An interesting book, though I kind of resent the title- no relationship is “normal,” but it is intriguing to know where a mode of relationships lie on certain questions and what the bell curve looks like. I think a better title might have been something along the lines of “my relationship v. Most relationships.”

There were a few instances where this data was compared to other research, and I loved that. Wished there was more of it!

Nie spodziewałam się, że znajdę tu jakieś porady, a tym bardziej tak (w większości) sensowne i mocno nastawione na komunikację. Myślę, że nawet jak obecnie pewne rozwiązania nie są mi potrzebne tak je zapamiętać na przyszłość. Jednakże zawsze można coś ulepszyć, więc na pewno z czegoś skorzystam.

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.

Thought this would be more interesting than it actually was. The authors did an online survey about relationships and then shared with you "the new normal" and then hoped it would help you make your marriages better. But it seems to me that "normal" or "average" marriages aren't doing so hot, and I'd rather be a lot BETTER than "normal".

I thought that this was a pretty interesting book. It provides some good advice on how to make a relationship stronger.

So many summary statistics.

Spurious. That’s the word I would use to describe The Normal Bar. First of all, bar is such a cold and unwelcoming metaphor. I hear it, and I don’t think love relationships. The “tools” at the end of each chapter are also utilitarian and kind of masculine to me. When they started discussing prongs, I was like, are we building a house or a love relationship? The metaphors were so technical. We’re talking about normality. Why not use a more accessible i.e. gender neutral i.e. normal metaphor? Perhaps because the book isn’t about normalcy. Despite it’s claims to diversity, it’s really exclusive. It’s American and European read white. The only time African Americans were addresses was to note they trust each other less and cheat more. Each chapter included at least one cartoon. Only three characters were colored in. What’s normal about a survey that focuses on pretty much everyone but people of color? Oh my bad, there was also a passing mention of Latinos and Asians. In addition to that a majority the tips in the tools required quite a bit of disposable income. I was like, I’d love to do that, oh wait, on my salary, I can’t afford to do that to make my relationship better. So much for normal.
Then the data was just suspect. 100,000 people is more than I’ve ever surveyed. Yes, I admit that, but a book full of claims about 30% of this population is not generalizable to the world’s population (since they claim to be so diverse). If we can’t talk about at least half, then why are we talking? I learned next to nothing reading this book. I would never recommend it as a relationship book because there are so many books written by real relationship researchers that could actually be helpful. And to add another pet peeve they ran fast and loose with the data. Why would you flip the stats for your pull quotes? It just shows how easily everything you conveyed could be manipulated. For example, they might write, 90% of people are happy then the pull quote would read 10% of people are unhappy. Just plain sloppy. I know what bugs me the most about this book. It’s an internet book. It’s a book filled with cartoons and pithy quotes and stats and data that make for a good blog and a terrible book.

A little dry at time with all the statistics. No big surprises, but interesting and helpful

This book is a great read to give a barometer on what "normal" is based on surveys of 100k+ people.

When the responses were broken out by location, even though responses are from around the world, the text skewed to American responses and offering the European data as comparison and occasionally touching on Africa and Asia.

It did a good job of taking what we are assume are "normal" and showing whether that was true. They also do some split comparisons on some data, for example between happy and unhappy couples, gay v straight, new v seasoned. The authors also provided tools in each chapter based on what they actually learned from the responses.