“Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death.”—Time One of the signature novels of the American 1960s, Couples is a book that, when it debuted, scandalized the public with prose pictures of the way people live, and that today provides an engrossing epitaph to the short, happy life of the “post-Pill paradise.” It chronicles the interactions of ten young married couples in a seaside New England community who make a cult of sex and of themselves. The group of acquaintances form a magical circle, complete with ritualistic games, religious substitutions, a priest (Freddy Thorne), and a scapegoat (Piet Hanema). As with most American utopias, this one’s existence is brief and unsustainable, but the “imaginative quest” that inspires its creation is eternal. Praise for Couples “Couples [is] John Updike’s tour de force of extramarital wanderlust.”—The New York Times Book Review “Ingenious . . . If this is a dirty book, I don’t see how sex can be written about at all.”—Wilfrid Sheed, The New York Times Book Review

Ready to strengthen your relationship? Start with a little fun Whether you're just starting your romantic adventure or celebrating years of marriage, The Couple's Activity Book can help you enhance your connection with playful, interactive games and activities. Through moments of shared laughter, physical reconnection, and meaningful conversation, you'll discover new and engaging ways to relate to one another. Feeling adventurous? Creative? Silly? Each chapter of this relationship book for couples is centered on a specific mood, so you can pick an activity that intrigues you both and jump right in, or you can work through the book together from cover to cover. The games in The Couple's Activity Book range from fun fill-in-the-blanks and word scrambles to more involved activities, like themed date nights, DIY day spas, and becoming tourists in your own hometown. Some can be done spontaneously. Others need a little preparation for a truly special experience. Unlike other relationship books for couples, the activities are designed to be carefree and entertaining without the added pressure of journaling or deep reflections. Build a stronger, loving bond with this big activity book for couples and have fun along the way.

Learn what it means to pursue your husband for the rest of your life. Wife In Pursuit is a 31-day challenge for women who desire to love their husbands fiercely and boldly. Each day will challenge and inspire readers to love in ways that are fresh, honest, and selfless. Every pursuit includes a study verse, devotional content, reflection questions, a prayer prompt, and a pursuit challenge.

The process of finding and making the best possible match is not an easy one. On the contrary, from an emotional perspective finding, making, maintaining, and enriching an intimate partnership is one of the most challenging tasks an adult faces. There must be an attraction or a "spark" for a true match to be made. When a couple comes for counseling, they come with the hope that their relationship can be renewed-that they can capture the heat and the emotion that they once had together. The Couple's Match Book: Lighting, Rekindling, or Extinguishing the Flame explores relationship theory and research. Including self-assessment activities to help determine what actions to take to improve relationships, this guild offers information that focuses on understanding and respecting personality differences, role perceptions, communication, and problem-solving. The balance of the book shares personal stories written by couples detailing their own experiences in an effort to help others in improving their intimate relationships. The Couple's Match Book: Lighting, Rekindling, or Extinguishing the Flame can be used as a supplemental text in marriage and family courses, as well as a primary resource in couples counseling and marriage and family therapy.

Finding fulfillment in both love and work isn't easy--but it's possible. The majority of couples today are dual-career couples. As anyone who's part of such a relationship knows, this presents big challenges: trying to raise kids and achieve career goals while caring for and supporting your partner can seem impossible. Yet most advice for dual-career couples fails, framing the challenges as a zero-sum game in which one partner’s gain is the other's loss and solutions feel like sacrifices or unsatisfactory trade-offs. This book is different. In Couples That Work, INSEAD professor Jennifer Petriglieri rejects conventional, one-size-fits-all solutions and instead focuses on how dual-career couples can tackle and resolve the challenges they face throughout their lives--together. She identifies three key phases of exploration and personal growth in every couple's work-life journey, showing how partners must navigate these together to strengthen their bond. Each phase is crystallized with a question: How can we make this work? The first phase focuses on the logistics of combining two busy lives and often involves the demands of young children. What do we really want? In the second phase, couples learn to navigate their midlife crises in ways that allow each partner to continue to feel happy and fulfilled. Who are we now? With careers winding down and kids grown up, this last phase offers new freedoms--and uncertainties. Based on a five-year research project, the book includes interviews with couples from over thirty countries--from executives to entrepreneurs and from twentysomething newlyweds to dual-career grandparents. Filled with vivid real-life stories, keen insights, and engaging exercises, Couples That Work will help couples develop their own unique answers to that most pressing question: How can we successfully combine love and work?

