Mating in Captivity examines the tension between emotional security, domestic life, and erotic desire in long-term relationships. Drawing on Esther Perel's clinical experience as a psychotherapist, the book explores why sexual desire may diminish even in loving relationships and discusses ways couples can maintain intimacy, passion, curiosity, and erotic connection. The twentieth-anniversary edition includes a new preface in which Perel reflects on the origins of the book and cultural changes since its original publication.

When notorious rake Anthony Bridgerton announces that he has chosen a prospective bride, he faces unexpected opposition when his intended's meddlesome sister Kate decides to protect her innocent sister from the wicked aristocrat.

"One of the foremost relationship experts at work today applies the insights of science toward understanding the real meaning of trust between a couple. He decodes the "why" behind betrayal and shows how partners can avoid or recover from unfaithfulness and maintain a loving relationship.Dr. John Gottman, the country's pre-eminent researcher on marriage, is famous for his Love Lab at the University of Washington in Seattle where he deciphers the mysteries of human relationships through scientific research. His thirty-five years of exploration have earned him numerous major awards, including from the National Institute of Mental Health, the American Psychological Association, and the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. Now, Dr. Gottman offers surprising findings and advice on the characteristic that is at the heart of all relationships: Trust. Dr. Gottman has developed a formula that precisely calculates any couple's loyalty level. The results determine a relationship's likely future, including the potential for one or both partners to stray. A Love You Can Trust shows couples how to bolster their trust level and avoid what Dr. Gottman calls the "Roach Motel for Lovers." He describes how the outcome of--"sliding door moments," small pivotal points between a couple, can lead either to more emotional connection or to discontent. He suggests a new approach to handling adultery and reveals the varied and unexpected non-sexual ways that couples often betray each other. A Love You Can Trust guides couples through an empirically tested, trust-building program that will let them repair and maintain a long-term, intimate, and romantic relationship"--

In 1994, Dr. John Gottman and his colleagues at the University of Washingto— made a startling announcement: Through scientific observation and mathematical analysis, they could predict—with more than 90 percent accuracy—whether a marriage would succeed or fail. The only thing they did not yet know was how to turn a failing marriage into a successful one, so Gottman teamed up with his clinical psychologist wife, Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman, to develop intervention methods. Now the Gottmans, together with the Love Lab research facility, have put these ideas into practice. In Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage, the Gottmans share this vital information so that couples can develop the skills to turn their relationship problems around and create strong, lasting unions. What emerged from the Gottmans’ collaboration and decades of research is a body of advice that’s based on two surprisingly simple truths: Happily married couples behave like good friends, and they handle their conflicts in gentle, positive ways. The authors offer an intimate look at ten couples who have learned to work through potentially destructive problems—extramarital affairs, workaholism, parenthood adjustments, serious illnesses, lack of intimacy—and examine what they’ve done to improve communication and get their marriages back on track. Giving an insider’s view of the Love Lab, the Gottmans take the reader step-by-step through the couples’ conversations, before and after they are counseled. The authors also provide an analysis of the couples’ interactions, identifying their core problems and offering suggestions for resolving them. By “listening” to the discussions in this way, you will learn to detect the most common stumbling blocks of a relationship and—most important—how to avoid them. Hundreds of thousands have seen their relationships improve thanks to the Gottmans’ work. Whether you want to make a strong relationship more fulfilling or rescue one that’s headed for disaster, Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage is essential reading. From inside the famed Gottman Institute, aka the “Love Lab”: ten scientifically proven, practical ways to strengthen your marriage “We don’t feel close anymore.” “You never talk to me.” “We only have time for the kids.” “All you do is work.” “You don’t care about my dreams.” Do you recognize yourself, or your spouse, in any of these statements? If so, Dr. John Gottman and his wife, Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman, say you shouldn’t be surprised. In fact, their decades of scientific research have shown that most couples face these and other serious problems—but what the Gottmans have proven is that such difficulties don’t have to lead to a broken relationship, or even divorce. In Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage, the Gottmans provide vital tools—scientifically based and empirically verified—that you can use to regain affection and romance lost through years of ineffective communication. You’ll strengthen your relationship and make it the most fulfilling it can be.

An eminent therapist explains what makes couples compatible and how to sustain a happy marriage. For the past thirty-five years, John Gottman’s research has been internationally recognized for its unprecedented ability to precisely measure interactive processes in couples and to predict the long-term success or failure of relationships. In this groundbreaking book, he presents a new approach to understanding and changing couples: a fundamental social skill called “emotional attunement,” which describes a couple’s ability to fully process and move on from negative emotional events, ultimately creating a stronger relationship. Gottman draws from this longitudinal research and theory to show how emotional attunement can downregulate negative affect, help couples focus on positive traits and memories, and even help prevent domestic violence. He offers a detailed intervention devised to cultivate attunement, thereby helping couples connect, respect, and show affection. Emotional attunement is extended to tackle the subjects of flooding, the story we tell ourselves about our relationship, conflict, personality, changing relationships, and gender. Gottman also explains how to create emotional attunement when it is missing, to lay a foundation that will carry the relationship through difficult times. Gottman encourages couples to cultivate attunement through awareness, tolerance, understanding, non-defensive listening, and empathy. These qualities, he argues, inspire confidence in couples, and the sense that despite the inevitable struggles, the relationship is enduring and resilient. This book, an essential follow-up to his 1999 The Marriage Clinic, offers therapists, students, and researchers detailed intervention for working with couples, and offers couples a roadmap to a stronger future together.

