The Marriage Of All And Nothing

“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.

“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.

Edited by Mary Freiburger. Sequel to My Only Friend is Darkness, this new offering of Barbara Dent's writings brings together articles already published elsewhere and forty-one previously unpublished poems. The New Zealand author's intensely personal, experiential style gives "flesh and bones" to the notion of the "dark night of the soul" in this new book. Barbara Dent goes beyond merely generic expositions of that key concept of Carmelite spirituality to craft her own vivid witness, one that speaks always in tones of our times. This she does as a mother, writer, poustinik, and Carmelite secular order member. As she identifies the major events of her adult life in biographical pieces, both by prose and in poetry, she reveals how adept a guide she is to managing the darkness of physical suffering and spiritual progress. The reader will appreciate all the attention she pays, in line with modern renewal movements, to the resurrection as an integral part of spiritual development.

The only way to secure her dream is to marry a handsome stranger . . . When Rose and Jack meet, she has just lost her uncle, and with him her dream of owning a coffee shop. Rose wanted nothing more than to open a café in her uncle’s building. But her uncle’s will is clear – the building goes to Rose’s husband. Not to her. Then, his lawyer, Jack, offers an unusual solution… she can marry him. She’ll get the café and he’ll get the building. For some reason, Rose agrees. It might be a marriage of convenience but it’s anything but simple. Despite it being his idea, Jack is unbearably surly... But then he does something that shows Rose he might just have a softer side. Maybe love can start with a contract… but will Rose still feel that way when she learns the full terms of their deal?

Earlier in my post-divorce life, I thought marriage would never happen again for me. Having exited a painful one, I had no desire to enter another. Why would anyone want to repeat a difficult experience? . . . I felt that my heart would never be as trusting as it once was. I had lost my faith in marriage. I wasn’t sure it was the best custodian of love. And I still feared how the wife identity could sabotage me. I was content to sit to the side and let others have their turn at giving the institution a whirl. – from Happily Ever After Marriage: There’s Nothing Like Divorce to Clear the Mind by Sarah Hampson After eighteen years of marriage and three children, Sarah Hampson finds herself amongst the growing ranks of divorced MLWs (“Mid-Life Women”). “This is what happens when you are outside the marriage bubble,” she writes. Suddenly, you are in a parallel universe, across some mythic river in a place where you are the un-wife – and you and your un-husband are on the un-married side. And once there, as some kind of compensation for the hardship of the journey, you develop relationship X-ray vision. You know more than if you had never inhabited the bubble. Illusions (and delusions) drop away. Everything is clearer. (pp. xi­­­ – xii) Hampson uses this newfound vantage point outside the “marriage bubble” to bravely explore the institution of matrimony. She applies her famously warm, perceptive and frequently hilarious perspective, not only to her own marriage experience, but also to those of her family and friends, along with the myriad celebrities she has interviewed in more than a decade of journalism. Hampson asserts that the tradition of unveiling the bride after the vows have been made is all wrong. “A bride wears a veil after she becomes a wife,” she writes. “For many, it’s a question of denial, not just of what they want and their unhappiness but also of the characteristics in their mate” (p. 138). With the veil lifted from her eyes, Hampson scrutinizes the marriage assumptions she made as a child, better able to see the domestic compromises made by her mother and grandmother, as well as her own. As a young girl growing up in a comfortably privileged household, Hampson felt secure in her expectation that she would one day be taken care of by a husband. “The message in all quarters of our upbringing was that marriage was the life glue” (p. 30), she writes. Now an Un-Married, Hampson has no end of worries to keep her awake at night. Will her children be irreparably damaged by the divorce? Will her “Ghost Dad” ex stop disappointing them, and her? How will she manage financially? Will she find the serenity she craves? And yet, despite her worries, Hampson finds that as a mature and independent woman she has access to the sort of security and self-possession that she sorely lacked when married. She traces her divorce journey, from her hilarious “Un-marriage Ceremony” (selling her wedding ring to a junk gold broker), to a more fully realized state of being, in which life can be viewed as “a carnival of choices, good and bad, wise and regrettable, designed not to teach us pride in ourselves for engineering whatever successes we may have, but humility in acceptance of how it happened to unfold” (p. 280). Candid, humorous and full of fascinating stories, Happily Ever After Marriage is part modern guide, part passionate conversation with friends and part meditation on what can be seen as a new rite of passage to self-actualization in mid-life. By bravely examining her own life, Hampson brings clarity to the underlying cultural messages that inform the choices we make – and shows how embracing change at mid-life can open oneself to new possibilities of connectedness.

God intends marriages to be filled with love. Why are so many faltering with distrust, anger, and contempt? The authors of Love After Marriage believe that the Holy Spirit is ready to pour out healing and anointing on couples who seek God for themselves and their family. Using the book's proven strategies, based on the successful Love After Marriage workshops, couples can bring an atmosphere of loving transparency and vulnerability into their relationship and develop a beautiful God-designed intimacy that can last throughout their life together. Couples will find clear teaching on God's perspective of marriage, as well as methods for listening to the Holy Spirit and tools to develop the breakthroughs the Spirit brings to their marriage. They will be refreshed by the knowledge marriage can be deeply enjoyable even if it is a little hard work.

One of the greatest social tragedies of our day is the underperformance of marriage—not only marriages that end in divorce, but also those which, while remaining “intact,” become painfully strained and emotionally scarred. Surely there must be hope for something better, for something more. With profound insight and vivid illustrations, marriage counselor Tim Savage helps us to realize the unlimited potential of marriage—to discover how the glory of God can infuse our unions, increase our joy, and make us bright lights in a troubled world.

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book “Whom to marry, and when will it happen—these two questions define every woman’s existence.” So begins Spinster, a revelatory and slyly erudite look at the pleasures and possibilities of remaining single. Using her own experiences as a starting point, journalist and cultural critic Kate Bolick invites us into her carefully considered, passionately lived life, weaving together the past and present to examine why­ she—along with over 100 million American women, whose ranks keep growing—remains unmarried. This unprecedented demographic shift, Bolick explains, is the logical outcome of hundreds of years of change that has neither been fully understood, nor appreciated. Spinster introduces a cast of pioneering women from the last century whose genius, tenacity, and flair for drama have emboldened Bolick to fashion her life on her own terms: columnist Neith Boyce, essayist Maeve Brennan, social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and novelist Edith Wharton. By animating their unconventional ideas and choices, Bolick shows us that contemporary debates about settling down, and having it all, are timeless—the crucible upon which all thoughtful women have tried for centuries to forge a good life. Intellectually substantial and deeply personal, Spinster is both an unreservedly inquisitive memoir and a broader cultural exploration that asks us to acknowledge the opportunities within ourselves to live authentically. Bolick offers us a way back into our own lives—a chance to see those splendid years when we were young and unencumbered, or middle-aged and finally left to our own devices, for what they really are: unbounded and our own to savor.