Fighting for Your Marriage

May 15, 2010
As with most self-help books on marriage, these two offer insights into conflicts and new behaviors with which to handle them. A clinical psychologist and a contributor to the "Ladies' Home Journal" column "Can This Marriage Be Saved?," Betchen identifies the subconscious inner conflicts rooted in partners' upbringings. He offers quizzes to help readers identify and gain mastery over their master conflict and reexamine relationships in their family of origin. Interestingly, Betchen maintains that one can play different roles, such as caretaker or recipient, in new relationships but get caught in the same traps. While the advice is not novel, the analyses are fascinating.

The authors of "Fighting for Your Marriage" have taken their classic by the same name and updated it with the latest research on technology's influence on relationships, the significance of divorce and single parenting, and the increasing prevalence of negotiation-based marriage. Markham (psychology, Univ. of Denver), Scott M. Stanley ("A Lasting Promise"), and director Susan L. Blumberg (Interpersonal Communication Options, Denver) are supporters of the Smart Marriages movement and base their teaching on the PREP method (Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program), an empirically based marriage-education program noted by the National Institute of Health. The authors provide an encyclopedia-like wealth of information, from escaping destructive patterns to controlling conflict to playing together. No one can doubt the quality of the information contained here, but it is most helpful for couples working together, marriage counselors planning programs, or others in a group setting. (DVD not seen.)

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