In Kosher Sex, his celebrated international blockbuster, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach pioneers a revolutionary approach to sex, marriage, erotic attraction, and personal relationships, drawing on traditional Jewish wisdom. Using his experiences counseling individuals and couples, the author breaks down sexual taboos and openly, yet respectfully, discusses the meanings, emotions, and hidden power of sex. With his unique anecdotal style, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach illustrates each and every point, using real couples who have discovered the joys of "Kosher Sex"- sex that blends passion and intimacy. He profiles the two most common types of couples - best friends and passionate lovers- and suggests revolutionary ways of synthesizing the best that each type has to offer. At a time when half of all marriages fail and one third are sexless and platonic, Kosher Sex will have an astonishing and electrifying impact.

Argues that couples must recognize the polarity between masculinity and femininity in order to sustain a mutually satisfying marriage, in a guide the draws on examples from the author's call-in radio show.

"An unlikely pair of voices, the world's most recognizable beauty icon and 'America's rabbi', comes together to diagnose how meaningful, passionate sex is on the decline in Western culture, and how to save it"--

"In the tradition of The Year of Magical Thinking comes a legendary editor's unflinching love song about his radiant wife, Margaret, and her battle with cancer. It was a warm April in Pleasant Valley when Margaret Korda, normally a fearless horsewoman, dropped her horsewhip while she was riding. Such a mild slip was easy to ignore, but when other troubling symptoms accumulated, she confided to her husband, 'Michael, I think something serious is wrong with me.' Within a few rapid weeks, the fiercely independent, former fashion model was diagnosed with brain cancer, while Michael, once reliant on her steeliness, became her caregiver, deciphering bewildering medical reports and packing her beloved toiletries for the hospital. An operation performed by a renowned surgeon allowed Margaret to ride her favorite competition horse Logan go Bragh a few more times, but Margaret's tumors quickly returned-leaving her to grapple with the reality of impending death. In rapturous prose, Korda, a modern- day Orpheus, braids her heroic story with heartrending details of their final year together. Passing, a tender memoir, is a testament to the transcendent possibilities of love"--

Part biography, part cultural history, The Creation of Anne Boleyn is a fascinating reconstruction of Anne's life and an illuminating look at her afterlife in the popular imagination. Why is Anne so compelling? Why has she inspired such extreme reactions? What did she really even look like?! And perhaps the most provocative questions concern Anne's death more than her life. How could Henry order the execution of a once beloved wife? Drawing on scholarship and popular culture Bordo probes the complexities of one of history's most infamous relationships. In her inimitable, straight-talking style Bordo dares to confront the established histories, stepping off the well-trodden paths of Tudoriana to expertly tease out the human being behind the myths.

"...any couple contemplating marriage or reevaluating an existing one will find powerful information and encouragement here for a true marriage of minds." -- Kirkus Reviews "Pepper Schwartz is remarkable. She explains to us the possibilities for relationships that remain for so many a fantasy. This book is a necessity for anyone who wants to understand how partnerships work but more importantly wants to really love." -- Wendy Wasserstein, Playwright: author of Isn't It Romantic?, The Heidi Chronicles, and The Sisters Rosensweig

What's Your Marriage? * The Romantic Marriage: exciting, sensual memories of your first meeting radiate a glow over years. * The Rescue Marriage: the healing that follows early emotional trauma becomes the central theme. * The Companionate Marriage: commitment to careers seeks a balance with commitment to relationship and children. * The Traditional Marriage: the woman takes charge of home and family while the man is the primary wage earner. Hundreds of books have been written about marriages that don't work. But what about the ones that do? Now Judith S. Wallerstein, bestselling author and leading relationships expert, reveals the natural stages of marriage and the nine tasks you must undertake to make a good marriage. As she introduces us to a number of ordinary yet fascinating couples, the intimate interiors of their lives, and the countless pressures they face in an age of divorce, you'll see how happy, lasting marriages are challenged and rebuilt every day-and how, whatever your marriage type, you and your partner can share a joyful, exhilarating, and fulfilling lifetime together.

