World Class Marriage is an engaging, practical and personal guide for relationship success written by two experienced marriage and relationship educators who share a loving and successful 30-year marriage with each other. The authors combine the latest and best information and guidance about how couples can avoid relationship damage and create lasting love, with unique insights and personal examples from their own successful marriage and extraordinary career teaching relationship skills around the world. This warm and practical guide will help readers keep or retrieve the love, closeness, and intimacy everyone wants from marriage.

Millions of American marriages have failed or will fail, resulting in what the authors see as a social epidemic that brings devastating consequences to the couple, their children, and to the economic and social fabric of society. Building upon their notion of the 16 'pillars' that promote a healthy and rewarding marriage, the authors present a structure for relationship success that is built upon groundbreaking information about what does and does not work in relationships and the conditions that promote growth and intimacy. This approach offers couples a powerful toolbox for eliminating behaviors that damage their relationship and pumping up the behaviors that promote love, caring, closeness and cooperation. World Class Marriage is a book all couples who want to see their marriages last should read and share.

Marriage has come a long way since biblical times. Women are no longer property, and practices like polygamy have long been rejected. The world is wealthier, healthier, and more able to find and form relationships than ever. So why are Christian congregations doing more burying than marrying today? Explanations for the recession in marriage range from the mathematical--more women in church than men--to the economic, and from the availability of sex to progressive politics. But perhaps marriage hasn't really changed at all. Instead, there is simply less interest in marriage in an era marked by technology, gender equality, and secularization. Mark Regnerus explores how today's Christians find a mate within a faith that esteems marriage but in a world that increasingly yawns at it. This book draws on in-depth interviews with nearly two hundred young-adult Christians from the United States, Mexico, Spain, Poland, Russia, Lebanon, and Nigeria, in order to understand the state of matrimony in global Christian circles today. Regnerus finds that marriage has become less of a foundation for a couple to build upon and more of a capstone. Meeting increasingly high expectations of marriage is difficult, though, in a free market whose logic reaches deep into the home today. The result is endemic uncertainty, slowing relationship maturation, and stalling marriage. But plenty of Christians innovate, resist, and wed, and this book argues that the future of marriage will be a religious one.

Drawing upon interviews with adults married to a partner of a different class background, The Power of the Past reveals the intimate connections between love and class and how enduring class attributes shape who they love and how their marriage unfolds.

The nineteenth-century middle-class ideal of the married woman was of a chaste and diligent wife focused on being a loving mother, with few needs or rights of her own. The modern woman, by contrast, was partner to a new model of marriage, one in which she and her husband formed a relationship based on greater sexual and psychological equality. In Making Marriage Modern, Christina Simmons narrates the development of this new companionate marriage ideal, which took hold in the early twentieth century and prevailed in American society by the 1940s. The first challenges to public reticence to discuss sexual relations between husbands and wives came from social hygiene reformers, who advocated for a scientific but conservative sex education to combat prostitution and venereal disease. A more radical group of feminists, anarchists, and bohemians opposed the Victorian model of marriage and even the institution of marriage. Birth control advocates such as Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger openly championed women's rights to acquire and use effective contraception. The "companionate marriage" emerged from these efforts. This marital ideal was characterized by greater emotional and sexuality intimacy for both men and women, use of birth control to create smaller families, and destigmatization of divorce in cases of failed unions. Simmons examines what she calls the "flapper" marriage, in which free-spirited young wives enjoyed the early years of marriage, postponing children and domesticity. She looks at the feminist marriage in which women imagined greater equality between the sexes in domestic and paid work and sex. And she explores the African American "partnership marriage," which often included wives' employment and drew more heavily on the involvement of the community and extended family. Finally, she traces how these modern ideals of marriage were promoted in sexual advice literature and marriage manuals of the period. Though male dominance persisted in companionate marriages, Christina Simmons shows how they called for greater independence and satisfaction for women and a new female heterosexuality. By raising women's expectations of marriage, the companionate ideal also contained within it the seeds of second-wave feminists' demands for transforming the institution into one of true equality between the sexes.

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.

"Every marriage has its rough patches. If you're wondering how to repair yours, step away from the therapist, put down the magazine, and pick up this book. If you want to build a long, happy, fulfilling marriage, why not learn from the women who've done it? Laura Doyle's marriage was in trouble. After five years, her husband had become distant. He seemed checked out of their relationship, preferring watching TV to making love. There were frequent fights that ended with tense silences and even threats of divorce. Marriage counseling actually made their problems worse. Each session seemed to reinforce the feeling that she and her husband were just too far apart. Desperate to avoid divorcing the man she loved, Laura tried something different. Rather than consulting with experts or professionals, she simply started talking to women who'd been happily married for more than fifteen years. What she discovered shocked her. Everything she had heard in marriage counseling was wrong. Laura realized that there are some basic truths to relationships that can help women maintain loving, intimate marriages, such as: The happiness of your relationship is up to you! Women hold the keys to a happy relationship 95 percent of the time (and will learn what to do the other 5 percent). What men want most of all is to be treated with respect. Treat your man with respect (even if you aren't feeling it), and he will treat you with love and care. Your man wants to know he has your trust. Give it to him, and he'll realize you are special, because you will be! After seeing her own marriage transform, Laura set out to help other women do the same. In this book, you'll learn Laura's "Six Intimacy Skills," which have been used by over 50,000 women who have transformed their previously unhappy marriages into blissful unions. Stop reading articles about how important it is to schedule date night, and learn how to transform your relationship into one bursting with energy, intimacy, and love. First, Kill All the Marriage Counselors will put you on the path to having the marriage you want with the man you love"--