April 26, 2024
Stroke It:
Your Guide to Enhancing Every Relationship, Especially With Yourself
Jenny Townsend
Aviva Publishing (2024)
ISBN: 978-1636183206
New Book Reveals How to Stroke Others to Enhance All Relationships
Jenny Townsend’s new book, Stroke It: Your Guide to Enhancing Every Relationship, Especially With Yourself is not a sex manual, although she includes advice on sex in the final chapter. Rather, it’s an inspirational relationships book. Townsend uses the term “stroke it” to reference how we can say and do things to show others we care and they matter to us, and as a result, we can improve all our relationships.
The book is divided into seven fun yet serious chapters, each focused on the type of stroking needed in a different kind of relationship. Probably the most important chapter, Chapter 1, is about how to improve your relationship with yourself. The successive chapters are about how to improve your relationship with your spouse or partner, your employer, your employees, your friends, and your family members, culminating in the most fun chapter, how to stroke it in the bedroom, i.e., how to improve your most significant relationship by improving your sex life.
Despite the play on words, Townsend wrote this book in the aftermath of a very serious situation. For a long time, she felt insecure in her relationship and even accused her spouse of cheating. Eventually, her husband did. When Townsend found out about the affair and her husband explained the other woman made him feel good, Townsend responded, “She stroked you mentally, emotionally, and physically.” That conversation inspired this Stroke It guide. Townsend realized that we all need to be stroked in all areas of life. She also realized some of her insecurities came from not stroking herself, that is not focusing on her own relationship with herself; if she didn’t feel good about herself, she couldn’t feel good about her marriage. While adultery would cause many people to divorce, Townsend took responsibility for her role in her marriage’s problems; while her husband had an affair with another person, she realized she’d had an affair with her career; both had caused pain and broke their marriage. She then set about learning how to do better.
Consequently, Chapter 1 is focused on how we can learn to connect with and stroke ourselves. It is the longest chapter because it sets the groundwork for how to feel better about yourself. Once you know how to do that, you can apply it to your other relationships. Often, the biggest challenge in taking care of yourself is learning to balance your personal and professional lives. While balance is not always easy to achieve, Townsend assures us, “After years of struggling, discovering an affair, contemplating divorce, and a pandemic, I can tell you it is 100 percent possible. Consider taking action, making changes, and Stroking It!”
Townsend goes on to discuss how our self-image and our expectations of ourselves and others can affect our happiness, and what decisions to make to improve our home life, even if at the expense of our professional life. In the end, our family life is more important than our work life. Even if we love our job and our coworkers, when we leave our jobs, we rarely stay in contact with our coworkers. The same is not true with our families.
That is not to say it isn’t important to stroke it in the workplace. While Townsend warns to avoid workplace romances in all their forms, she devotes a chapter to stroking your employer and another to stroking your employees. How do you stroke your employer? Ways include being loyal, supporting their ideas, and not complaining about them behind their back, which only leads to a toxic workplace. If you are an employer or boss, you can stroke your employees by giving them flexible schedules, celebrating their accomplishments, remembering their work anniversaries, and encouraging them to take care of themselves. Townsend, who owns a music school among other entrepreneurial ventures, recounts how when she told a team member, “If you poured as much time and energy into yourself as you do into your kids and job, you would be unstoppable and absolutely the happiest person alive,” the employee started crying. Everyone needs to be encouraged to do more for themselves.
When it comes to stroking it with your partner, Townsend makes her advice applicable to men and women. She states, “Men need [stroking] as much as women. Women need men even when they say they don’t. We’re in this together. We both want to be stroked, loved, and taken care of. However, men aren’t allowed to say what they need because it would show weakness…. Let’s get down to it to ensure everyone knows how to stroke their spouse/partner no matter their sex.” Townsend also discusses how to stroke better by responding to our partner’s preferred love language. Plus, she offers four ground rules for enhancing your relationships. Bottom line: Great relationships require time and stroking.
When it comes to friendships, Townsend encourages us just to stay in contact with others. She knows how too often people don’t call, assuming the other person is busy. She says to call anyway. We can’t assume things. People are lonely and want to connect. She encourages us to make the effort to contact three people each month to maintain our friendships.
The final chapter of this book, “Stroke It in the Bedroom,” is too hot to detail here. However, a lot of it boils down to building confidence with your partner and learning to understand each other’s needs. It’s also about honesty. Don’t lie and say you like something you don’t—that just encourages your partner to keep doing it—and don’t fake it. Be honest and you’ll both get better at stroking the other.
Today, Townsend assures us she is the happiest she has ever been because she has spent so much time learning how to stroke herself and others. She has found work-life balance, understands the value of “me time,” enjoys a strong marriage, and has learned how to enjoy life in the moment. Best of all, she has revealed her stroking secrets in this book so we can benefit from them. So what are you waiting for? Start stroking.
For more information about Jenny Townsend and Stroke It, visit www.JennyAldayTownsend.com.
— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of Odin’s Eye: A Marquette Time Travel Novel
