Crossing the Tracks for Love: What to Do When You and Your Partner Grew Up in Different Worlds

by Ruby K. Payne

Book Overview

Crossing the Tracks for Love is a guide for successfully negotiating the barriers that divide economic classes. It explores the ways that people from poverty, middle class, and wealth view the world... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 192922933X
• ISBN13: 9781929229338
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: AHA! Process
• Length: 186 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Useful book.

I bought this book even though I expected to be disappointed. However, the book is very good, and I was not disappointed at all. On the contrary, the book is very useful. The best aspect of the book is that it is very concrete in its description of the details, and that it tries hard to avoid judging the different styles of living. Therefore, it enables the reader to understand the background of ones partner/friends/etc.

Crossing the tracks for love: what to do you do when you and your partner grew up in different world

This book is not only for people trying to understand their spouse. This helps understand and interact with other social classes. Its very informative and has dashes of humor. Its a quick read, and very informative.

Eye-opening and insightful, but needs a little more...

This book is a good place to start in terms of social class expectations, something that doesn't get talked about very much in American society. On a personal level, it gave me a lot of insight into a failed relationship with a working class man that I loved, and helped me understand why he chose to marry someone with more similar values. Still, what I hoped to see was a chapter or two on "What to Do When You and Your Partner Both Shift from One World to a Different One". This was the case with my parents, who came from working class backgrounds and retained working-class attitudes toward child-rearing despite adopting middle-class attitudes in other areas of life. Some people really do retain both sets of values rather than making the transition that the author implies occurs automatically. It would have been nice to see those viewpoints included. Also, middle-class and upper middle-class are two very different experiences in America, in my opinion. Some of the behaviors this author describes as middle class (extreme attention paid to quality of food, childrens' extracurricular activities, and the status of a college or university which a child attends) are more properly described as upper-middle class values. I wish the author had separated middle-class from upper middle-class, and used four basic categories instead of three. Nonetheless, I enjoyed this book and learned quite a bit from it. The author does a good job of explaining that a particular set of behaviors does not constitute stereotyping, since many who self-assess as being members of a specific class would not identify with all of the attributed associations (I found myself a hybrid of working-class and middle-class values). She also fits observations into general categories in a way that makes sense. The current edition is a good starting point for discussion, but an expanded version of this book would be even more insightful.

Dr. Payne Gives Great Advice and Problem Solving

This is truly an astonishing book that tells quite candidly how to work with and have relationships with people of different classes. I LOVED the class mindset quiz in the first part of the book. It made me think how the hidden rules of class do hinder relationships in both the business world and our personal relationships.

Great Topic ...

After hearing Dr. Payne on a radio show, I decided to buy the book. Not only has Dr. Payne helped me realize problems in my own personal relationships, but it has helped me realize my own issues with being a successful women who has come up from a poverty situation. I had my partner take Dr. Payne's Quiz that defines what type of class thinking you have. It was a fun way to discuss our very different views of marriage, finances, child rearing, and so much more. I highly recommend it