Chrisanna Northrup

Even though it's talking about the statistical norm, there's something about the title of this book that's deeply objectionable. It's not pop psychology; it's barely even Anthropology Lite. It's crowdsourced opinions about relationship satisfaction, which might be interesting as a listicle, but not so much as a full book. I was looking forward to some good infographics or otherwise easily digestible statistics, and what I got was anecdata and superficially extrapolated advice with a side of percentages. A lot of it is of the "no duh" variety: happy people communicate well, make each other feel wanted and appreciated, and work on being good partners. Unhappy people tend not to do those so well.… (altro)

I was intrigued by the premise of this book: an enormous survey provides information about all aspects of relationships, giving us a sense of what “normal” is. And the book lived up to the concept, more or less. There are all sorts of interesting nuggets here, and it was a relatively quick and enjoyable read. There’s nothing really groundbreaking, but the material is certainly interesting enough on its own. Topics range from romance to communication to money to sex, with enough detail about that last one that I wouldn’t recommend the book to the prudish: you’ll learn, for example, that 52% of women swallow semen when performing oral sex.

I did have some concerns about the reliability of the data and the degree of analysis, though. There isn’t really much analysis to speak of; this is more a collection of “x percent of people said this, and y percent of people said that”. There were times when it might have been just as enlightening to see a straight-up table of results. The book is filled out by personal anecdotes from the survey subjects and various pieces of advice for improving our own relationships, sometimes offered up in an overly chipper tone. Some of the advice is good, but again, it wasn’t groundbreaking.

I was also a bit worried about the methodology, which is described in an appendix at the end of the book. All the data is based on a voluntary survey, where participants have a choice about which two topics they answer questions about. There are some core questions that everyone answers, but in general, the responses about family are from people who specifically chose to do questions about family, while the responses about sex are from people who specifically chose to do questions about sex. As the authors acknowledge, this means that the results are neither representative nor unbiased. They dismiss this an unimportant, with the arguments that a) it’s becoming harder and harder to get a truly random sampling; and b) it’s okay that the respondents are particularly interested in the quality of their relationships, because the book’s readers are like that too. I wasn’t entirely convinced.

Despite these flaws, I did enjoy the book as I was reading it. It didn’t take me long to finish, and I wasn’t bored. I’m just not sure how much important information I really took away from it in the end. If you’re interested in the topic, I’d cautiously recommend it, if only because I don’t know of any similar book to suggest as a substitute.… (altro)