Book Review: Seth’s Seashell Methods of Marriage by T. Seth Cox
Some books catch you with their cover design, others with a famous author. This book’s title: Seth’s Seashell Methods of Marriage: Meeting Needs, Understanding Controlling Personalities, and Standing for Your Marriage the Seashell Way is what gave my noggin about a quarter-turn. What is the “seashell method?” I wondered immediately, “And what does it have to do with marriage?” I was hooked.
This book is about seashells and marriage, yes, but it goes deeper than any marriage book I’ve read before. I’ll get to that in a minute – but first, SEASHELLS?!? Do you remember the old saying,
“She sells seashells by the seashore.
The shells that she sells are seashells I’m sure.”
Seth Cox (http://www.marriagewalk.com) takes this simple rhyme and asks the basic question: “SHE DID WHAT?” You’ve got to be a pretty smart cookie to sell seashells right on the beach – where they’re strewn about the sand for anyone to pick up free! You’ve got to be a incredible salesperson using everything in your arsenal to sell seashells by the seashore. It takes determination, customer care, patience and persistence, timeliness (the early bird gets the worm – or in this case, the best seashells,) and more. Cox describes this as the “Seashell Method” – you can apply it to any realm of life – business, sports, and of course, marriage.
This book proposes that if you are (or once were) married, you were at one point the best salesman in the world, for at least one person – your spouse. Think about it – you convinced your spouse that that against all odds, you would be the right choice out of billions of others to spend, not money, but an ENTIRE LIFE with! To cultivate a vibrant marriage, we must continue to care for our most important customer (our spouse).
Throughout the book, Cox attempts to make us better “salespeople” in our marriage using the Seashell Method. By giving us practicals on developing a life-long relationship, on meeting our spouse’s needs, on communicating our own wants and desires, on gaining your spouse’s trust, and more, Cox offers advice that quickly goes beyond the slightly-stretched metaphor of sales to the deepest issues facing marriages across the globe. He takes on issues that no other marriage book I’ve read ever has, and deals with them not through anecdotes, but through his deep, learned wisdom. You can sense he’s been there too – but he never makes this book about him, instead keeping the focus on the simple practices he knows will make a marriage last.
Few books on marriage take you past the feel-good topics of “meeting each other’s needs” to less popular topics like unwinding yourself from destructive patterns of controlling your spouse, or the personal temptation of lust. How many other books on the subject give you a firm, steady hand in guiding you when your spouse has left you and your left to stand for your marriage on your own? Millions are struggling with these issues, and I’m thankful that for the first time, I see them dealt with on the printed page. Cox handles these raw elements of life and marriage with gentle wisdom, and offers hope and practical advice.
Marriage is not what we see in movies, though that is often our expectation entering into such a sacred covenant with another person. While it seems marriage is the most ancient of human endeavors, there is still such a mystery surrounding how to simply live together. I doubly recommend Cox’s book, as well as his popular Marriage Walk website. Anyone with Cox’s ability to speak with courage and honesty to the rewarding, yet tough reality of married life ought to stay close to the keyboard – keep writing Seth!
Consider a tree – it receives its best nourishment not from the most impressive and strongest part, the trunk. But the trunk is merely the highway of connectivity. When you look for where the real power of a tree resides, look to the thousands of tiny leaves, soaking in the sunlight and nutrients. If you can, pull up some of the roots and examine how frail and yet how essential they are in drinking up the liquid life that would otherwise be inaccessible to a starving tree. The tree, as the strongest organism in the forest, depends on the collective power of its smallest and weakest parts to survive.