February is the month that relationship books hit the bookshelves, and every day brings a new research study or feature article asking the question, “How can a couple best keep love alive?” Continue reading
In The News
Warning: Don’t Trust The Wall Street Journal To Give You Marriage Advice
Imagine that one morning you sit down to breakfast and your partner hands you a copy of your annual review. There in a bright yellow folder is a formal evaluation, complete with pie charts and bar graphs, highlighting the areas in which your spouse thought you’d excelled and where you’d fallen short.
“Over all, your performance is up from last year. Sex has improved, both in frequency and enthusiasm, and you’re also more punctual, which, as you recall, was a big problem last year. However, you continue to be far too irritable about the house being messy, complaining an average of five times a week…”
Sound far-fetched? Insulting? A sure first step toward divorce? Continue reading
Why Changing One Thing Changes Everything
If you had to guess the most frequently cited reason for divorce, what would you say?
Family violence? Infidelity? Money troubles?
Guess again.
In a recent study done in the UK, forty-seven percent of couples claimed that unreasonable behavior had prompted them to untie the knot.
My experience with couples in the US bears that out. It is well-documented that a vast majority of couples survive infidelity. Some studies suggest numbers as high as seventy-five percent.
Unreasonableness… that’s another thing entirely. Continue reading
Making It Last… and Last and Last
What if when you said “until death do us part” you were signing on to a marriage that may last as long as a century?
Today TIME.com ran a piece that talked about how with the possibility of some of us living to be one hundred fifty years old we may live long enough to have two or even three very long marriages.
I began to wonder, instead, what one would need to do to have one marriage that would remain vital and satisfying for a hundred years, or even longer? With a mere thirty-five years of marriage under my belt, my first thought was Continue reading
“I Should Do What??”
Trust and Forgiveness After An Affair
One of the first questions most people ask when seeking couples therapy after an affair is, “Can my marriage survive? Are people really able to heal after a betrayal like this?”
It can be reassuring to hear that, yes, a great majority of couples are able to not only survive, but eventually thrive in the wake of an affair. Yet for many, repair can, at first, seem beyond reach and forgiveness can seem all but impossible.
Today’s New York Times ran an article about the need to reestablish trust after an affair. Molly O’Shea, the marriage and family therapist interviewed in the article, said that she asks the betrayed spouse “what it would take to regain trust and what the cheating spouse can do to prove the affair was a mistake.”
Most of her clients tell her that they have no idea what it would take for them to regain their lost trust. 
Many assume that nothing will help. The problem, she believes, is that “they’re just so angry.”
I believe the problem is the flawed question she’s asked them. Continue reading
Speaking of Marriage 