Contented Couples: Magic, Logic or Luck?

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.

Anne Power has an MA in History and was a nurse before studying attachment theory at The Bowlby Centre. After qualifying in couples work with Relate she trained in Emotion Focused Couple Therapy (EFT). She has published papers on attachment and one book: Forced Endings: Attachment and loss in retirement. She has contributed to oral history projects and sees her interviewing and story-collecting as borrowing from that tradition. After working for twenty-five years with clients in difficulty she wanted to hear from contented couples.

An elegant, comprehensive book about coupling . . . Anne's writing is captivating and so easy to fall into . . . Read this book to grow yourself and your relationship. - Dr. Kathryn Rheem, EFT Trainer, Co-Founder of the EFT Cafe Listening in to couples that thrive, who enjoy, trust and continue to develop is rare. Therapists tend to write about what needs changing, not what works. It is warming to hear these accounts of closeness in which obstacles are managed and which bring growth to both people. - Susie Orbach, psychoanalyst and author of The Impossibility of Sex A diverse cross-cultural perspective on the elusive mixture of magic, logic and luck that is involved in the making of a happy marriage . . . from random romance to self-arranged marriages - this book shows how an initial spark of attraction can be transformed into an ever-glowing cosy fire. - Raksha Pande, author of Learning to Love: Arranged Marriages and the British Indian Diaspora