How to Be an Adult in Relationships Review: A Therapist’s Perspective
By Desiree Evans, LCMHC
Introduction
Relationships tend to bring us face-to-face with needs, fears, and patterns that are much easier to overlook when we are alone. In How to Be an Adult in Relationships, psychotherapist David Richo offers a framework for understanding what emotionally mature love asks of us—not perfection, but presence, responsibility, and a willingness to see ourselves clearly.
The heart of the book is what Richo calls the Five A’s: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing. These qualities may sound simple, but they create a useful vocabulary for identifying what feels supportive in a relationship and what may be missing.
What the book gets right
One of the book’s strengths is its focus on personal responsibility without reducing relationships to a list of communication techniques. Richo asks readers to notice how old wounds, expectations, and protective habits affect the way they respond to closeness, disappointment, and conflict.
The Five A’s are especially useful because they make an abstract idea—feeling loved—more concrete. Attention means being emotionally present. Acceptance involves recognizing another person as they are. Appreciation communicates that the person and the relationship matter. Affection includes warmth and care. Allowing means making room for difference rather than trying to control another person into becoming more comfortable for us.
The framework can also help people move beyond the question, ‘Does this person love me?’ A more useful set of questions may be: Do I feel seen? Can I be myself? Can we tolerate difference? Are care and appreciation expressed in ways that each of us can recognize?
What deserves a closer look
The emphasis on self-awareness is valuable, but it should not be used to make one person responsible for repairing an unhealthy relationship alone. Acceptance and allowing do not require tolerating cruelty, coercion, chronic dishonesty, or abuse. Personal growth can help us respond differently, but it cannot create mutuality when the other person is unwilling or unsafe.
Some readers may also find the spiritual and mindfulness language more natural than others. The book is most useful when its concepts are treated as invitations for reflection rather than rules for how a mature person should always behave. Trauma, neurodivergence, culture, race, gender expectations, and lived experience can all affect how people communicate needs and protect themselves in relationships.
Who may find this book helpful
This book may be helpful if you repeatedly find yourself overfunctioning, withdrawing, seeking reassurance, avoiding conflict, or expecting a partner to resolve feelings that are difficult to hold on your own. It can also support couples who want language for discussing closeness without immediately deciding who is right or wrong.
It is not a substitute for therapy, particularly when a relationship includes fear, abuse, or significant instability. It is best used as a starting point for understanding patterns and deciding what kind of change is actually possible.
Questions to consider while reading
Which of the Five A’s comes most naturally to you? Which is hardest for you to give or receive?
When you feel hurt, do you move toward the other person, pull away, become critical, or try to solve the problem immediately?
What do you ask another person to provide that may also require attention from you?
Where does acceptance support intimacy—and where might you be confusing acceptance with tolerating harm?
How these ideas connect to therapy
In therapy, insight becomes useful when it helps you recognize a pattern while it is happening and make a different choice. The Five A’s can provide a shared language, but the deeper work is learning what makes attention, acceptance, or allowing difficult in the first place.
If you want help understanding the patterns shaping your relationships, learn more about online couples therapy in North Carolina or request a free 15-minute consultation.
About the author
Desiree Evans, LCMHC, provides online individual and couples therapy and adult ADHD and autism assessments throughout North Carolina.
