The Secret of Happy Parents: How to Stay in Love as a Couple and True to Yourself. Steve Biddulph
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The Secret of Happy Parents
How to Stay in Love as a Couple and True to Yourself
Steve and Shaaron Biddulph
Thorsons
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Australia and New Zealand as The Making of Love by Doubleday 1988
Revised and expanded edition by Doubleday 1999
Published in the UK as How Love Works by Thorsons 2000
Copyright © Steve and Shaaron Biddulph
Steve and Shaaron Biddulph assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780722536698
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2013 ISBN 9780007373598
Version: 2016-08-24
It doesn’t much matter whether you are a billionaire, or you work in the corner shop.
It doesn’t matter if you are good looking, educated, famous, or unknown.
You are here, in this life, to learn how to love, and that’s all.
You have always known this.
Contents
Chapter 2 Compatibility: The Ways We Connect
Chapter 3 Why We Choose Who We Choose
Chapter 4 Commitment: The Freedom You Can Count On
Chapter 5 What Kind of Couple Are You?
Chapter 6 How Solving Problems Brings You Closer
Chapter 7 Fighting Your Way to Closeness
Chapter 8 Then Along Come the Kids
Chapter 9 The Sex-Romance Alliance
In the book we use the word ‘married’ in a specific way; that is, to indicate two people in a committed long-term project of loving and learning. It is not necessary to be legally married to do this (and it is possible to be legally married and not in such a project).
Though the book is primarily written with heterosexual couples in mind, we hope gay and lesbian couples will find it just as useful.
This book was first written in 1988. We had been about ready to retire it, but kept meeting people in shops or in the street who said this was the book of all our books that really helped them the most. So instead of a dose of euthanasia, the book has been resuscitated, massaged, Viagra’d, and given a major renovation! Its aims are now much clearer, the language is simplified, its methods easier and more powerful.
The book’s goal is simple: to help you stay married, and enjoying it. And secondly, to help you raise children with a team approach, to survive the dramas and enjoy the delights that children bring. So instead of becoming a divorce statistic, you can be part of a social revolution: the breakthrough generation that learns to make relationships work.
There’s something else you should know. This is NOT a book about COPING with the family or fitting yourself in to make a tame and comfortable marriage. Nor is it about sacrificing yourself to conform to society’s wishes. It’s about how to turn the situations you are in right now – difficulties with sex, problems with partner communication, the challenges of children – into a fire-of-honesty which will burn away your hang-ups, your limitations, and leave you freer and more fulfilled than you currently might think possible. To have the kind of family life that (at least most of the time) makes you want to laugh out loud, and smile with pleasure for being in such a buzzing hive of human loving, clashing and growing. To break free from the modern madness of hurry-earn-and-spend, and get a life.
In raising a family, you can plumb the mysteries of life itself. There is no hotter furnace, no deeper pool to dive into than that of ‘married with kids’. This, ultimately, is a book about self-liberation: how to bring more love into your life, and into