I am very excited to let you know that my book, The Partnership Marriage: Creating the Life You Love…Together, will be available on Amazon by the end of this June! The premise of my book is that marriage is a lifelong conversation for fulfilling, enduring partnership. Here’s an excerpt from the book.
From the Prologue: The Focus of this Book
The focus of this book is the power of conversation in marriage and how you and your partner, by having important conversations, can create a life you love. You’ll learn what it will take for you to create a mature partnership in your marriage, one that lasts a lifetime.
As you read, ask yourself these questions: What do my spouse and I want in our life together? What is really important to us in our marriage? What are our deepest desires? What dreams have we been putting off for years? What is possible for us? What are we passionate about? What is holding us back? What is the quality of our partnership? How can we better work together to create the life we desire? As you read this book, I invite you to have conversations with your spouse for expanding and enriching the quality of your marriage.
Several caveats are necessary. In this book I explore how marriage has developed in the United States and Western Europe. For instance, I talk about the societal changes that have taken place in the past sixty years and how the public discourse in American society has transformed the institution of marriage itself. I do not, however, examine marriage in other cultures, although what I am offering may have applicability to people from other countries. Also, I acknowledge I am a heterosexual white male who grew up in upper middle class privilege in New England. I offer this only to reveal potential bias that may be inherent in the way in which I am viewing marriage. My own lived experience clearly excludes a rich array of experiences of people from different socioeconomic, ethnic and sexual orientation groups and from different geographical regions of the country. And since I am male, I acknowledge that, while I have worked very hard at it for over forty years, I still fall short in being able to see the world from a woman’s point of view. You can ask my wife, Martha, about that. I am very aware that to understand the changes that marriage has undergone in the last six decades, you need to understand how the legal rights and opportunities for women changed in the United States during that time.
My intention is not to give you a lot of advice about how you should express partnership in your lives. Every partnership marriage is distinct. Partnership, ultimately, is a context for marriage and how you create partnership in your marriage is through the commitments you make and the conversations you have. You won’t be learning strategies on how to deal with specific issues around money, sex, spirituality, illness, infidelity, etc. Many of these issues are best dealt with in marital therapy or with professionals who have specific expertise.
This book is designed to both give you a framework to think of your marriage as a long-term partnership and provide different tools in the form of conversations that you can use to design your life together. This book is not about fixing your marriage; it is about creating the life that you desire. Toward this end, I have brought together ideas from many different fields of study, including life span development, marriage education, leadership development and professional coaching. Your marriage and your partnership are the vehicles for you to live lives you both love and to love the life you share. If you are committed to having an enduring, fulfilling partnership as well as a happy and healthy lifelong marriage, this book is for you.
Stay tuned! I’ll let you know when you can buy The Partnership Marriage on Amazon. You can also visit www.facebook.com/thepartnershipmarriage where I’ll be posting additional excerpts from the book. I’ll keep you posted on the book’s status!