" A Courtship After Marriage places sex and marriage at the heart of modernity's making. Hirsch's innovative study of marriage-making in transnational Mexican families offers a fascinating look at the opportunities cross-border migration provides for reconstructing gender and rediscovering pleasure. This ambitious, well-crafted book speaks to anthropologists, demographers, and public health specialists, while transcending the divides between them."—Susan Greenhalgh, author of Under the Medical Gaze: Facts and Fictions of Chronic Pain "Jennifer Hirsch is one of the new wave in demographic scholars that takes culture seriously. Her book is a model of engaged, policy-relevant scholarship that achieves its warrant through deep contextualization in the everyday experience of its subjects. Beautifully written, rigorously analyzed, and almost novelistic in its nuance and detail, this study of marriage, migration, and fertility puts the people back into demography and makes one of the most powerful contributions to policy-relevant social science that I have seen in a long time. A work of beauty, sensitivity, and scholarship that sets a new standard for all that follows."—Tom Fricke, author of Himalayan Households: Tamang Demography and Domestic Processes "In this engagingly written and keenly observed ethnography of Mexican marriages in Atlanta and in small Mexican towns, Jennifer Hirsch brings love, sex and romance to Mexican immigration scholarship, and presents a compelling case for the rise of companionate marriages and ideals of spousal intimacy. This book will appeal to anyone interested in gender studies, immigrant families and the social and cultural contexts of fertility."—Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, author of Domestica: Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence "A groundbreaking study. Gracefully written, yet at the same time rigorously argued, this book reminds us of the poetry and dignity that can be found in ordinary lives and of the dreams and aspirations that sustain human agency even in the face of severe social and economic constraints. This is a major contribution to our understanding of migration, gender, sexuality, and social change in contemporary life and a model for engaged social research at its very best."—Richard Parker, author of Bodies, Pleasures and Passions "Hirsch has written a superb, insightful, and original study of Mexican migrants and the challenges of marital devotion and separation they face across time and space. Exemplary in its detail and rigor, Courtship brings us into the lives of men and women in Georgia and Jalisco, shows us the risks they take to create modern forms of intimacy, and reconceptualizes how we should view sexualized companionship, procreation, and engendered pleasures. This book will become a gold standard ethnography in medical anthropology, public health, and transnational migration studies."—Matthew C. Gutmann, author of The Romance of Democracy: Compliant Defiance in Contemporary Mexico "Hirsch’s engaging analysis of gender relations among immigrant Mexicans in Atlanta and in the Mexican community from which they come, shows how migration affects women's and men's roles, the place of sexuality in building marital intimacy, struggles over contraceptive use, and power relations in the couple. Using detailed ethnographic examples, she examines the trend toward companionate couplehood, and demonstrates both struggles and triumphs as young Mexicans and Mexican-Americans strive to create marriages that combine the strengths of traditional respect-based bonds with the advantages of new relationships built on trust."—L.A. Rebhun, author of The Heart Is Unknown Country: Love in the Changing Economy of Northeast Brazil

"Peter Godwin's mother is dying. Born in England, and having spent most of her adult life as a doctor in Zimbabwe, she now lies on a hospital bed in the partitioned living room of his sister's London home. Peter has spent his life missing his Zimbabwean childhood, a longing that does not diminish as he reflects on his time as a journalist on the frontlines of combat around the world, or life in New York with his English wife and transatlantic children. In his mother's final months, he must come to terms with everything his family was and wasn't: the secrets they kept from one another, the stoicism that sometimes threatened to destroy them, and the beauty of the wildly different places they called home. With generations of history behind him, Godwin lyrically brings us into the spaces which make us question and suffer, shows us how we can heal our own scars, and celebrate the lives we have among family and friends" -- Publisher's description.

When should a girl have sex-and with whom? Should you wait until you are married, or is it OK to have sex with your boyfriend if you love him? Or is it OK to have sex with someone you just met? There used to be clear rules about sex, but not anymore. Should a girl just do what she wants? Do what her friends do? Do what people in the movies do? Is there no real right or wrong about sex? The only people who claim to have clear answers are likely to be religious. But what if you're not religious? Is there no way to work out what's right?This book is written for people who may not be religious but who want answers. The insights in this book come from a deep study of human nature and human psychology. These insights do point to rules and guidelines-rules that can help you avoid heartache and lead you to happiness.It turns out that there is wisdom in the traditional view of when to have sex, but the traditional view was nothing but rules: "Do this! Don't do that!" Rules without explanations mean nothing.After you read this book you can follow those rules or not, but you will at least know where they come from.Sex is powerful, and can bring great joy, but it can crush you and break your heart. This is a book of advice on how to find the joy and avoid a broken heart. It is only 90 pages long, but your happiness may depend on whether you read it or not. About the Author:Samuel Taylor was part of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s. He experienced the excitement but also suffered the dangers of what amounted to a complete rewriting of the rules about sex. He is also a keen student of psychology and human behavior. This book is based on the advice he gives his daughters, whom he loves more than anything else on earth.

"Sixteen-year-old Lily knows nothing beyond the Syrian-Jewish community in Brooklyn where she lives a cloistered life with her much older husband. Soon an unlikely relationship with her enigmatic African-American maid opens Lily's world to new possibilities--but at a huge price."--P. [4] of cover.

Leaving her husband at home, Daniela journeys from Tel Aviv to East Africa to mourn the death of her older sister and to confront her grieving brother-in-law, a scientist still struggling with the death of his soldier son in an incident of "friendly fire" on the West Bank