Guide to Lasting Love
Reta Faye Walker
Brown Books Publishing Group (2025)
ISBN: 978-1612546971
Reviewed by Ada Jenkins for Reader Views (11/2025)
Have you ever felt disconnected from your significant other? Relationships have their ups and downs and, in my case, after sixteen years of marriage, this hands-on guide by experienced relationship councilor, Reta Faye Walker, piqued my interest. Guide to Lasting Love: A Therapist’s 21-Day Program to a Fulfilling Relationship is a repair and reconnection program for those in a long-term relationship. And, my goodness, this book gave me a lot to think about!
I was immediately drawn into the narrative by the author’s honest, down-to-earth tone. I found her openness and ability to draw from her own personal experience of marriage to be both refreshing and relatable. For instance, in the first chapter (Day 1), she recalls questioning the purpose of her own marriage: “…against a complicated backdrop of caregiving and hardship, raunchy family humor, pie baking, and trying hard to not cheat at Monopoly, I resumed the effort to find purpose in my marriage.” This made me smile, as it’s a scenario that I could certainly relate to.
My husband and I both agreed that the structure of this book encouraged us to sit down together and work through the chapters, interacting as we did so. There’s a practical element to this book, oftentimes with steps and strategies a couple can undertake together as a team. One of my favorite chapters is “Making a Match of Different Personalities.” It applied to us, as my husband and I are quite different, personality-wise. He’s an extrovert, and I’m an introvert, meaning he can be “especially driven, ambitious, status-conscious, and even rigidly organized…” Conversely, I’m pretty laid back.
This can lead to a “personality clash,” something that has affected us in the past. Sometimes I’ve found that he rushes to make decisions before I’ve even had a chance to process what’s happening! So, we took the strategies laid out by the author on board, such as learning to release control (for him), and speaking up and communicating my feelings more openly (for me). The end of each chapter invites readers to reflect further and take steps forward. For us, we listed two personality traits that affected us positively and two that weren’t so helpful. Then we asked one another to work on changing one of those traits.
The narrative is well-written, with a literary flair that helps clarify key concepts and ideas. I particularly enjoyed the following analogy when discussing the importance of connection: “If healthy relationships were pyramids, the element of connection would be the foundational base on top of which all the other parts are built.” This analogy emphasizes the importance of real, meaningful connection, which is what sustains a relationship after the honeymoon phase has passed.
With helpful strategies and a truly compassionate approach toward working through unresolved issues, Guide to Lasting Love is, I feel, an inspirational and attainable guide for couples who wish to reset their relationship. I think that Reta Faye Walker offers real hope here for those who might be struggling to find a way forward, or even couples who simply wish to deepen their connection.