Can This Marriage Be Saved?

Marriage, marriage counselling, and eugenics! A Critic at large (New Yorker) discusses the legacy of Paul Popenoe, the father of marriage counseling, and reviews three recent books on marriage: The Husbands and Wives Club: A Year in the Life of a Couples Therapy Group by Laurie Abraham…(see Laurie in the video that I posted earlier today)

Rebecca L. Davis observes in an astute, engaging, and disturbing history, More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss, the rise of couples counselling has both coincided with and contributed to a larger shift in American life: heightened expectations for marriage as a means of self-expression and personal fulfillment. That would seem to make for an endlessly exploitable clientele, especially given that there’s not much profit in pointing out that some things—like the unglamorous and blessed ordinariness of buttering the toast every morning for someone you’re terribly fond of—just don’t get any better. Not everything admits of improvement.

“Understanding the science of marriage gives us a crystal ball of sorts,” Tara Parker-Pope writes inFor Better: The Science of a Good Marriage. Did you know that the first three minutes of an argument are the most important? That “strong marriages have at least a five-to-one ratio of positive to negative interactions,” so that “for every mistake you make, you need to offer five more good moments, kind words, and loving gestures to keep your marriage in balance”?

😀 Enjoy!

Source: The New Yorker