The Marriage Paradox


Book Description

The Marriage Paradox explores both national U.S. data and a smaller sample of emerging adults to find out how they really view marriage today. Interspersed with real stories and insight from emerging adults themselves, this book attempts to make sense of the increasingly paradoxical ways that young adults are thinking about marriage.




The Marriage Paradox


Book Description

Marriage has been declared dead by many scholars and the media. Marriage rates are dropping, divorce rates remain high, and marriage no longer enjoys the prominence it once held. Especially among young adults, marriage may seem like a relic of a distant past. Yet young adults continue to report that marriage is important to them, and they may not be abandoning marriage, as many would assume. The Marriage Paradox explores both national U.S. data and a smaller sample of emerging adults to find out how they really view marriage today. Interspersed with real stories and insight from emerging adults themselves, this book attempts to make sense of the increasingly paradoxical ways that young adults are thinking about marriage. The combination of national trends, statistical findings, and quotations from emerging adults makes for a deep exploration of why we see the marital trends of today, and why they may not actually represent emerging adults moving away from marriage.




The All-or-Nothing Marriage


Book Description

“After years of debate and inquiry, the key to a great marriage remained shrouded in mystery. Until now...”—Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success Eli J. Finkel's insightful and ground-breaking investigation of marriage clearly shows that the best marriages today are better than the best marriages of earlier eras. Indeed, they are the best marriages the world has ever known. He presents his findings here for the first time in this lucid, inspiring guide to modern marital bliss. The All-or-Nothing Marriage reverse engineers fulfilling marriages—from the “traditional” to the utterly nontraditional—and shows how any marriage can be better. The primary function of marriage from 1620 to 1850 was food, shelter, and protection from violence; from 1850 to 1965, the purpose revolved around love and companionship. But today, a new kind of marriage has emerged, one oriented toward self-discover, self-esteem, and personal growth. Finkel combines cutting-edge scientific research with practical advice; he considers paths to better communication and responsiveness; he offers guidance on when to recalibrate our expectations; and he even introduces a set of must-try “lovehacks.” This is a book for the newlywed to the empty nester, for those thinking about getting married or remarried, and for anyone looking for illuminating advice that will make a real difference to getting the most out of marriage today.




The Marriage-Go-Round


Book Description

In a landmark book that's "intriguing [and] provocative" and presents "an original thesis [to explain] this peculiar paradox—we idealize marriage and yet we’re so bad at it” (The New York Times). Andrew J. Cherlin's three decades of study have shown him that marriage in America is a social and political battlefield in a way that it isn’t in other developed countries. Americans marry and divorce more often and have more live-in partners than Europeans, and gay Americans have more interest in legalizing same-sex marriage. The difference comes from Americans’ embrace of two contradictory cultural ideals: marriage, a formal commitment to share one's life with another; and individualism, which emphasizes personal choice and self-development. Religion and law in America reinforce both of these behavioral poles, fueling turmoil in our family life and heated debate in our public life. Cherlin’s incisive diagnosis is an important contribution to the debate and points the way to slowing down the partnership merry-go-round.




The Paradox of Love


Book Description

"The sexual revolution is justly celebrated for the freedoms it brought - birth control, the decriminalization of abortion, the liberalization of divorce, greater equality between the sexes, women's massive entry into the workforce, and more tolerance of homosexuality. ...Bruckner argues that our new freedoms have brought new burdens and rules - without, however, wiping out the old rules, emotions, desies and arrangements: the couple, marriage, jealousy, the demand for fidelity, the war between constancy and inconstancy. It is no wonder that love, sex, and relationships today are so confusing, so difficult, and so paradoxical. Drawing on history, politics, psychology, literature, pop culture, and current events, this book ... exposes and dissects these paradoxes. Bruckner traces the roots of sexual liberation back to the Enlightenment in order to explain love's supreme paradox, epitomized by the 1960s oxymoron of "free love": the tension between freedom, which separates, and love, which attaches. Ashamed that our sex lives fail to live up to such liberated ideals, we have traded neuroses of repression for neuroses of inadequacy, and we overcompensate: "Our parents lied about their morality", Bruckner writes, but "we lie about our immorality." "--Book jacket.




The Love Paradox


Book Description

This book transforms! It surprises you. It intrigues you. Most of all it frees you! This is your invitation to value your self the way God values you, then discover the delightful impact it has on everyone else. You will experience how a Biblical love of self enhances your relationships. At first, The Love Paradox may seem absurd, but on reflection, it will actually produce a deep sense of satisfaction. Come on! Take the journey from what seems ridiculous to what is profoundly true. Lead others by loving your self. Join in the conversation at KarlGalik.com to explore the relationship between your personal well-being and its influence on your mission. Rev. Dr. Karl Galik Karl is a nationally recognized speaker, author and leadership coach specializing in the connection between personal well-being and success in life. His universal message has impacted a wide range of people including medical professionals, entrepreneurs, clergy and stay-at-home parents. He is a pastor with a Master's of Divinity and 29 years of pastoral experience. He has a second Master's in Marriage and Family Therapy as well as a Doctor of Ministry in Leadership. Karl has been married to Marilouise for over 35 years. Together they have three married children and four grandchildren.




