Couple Relationships In The Middle And Later Years

What factors influence the nature and quality of today's older couple relationships, and what are the complex links between relationships and health? In this cutting-edge volume, the authors present the latest theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives in the field of middle-age and older couple relationships. The chapters cover a broad range of topics, including the impact of health concerns, loneliness, chronic disease management, couple negotiation of everyday tasks, coping across the lifespan, and the prevalence and visibility of nontraditional older couple relationships such as same-sex relationships and "living apart-together" relationships. Implications for couples therapy and policy are included.

Today's older couples often look and function differently than those of yesteryear. Lifespans have increased, while many health challenges remain. Retirement, spousal role equity, and family caregiving needs look different now, and cultural shifts have shaped the prevalence and visibility of non-traditional older relationships, such as same-sex relationships and ""living apart-together"" relationships. With such an increased variety in relationship forms and social contexts, what does the research say about quality? What factors influence the nature and quality of today's older couple relationships, and what are the complex links between relationships and health? In this cutting-edge book, the authors present the latest theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives in the field of middle-age and older couple relationships. The chapters cover a broad range of topics, including the impact of health concerns, loneliness, chronic disease management, couple negotiation of everyday tasks, and coping across the lifespan. Implications for couples therapy and policy are included. In short, the book makes a significant stride into understanding the strengths and challenges of older couples.

Providing an integrated and thorough representation from current research and contemporary society, Family Ties and Aging shows how pressing issues of our time—an aging population, changing family structures, and new patterns of work-family balance—are negotiated in the family lives of middle-aged and older adults. Focusing on key questions such as "How do current trends and social arrangements affect family relationships?" and "What are the implications of what we know for future research, theory, practice, and policy?", authors Ingrid Arnet Connidis and Amanda E. Barnett explore groups and relationships that are typically overlooked, including the unique family situations of older single and childless persons, sibling ties, older lesbian and gay adults, and new forms of intimate relationships. The Third Edition is thoroughly updated to include the latest research and theoretical developments, recent media coverage of related issues, and new information on intimate relationships in later life and elder neglect/abuse.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Over a million copies sold! “An eminently practical guide to an emotionally intelligent—and long-lasting—marriage.”—Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work has revolutionized the way we understand, repair, and strengthen marriages. John Gottman’s unprecedented study of couples over a period of years has allowed him to observe the habits that can make—and break—a marriage. Here is the culmination of that work: the seven principles that guide couples on a path toward a harmonious and long-lasting relationship. Straightforward yet profound, these principles teach partners new approaches for resolving conflicts, creating new common ground, and achieving greater levels of intimacy. Gottman offers strategies and resources to help couples collaborate more effectively to resolve any problem, whether dealing with issues related to sex, money, religion, work, family, or anything else. Packed with new exercises and the latest research out of the esteemed Gottman Institute, this revised edition of The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work is the definitive guide for anyone who wants their relationship to attain its highest potential.

Essentials of Human Behavior combines Elizabeth D. Hutchison’s two best-selling Dimensions of Human Behavior volumes into a single streamlined volume for understanding human behavior. The text presents a multidimensional framework integrating person, environment, and time to show students the dynamic, changing nature of person-in-environment. In this Third Edition, Hutchison is joined by new co-author Leanne Wood Charlesworth, who uses her practice and teaching experience to help organize the book’s cutting-edge research and bring it into the classroom. The text will thoroughly support students′ understanding of human behavior theories and research and their applications to social work engagement, assessment, intervention, and evaluation across all levels of practice. This title is accompanied by a complete teaching and learning package.

“Wise, practical, wryly good-humored, and immensely helpful, this book is a must-read for the millions of boomers entering retirement age.” —Jane Mansbridge, PhD, Adams Professor, Kennedy School, Harvard University A Couple’s Guide to Happy Retirement is the most comprehensive book devoted entirely to relationship issues in retirement. Not a treatise on money management, this is a much-needed guide to the psychological aspects of retirement and how to make your retirement relationship happy, fruitful, loving, and successful. Written by a psychologist specializing in work and family issues, and drawing from actual accounts from retired couples, this book helps you prepare emotionally for the dramatic life changes during retirement, coaches you to find new purposes to your life beyond work, nurtures the relationship with your companion to strengthen your friendship and love, explores sexuality after retirement and how you can enjoy each other as much as you did as a younger couple, and recommends strategies to successfully deal with differences around money, time together versus apart, housework, and family relationships. It is crucial that couples prepare themselves and their marriages psychologically for what could very well comprise a quarter of their lives. A Couple’s Guide to Retirement shows you how to do that—so that you’ll have the time of your lives. “An extremely helpful perspective in meeting the challenge of aging and retirement, young or older.” —James I. Ausman, MD, PhD, and Carolyn R. Ausman, BSS, executive producers and creators of The Leading Gen® “A wise, optimistic, straightforward, and practical guidebook . . . I highly recommend it.” —William Pinsof, PhD, founder and past president of Family Therapy Institute, Northwestern University

Roughly 68 million North American women currently grapple with the challenges of midlife, faced with a culture that tells them their “best-before date” has long passed. In Navigating the Messy Middle, Ann Douglas pushes back against this toxic narrative, providing a fierce and unapologetic book for and about midlife women. In this deeply validating and encouraging book, Douglas interviews well over one hundred women of different backgrounds and identities, sharing their diverse conversations about the complex and intertwined issues that women must grapple with at midlife: from family responsibilities to career pivots, health concerns to building community. Readers will find a book that offers practical, evidence-based strategies for thriving at midlife, coupled with compelling first-person stories. Offering purpose and meaning in a life stage that can otherwise feel out of control, Douglas pushes back against the message that women at midlife are no longer relevant and needed, highlighting the far-reaching economic, political and social impacts of these messages and providing a refreshing counter-narrative that maps out a path forward for women at midlife. Both a midlife love letter and a lament, Navigating the Messy Middle both celebrates the beauty and rages at the many injustices of this life stage and provides readers with the tools to chart their own course.

This book is about caring for elderly persons in the 21th century. It shows that care has many facets and is influenced by many factors. Central topics of this book thus include the relation between the person depending on care and the care giver(s), the impacts of caregiving on the family and the larger social context, as well as socio-cultural and political aspects underlying the growing need for and the practice of formal and informal care. It is evident that care as a real-life phenomenon of our time needs the co-operation of multiple disciplines to better understand, describe, explain and modify phenomena of elder care. Such a need for cross- disciplinary research is even more urgent given the increasing population aging and the impending gaps between demand and supply of care. The present book is dedicated to this approach and provides a first substantive integration of knowledge from geropsychology, other gerosciences, and cultural psychologies by a multi-disciplinary cast of internationally renowned authors. Cultural psychology emerged as a valuable partner of the gerosciences by contributing essentially to a deeper understanding of the relevant issues. Reading of this book provides the reader—researcher or practitioner—with new insights of where the problems of advancing age take our caring tasks in our 21st century societies and it opens many new directions for further work in the field. Finally and above all, this book is also a strong plea for solidarity between generations in family and society in a rapidly changing globalized world.