Gen X relationships aren’t broken—the model they inherited is.
This wasn’t a screwup; it was a setup. Generation X was raised on the notion that the world was theirs for the taking. Men were told they just needed to earn money and step up their parenting game, while women got the message that they should somehow do it all so they could have it all. They weren’t supposed to need anyone or anything, and no one taught them how to be full, equal partners.
The result: burned-out women, lonely men, and relationships in desperate need of creative redesign.
New Release
"It’s Not the Marriage,
It’s the Model"
Gen XO
In Gen XO, Kate Engler, LMFT, CST, draws on relational psychology, sociology, history, and more than a decade of clinical practice and research to trace how Gen Xers—herself included—internalized contradictory scripts about self-sufficiency, partnership, gender roles, and need, then spent their adult lives trying to make them work.
Gen XO introduces original frameworks that finally give language to what Generation X has been living without words for:
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The No-Needs Contract
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The Good Guy Problem
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The Cool Girl/Fine Guy Dynamic
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The Do-It-All-Have-It-All Script
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Creative Relationship Redesign
Engler makes the case that the chronic inequity, exhaustion, and quiet resentment simmering under so many otherwise functional Gen X partnerships aren't the product of bad choices or personal deficiency. They're the predictable outcome of a generation handed relationship blueprints that were already obsolete on arrival: the boomer domestic model collapsing on one side and the feminist promise of equality arriving without a roadmap on the other, with no workable alternative in between.
Gen XO is both a diagnosis and an invitation. Written with clinical precision and the dry wit of someone who has sat with this generation's pain both professionally and personally, Gen XO is the answer Generation X didn't know they were waiting for: permission to finally stop blaming themselves and start asking different questions.
PRE-ORDER BEGINS 9/15
Kate Engler, LMFT, CST, is a relationship and sex therapist and a Certified Fair Play Facilitator. She is also the founder of Three Points Relationships, a group therapy practice in the Chicago area. Kate came to this work the way most of her clients do: the hard way. Discovering that the struggles she'd chalked up to her own shortcomings were, in fact, common among Gen Xers changed the course of her career. She's spent the years since helping her clients trade shame for the relief of knowing relationships are hard for everyone—not just for them.
Kate’s writing appears in the Psychology Today blog "Gen XO," and her clinical perspective has been featured in Time, Newsweek, SELF, and Bustle. She lives in the Evanston, Illinois, area with her family and a dog named Arlo, who has never once respected the concept of personal space in a relationship.
“In this powerful, eye-opening book, Kate Engler makes visible the forces shaping Generation X relationships that too often go unseen. She debunks the myth that our problems can be chalked up to interpersonal difficulties alone and explores the outdated relationship template we inherited. With Gen XO, Engler is starting a conversation that matters. A must-read for Gen X women and men alike.”
- Eve Rodsky, New York Times bestselling author of Fair Play
