually underneath. It is also great for couples who are newly serious and want to build good habits before the hard years. And it is especially good for people who, like me, need to write something down before they can say it out loud.

I also think this book works well for couples who have already done the work of staying together and now want the work of actually enjoying each other. We were not trying to save our marriage in January. We were trying to remember why we liked each other, and somewhere around week six we did. The check-in became the part of the week I looked forward to, and that is not something I could have said about any of our other tools.

Who Should Skip It

Skip this book if you are in an abusive relationship, if there is any fear or coercion in your home, or if one of you is in serious mental health distress. A workbook is not a substitute for a licensed professional, and Gina Senarighi would be the first to say so. Also skip it if you are not both willing to actually do the exercises. Reading the chapters without writing the answers is like reading a recipe and never turning on the stove. And if you are looking for a book that will change your partner without you having to change anything, this is not that book. No book is that book.

One more thing I would say honestly: if you are hoping a workbook will fix a specific betrayal or a years-long pattern of cruelty, this is not the tool. Gina Senarighi is clear in the introduction that the book is for building skills, not for repairing damage that needs a professional. We were lucky. Our problems were the boring kind, the ones that come from thirty years of two tired people getting sloppy with each other. For that, the workbook was exactly right. For the heavier stuff, please find a real human with a license.