Main description:

What is the secret of a long and contented marriage?

In this book, Anne Power interviews eighteen contented couples in the USA and the UK to discuss how they found each other and what made it work. As well as couples brought together by family arrangement or random romance, we meet those introduced deliberately by friends, or through agencies and the internet. Almost all the couples interviewed had faced major challenges along the way - but their attachment grew and relationships survived. In this book they tell us why.

The author uses some of the questions she puts to new couples in therapy: What does an argument look like? How has sex been across the years? Who has grown up the most over their time together? What stopped them from becoming a divorce statistic?

Woven through the book are expert, jargon-free explanations of how couples attach, how they fight and how they repair. Each chapter ends with questions which invite us to reflect on our own relationships and to benefit personally from this chance to eavesdrop on contented couples.

Contents:

The couples

Introduction

Chapter 1: What makes a 'good enough' marriage?

Chapter 2: Attachment and the couple bond

Chapter 3: Random romance - looks like magic

Chapter 4: Arranged marriage - looks like logic but could be magic

Chapter 5: Self-arranged marriage - can lay claim to magic and logic

Chapter 6: Selection

Chapter 7: Staying power

Chapter 8: Support and challenge

Chapter 9: Fighting, money and sex

Chapter 10: Conclusion

Appendix i: How this study was conducted

Appendix ii: What have we learned which could be helpful to single people?

Glossary

References

Further reading

Index

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