How to Be an Adult in Relationships

Psychotherapist David Richo, writing from a Buddhist-influenced perspective, argues that love requires specific, learnable skills organized around five core aspects he calls the "five A's": attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing. These elements serve simultaneously as the building blocks of childhood identity, the requirements of adult intimacy, and the qualities of mindfulness practice. The book integrates Western psychological tools for addressing, processing, and resolving personal issues with Eastern and Western spiritual practices such as letting go of ego and cultivating loving-kindness. Throughout, Richo uses the heroic journey as a guiding metaphor: leaving the familiar, passing through struggle, and returning home with higher consciousness, a pattern he sees mirrored in the phases of intimate relationships.

Richo begins by examining how early childhood experience shapes adult relationships. He contends that most people had good-enough parenting, enabling them to relate in healthy ways, while those who experienced serious childhood neglect or abuse may need extensive personal work before intimacy becomes possible. He distinguishes between the healthy ego, which organizes mental processes coherently, and the neurotic ego, driven by fear and desire, manifesting as arrogance, entitlement, and the compulsion to control. He reconciles Western psychology's emphasis on building a sense of self with Buddhism's emphasis on releasing the illusion of a fixed self, arguing that one must first establish a healthy ego before transcending its limitations.

Mindfulness, defined as bare attention to the here and now free of ego-based fears, desires, expectations, and defenses, is the book's central spiritual practice. Richo distinguishes compassionate witnessing, observing from a loving perspective, from dispassionate witnessing, a stance of passive indifference, and identifies the former as the proper mode for relationships. Each of the five A's receives detailed treatment. Attention means engaged focus and sensitivity to another's needs. Acceptance means being received respectfully with all one's feelings and traits. Appreciation acknowledges someone's worth and expresses gratitude. Affection encompasses love expressed emotionally, spiritually, and physically. Allowing supports inherent freedom, encouraging a person to act on their own choices rather than being controlled. Against these five qualities, Richo sets five ego mindsets that block authentic presence: fear, desire, judgment, control, and illusion. Each disrupts the giving of the five A's, though each also contains useful energy that can be redirected.

The second chapter introduces mirroring, the accurate and warm reflection of one's feelings by another, as the essential need underlying all five A's. When feelings fail to find attunement, they remain buried or become a source of shame. Richo shares a personal anecdote about discovering, during a body-therapy session at age 42, a vivid memory of his aunt's full refrigerator versus his family's usually empty one, illustrating how the body stores memories of deprivation that the conscious mind may deny. People trained early to endure deprivation often replicate that pattern in adult relationships, tolerating emotional scarcity because they were conditioned to view it as normal. Richo also reframes suffering as part of the heroic journey, arguing that wounds and betrayals can serve as initiatory thresholds for growth.

Turning to partner selection, Richo identifies investigation as the first of four relationship phases: investigation, romance, conflict, and commitment. He argues that promising partners arrive when one neither desperately seeks nor rigidly avoids connection but trusts the power of synchronicity, the occurrence of meaningful coincidences that further personal destiny. He outlines criteria for a qualified partner, including the ability to give and receive love, handle feelings, keep agreements, and follow a reconciliation rather than retaliation model. He warns against sexualizing emotional needs, arguing that people sometimes pursue sexual relationships because they believe a sexual response can fulfill unmet needs for the five A's.

Romance, the second phase, is real but temporary. It shows only the bright side of a partner while the shadow remains hidden. Richo distinguishes "falling in love," which implies powerlessness, from "rising in love," which involves conscious choice and clear-eyed fondness. When romance becomes addictive, it halts at the crest of excitement; Richo uses Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights as an example of what is commonly read as a great love story but is actually a story of addiction.

Conflict, the third and usually longest phase, replaces idealized romance with reality. Past conflicts from childhood surface, and partners instinctively reenact their earliest disappointments. Richo introduces a three-part framework for resolution: addressing what is happening, processing feelings and their roots, and resolving through agreements that lead to change. He draws a detailed distinction between healthy anger, which is mindful and aims at deeper connection, and abuse, which is ego-driven and aims to intimidate.

The book examines two central relationship fears: engulfment, the fear that closeness will smother one's freedom, and abandonment, the fear that a partner's departure will be emotionally unsurvivable. Richo offers a "Three-A Approach": Admit the fear without blame, allow it by feeling it fully, and act as if it cannot stop you. He also addresses jealousy, infidelity, and disappointment, reframing each as an opportunity for growth rather than a catastrophe. He tells the story of Katrina, who spent 45 years married to an unfaithful husband, nursed him through Alzheimer's disease, and now at 65 mourns not her dead husband but her own lost life, illustrating how cultural conditioning can trap someone in a model of servitude and how mourning the past can enable late-life reinvention.

The ego, both inflated and impoverished, is identified as the main obstacle to intimacy. Richo names the inflated ego's defining features with the acronym F.A.C.E.: Fear, Attachment, Control, and Entitlement. He calls the neurotic ego the "King Baby": like a king it demands divine rights; like a baby it mobilizes others around its needs. He identifies five attitudes of the impoverished ego, including victim, follower, self-blamer, unworthy, and unimportant, while also locating a kernel of positive potential in each. He presents five conditions of existence that the ego resists: Everything changes and ends; suffering is part of growth; things do not always go according to plan; life is not always fair; and people are not always loving and loyal. Accepting these givens unconditionally is the foundation for both serenity and intimate love.

In the commitment phase, partners let go of the ego's insistence on being right and allow conflicts to end in resolution. Richo distinguishes between an essential bond, the unconditional connection that persists even through separation or death, and an existential commitment, the daily choice to show love, work through conflicts, and remain faithful. The final chapter addresses grief when relationships end. Richo presents the journal of Selene, a psychiatrist whose fear of engulfment shapes her five-year relationship with Jesse, an engineer who fears abandonment. When Jesse leaves for someone else, Selene's entries track her movement through denial and obsession toward recognizing that Jesse triggered unresolved childhood abandonment by her father.

In his epilogue and appendix, Richo outlines an eight-step program for mindful grief work on childhood losses, progressing from allowing oneself to remember and feel, through replaying painful scenes and dropping expectations, to self-parenting by granting oneself the five A's. He shares a story about his father, who left when Richo was two: Years later, crossing a street in San Francisco, he heard an inner voice say his father was meant to be a father only by contributing to his birth, and from that moment his desire for anything more ended. The last step of mourning, he concludes, is the first step of intimacy, and grief work reaches completion only when it gives rise to compassion for suffering in the wider world.