The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts

What it is about

The Good Marriage comes from interviews with couples who had stayed together and described the marriage as satisfying. Wallerstein and Blakeslee sort the accounts into types—romantic, rescue, companionate, traditional—and name tasks they heard repeatedly: separating from the family of origin, building a joint identity, surviving children, and keeping a sexual bond. It is a portrait of marriages that lasted in one American sample, not a formula.

Questions it can answer

• What tasks did long-married couples in this study say they had to do more than once?
• How do the book’s marriage types differ without ranking them as better souls?
• What did these couples treat as the work of the later years, not only the wedding?

What you will not find

• A random sample that represents every culture
• A method for predicting divorce from one interview
• Guidance for leaving a violent marriage