Has Marriage for Love Failed?


Book Description

Today we like to think that marriage is a free choice based on love: that we freely choose whom to marry and that we do so, not so much for survival or social advantage, but for love. The invention of marriage for love inverted the old relationship between love and marriage. In the past, marriage was sacred, and love, if it existed at all, was a consequence of marriage; today, love is sacred and marriage is secondary. But now marriage appears to be becoming increasingly superfluous. For the past forty years or so, the number of weddings has been declining, the number of divorces exploding and the number of unmarried individuals and couples growing, while single-parent families are becoming more numerous. Love has triumphed over marriage but now it is destroying it from inside. So has the ideal of marriage for love failed, and has love finally been liberated from the shackles of marriage? In this brilliant and provocative book Pascal Bruckner argues that the old tension between love and marriage has not been resolved in favour of love, it has simply been displaced onto other levels. Even if it seems more straightforward, the contemporary landscape of love is far from euphoric: as in the past, infidelity, loss and betrayal are central to the plots of modern love, and the disenchantment is all the greater because marriages are voluntary and not imposed. But the collapse of the ideal of marriage for love is not necessarily a cause for remorse, because it demonstrates that love retains its subversive power. Love is not a glue to be put in the service of the institution of marriage: it is an explosive that blows up in our faces, dynamite pure and simple.




The Intimacy Paradox


Book Description

Although most people physically leave home by their early 20s, emotional separation from one's family is a more difficult process that can continue for a lifetime. Now available in paper for the first time, this acclaimed book addresses the struggle of adults to establish autonomy without sacrificing family connections. Donald S. Williamson presents personal authority therapy, an approach designed to simultaneously foster individual development and family-of-origin intimacy. Therapists are taken step by step through conducting individual, couple, and small group sessions that culminate in several sessions with each client and his or her parents. Writing with sensitivity and humor, the author demonstrates effective ways to help adult children construct new personal and family narratives, resolve intergenerational intimidation, and enjoy healthier, more equal relationships with parents and significant others.




All Joy and No Fun


Book Description

Thousands of books have examined the effects of parents on their children. In All Joy and No Fun, award-winning journalist Jennifer Senior now asks: what are the effects of children on their parents? In All Joy and No Fun, award-winning journalist Jennifer Senior tries to tackle this question, isolating and analyzing the many ways in which children reshape their parents' lives, whether it's their marriages, their jobs, their habits, their hobbies, their friendships, or their internal senses of self. She argues that changes in the last half century have radically altered the roles of today's mothers and fathers, making their mandates at once more complex and far less clear. Recruiting from a wide variety of sources—in history, sociology, economics, psychology, philosophy, and anthropology—she dissects both the timeless strains of parenting and the ones that are brand new, and then brings her research to life in the homes of ordinary parents around the country. The result is an unforgettable series of family portraits, starting with parents of young children and progressing to parents of teens. Through lively and accessible storytelling, Senior follows these mothers and fathers as they wrestle with some of parenthood's deepest vexations—and luxuriate in some of its finest rewards. Meticulously researched yet imbued with emotional intelligence, All Joy and No Fun makes us reconsider some of our culture's most basic beliefs about parenthood, all while illuminating the profound ways children deepen and add purpose to our lives. By focusing on parenthood, rather than parenting, the book is original and essential reading for mothers and fathers of today—and tomorrow.




The Marriage Paradox


Book Description

Departing from the tradition of reading literary modernism in terms of formal innovation, Pines’ study examines literary modernism through the lens of marriage. She considers the marriage plots of selected modernist novels by Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, D.H. Lawrence, Nella Larsen, and Virginia Woolf in relation to the social and legal restructuring of marriage occurring in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Britain and the U.S. In particular, she identifies and explores the strategies by which the modernist critique of marriage paradoxically reinforces the institution and the social imperative to marry. Despite a preoccupation with the changing nature of marriage, she argues, modern literature and culture do not imagine alternatives to marriage. By examining these novels in their social, legal, and historical contexts, Pines provides insights into how a critique of marriage can paradoxically contribute to a commitment to the institution. Ultimately, she argues, this critique undermines the definition of modernism as a radical disruption of social and cultural norms and raises questions about the persistence of marriage in Anglo-American culture. In treating marriage as a social and cultural institution, Pines departs from previous feminist examinations of modernism that focus on gender roles or consider the modern marriage plot in less historical and more formalist terms. And, finally, by setting texts of High Modernism alongside texts from the Harlem Renaissance, her study argues for a more expansive definition of literary modernism.