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The Sex-Starved Marriage
The Sex-Starved Marriage: Boosting Your Marriage Libido, a Couple's Guide by Michelle Weiner David Simon & Schuster 224 pp. $16.80 
Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts
Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts by Les and Leslie Parrott Zondervan 160 pp. $13.99 |
A few days after I got engaged, my mother presented me with a Barnes & Noble gift card, which a colleague had given to her. "You can have this gift card," she said, "but you must promise to buy that book that was just on Oprah, the one with the list of questions engaged couples should discuss." I knew just what book she meant—The Hard Questions: 100 Essential Questions to Ask Before You Say "I Do" had become a minor sensation. So I took the gift card. Mom said I could use the change for a mystery or a magazine or a cappuccino, whatever I wanted, so long as I didn't leave the bookstore without The Hard Questions.
The Hard Questions—ranging from "Who prepares the meals?" to "What if one of us is attracted to someone else? Superficially? Deeply?"—is just one of a truckload of books designed to help couples get married well, be married well, and stay married well. Many of these marriage books, like other staples of the self-help genre, codify their wisdom into a simple program comprising seven (or nine, or 100) easily digestible (and often alliterative) rules. To wit, The Good Marriage, by Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee. Wallerstein, who is best known for her studies on the impact of divorce on kids, optimistically asserts that good marriages are possible, and suggests nine steps couples should take to protect their nuptials. "The first task in any marriage … is to separate psychologically from the family of origin" (don't give your mom a key to your new marital home). Step two is "building togetherness and autonomy, … [that is,] putting together a shared vision of how you want to spend your lives together." Good marriages have a strong sense of "we," but, following Kahil Gibran, good marriages also have space in their togetherness. Then comes having children, coping with crises, and "build[ing] a relationship that is safe for the expression of difference, conflict, and anger." Tasks six and seven are to "create a loving sexual relationship and to guard it so that it will endure," and to laugh and ward off boredom and ennui. Finally, in good marriages, partners nurture each other emotionally, and they "hold onto … idealized images of courtship and early history along with a realistic view of the present."
In a similar vein, psychotherapists Linda and Charlie Bloom sketch out 101 Things I Wish I Knew When I Got Married: Simple Lessons to Make Love Last. Their lessons are indeed a little simpler than Wallerstein's. The Blooms urge couples to remember that "there's a difference between judging and being judgmental." They call for good communication (this sounds like presidential candidates saying they're pro-education—is there a marriage counselor anywhere who celebrates bad communication?), and suggest that spouses refrain from issuing ultimatums.
All those singletons who successfully followed Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider's The Rules—a blockbuster that coached women in "how to captur[e] the heart of Mr. Right"—can now avail themselves of The Rules for Marriage. Here Fein and Schneider lay out precisely 43 rules, including the seemingly contradictory "Don't Use the D Word (Divorce)," but then "Divorce with Dignity." (Fein is herself divorced. As she explained in one interview, "I was very happily married for many, many years before the book came out. The sudden rise to fame and overnight celebrity was just too much for me and I filed for divorce when I just felt like it was all too much. I had stopped going out on date night and was too tired to do all the things I used to do, and it was so overnight! Rather than filing for divorce, a few weekends away alone would have been better!")
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