Do Self-Help Books About Relationships Really Help?

It’s typically women who read the books, not men.

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by Catherine Aponte

KEY POINTS

• Relationship self-help books are often aimed at women, who tend to feel both responsible for the well-being of their relationships and insecure about themselves.
• Much of the advice focuses on conforming to traditional gender roles, or suggests that the reader is “flawed” and needs to be “fixed.”
• While implicitly promising that self-improvement will also improve the reader’s relationship, self-help books often avoid addressing the resistant partner.
• Be sure to check the credentials of the author before diving into self-help.

There is no formal library catalog category called “self-help.” Self-help books can be categorized as “applied psychology,” “personal finance,” “philosophy,” “religion,” etc.

On Goodreads, a site that allows users to track books they read or want to read, books are assigned to a category by the reader. Books tagged as “self-help,” “biography,” “memoir,” and “autobiography” are read by mostly women, with “self-help” having the highest percentage of women readers. Books tagged with “psychology,” “business,” “science,” “philosophy,” and…