‘This book highlights the fact that women are brought up to understand men’s emotional needs but men are not brought up to understand women’s.’ Woman

Many women today feel that they pour love, commitment and understanding into their relationships, but that it is not returned in kind. He seems secure and independent, she feels insecure and clingy.

The truth is that men and women are both dependent. But his needs are catered to so well – first by his mother, then by his girlfriend or wife – that he doesn’t know he has them, while her needs for closeness and tenderness are constantly rebuffed as he retreats from intimacy.

Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum set out to explore this crisis in the relationships of men and women. They explain how men have learned to ‘manage’ their dependency needs very differently to women, and why women feel dependent and hungry for love. Finally they show why dependency on both sides is the essential core of any successful relationship.

‘The old bargain has been shattered. Women want more than a man who makes a good living: they want a man who provides warmth and commitment.’ Vogue

‘It’s a question most women and many men have struggled with…this book comes up with the best answer so far.’ Woman

Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum are pioneers in the development and practice of feminist psychotherapy. In 1976 they founded the Women’s Therapy Centre in London which now provides counselling services for over five hundred women each year. Susie Orbach is the author of Fat is a Feminist Issue I and Fat is a Feminist Issue II, which revolutionized the treatment of compulsive eating in women. Luise Eichenbaum is the author of Outside In… Inside Out, Women’s Psychology: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Approach, and Bittersweet: Facing up to Feelings of Love, Envy and Competition in Women’s Friendships, also written with Susie Orbach.