“Wise, practical, wryly good-humored, and immensely helpful, this book is a must-read for the millions of boomers entering retirement age.” —Jane Mansbridge, PhD, Adams Professor, Kennedy School, Harvard University A Couple’s Guide to Happy Retirement is the most comprehensive book devoted entirely to relationship issues in retirement. Not a treatise on money management, this is a much-needed guide to the psychological aspects of retirement and how to make your retirement relationship happy, fruitful, loving, and successful. Written by a psychologist specializing in work and family issues, and drawing from actual accounts from retired couples, this book helps you prepare emotionally for the dramatic life changes during retirement, coaches you to find new purposes to your life beyond work, nurtures the relationship with your companion to strengthen your friendship and love, explores sexuality after retirement and how you can enjoy each other as much as you did as a younger couple, and recommends strategies to successfully deal with differences around money, time together versus apart, housework, and family relationships. It is crucial that couples prepare themselves and their marriages psychologically for what could very well comprise a quarter of their lives. A Couple’s Guide to Retirement shows you how to do that—so that you’ll have the time of your lives. “An extremely helpful perspective in meeting the challenge of aging and retirement, young or older.” —James I. Ausman, MD, PhD, and Carolyn R. Ausman, BSS, executive producers and creators of The Leading Gen® “A wise, optimistic, straightforward, and practical guidebook . . . I highly recommend it.” —William Pinsof, PhD, founder and past president of Family Therapy Institute, Northwestern University

Edited by a renowned family therapist, this book brings together prominent marital and family therapists to explore the new challenges and opportunities facing couples and the clinicians who work with them. The volume presents a range of approaches to helping couples reconsider and reorder their life priorities around parenting, marriage, and other stages of life.

Couples and family psychology is a broad and general specialty in professional psychology that is founded on an understanding of the human experience in a systems context. For the public, the terms "couples" and "family" provide a user friendly translation but underestimate the multifaceted perspectives required of the specialty. Specialists in couples and family psychology have developed unique assessment and treatment methods that impact behavioral and dynamic factors across individuals, couples, families, and larger social systems. In Specialty Competencies in Couple and Family Psychology, Mark Stanton and Robert Welsh provide a comprehensive explanation of the competencies involved in the specialty and illustrates how complexity, reciprocity, interdependence, adaptation, and self-organization are important aspects of the epistemology of a couples and family approach. As the authors underscore for the reader, the specialty of couple and family psychology is not confined to marital or family therapy, but encompasses a broad orientation to human behavior that occurs in the context of relationships as well as larger macrosystemic dynamics. The conceptualization and the application of systemic concepts to human behavior includes a body of knowledge and evidence-based interventions that require specialty training and competence. This is a must-read for all those interested in pursuing couples and family psychology specialty practice. Series in Specialty Competencies in Professional Psychology Series Editors Arthur M. Nezu and Christine Maguth Nezu As the field of psychology continues to grow and new specialty areas emerge and achieve recognition, it has become increasingly important to define the standards of professional specialty practice. Developed and conceived in response to this need for practical guidelines, this series presents methods, strategies, and techniques for conducting day-to-day practice in any given psychology specialty. The topical volumes address best practices across the functional and foundational competencies that characterize the various psychology specialties, including clinical psychology, cognitive and behavioral psychology, school psychology, geropsychology, forensic psychology, clinical neuropsychology, couples and family psychology, and more. Functional competencies include common practice activities like assessment and intervention, while foundational competencies represent core knowledge areas such as ethical and legal issues, cultural diversity, and professional identification. In addition to describing these competencies, each volume provides a definition, description, and development timeline of a particular specialty, including its essential and characteristic pattern of activities, as well as its distinctive and unique features. Written by recognized experts in their respective fields, volumes are comprehensive, up-to-date, and accessible. These volumes offer invaluable guidance to not only practicing mental health professionals, but those training for specialty practice as well.

Presenting couple-based interventions uniquely tailored to the mental health needs of military and veteran couples and families, this book is current, practical, and authoritative. Chapters describe evidence-based interventions for specific disorders—such as posttraumatic stress, depression, and substance abuse—and related clinical challenges, including physical aggression, infidelity, bereavement, and parenting concerns. Clear guidelines for assessment and treatment are illustrated with helpful case examples; 18 reproducible handouts can be downloaded and printed in a convenient 8 1/2" x 11" size. The book also provides essential knowledge on the culture of military families and the normative transitions and adjustments they face.

Facilitating change in couple therapy by understanding how the brain works to maintain—and break—old habits. Human brains and behavior are shaped by genetic predispositions and early experience. But we are not doomed by our genes or our past. Neuroscientific discoveries of the last decade have provided an optimistic and revolutionary view of adult brain function: People can change. This revelation about neuroplasticity offers hope to therapists and to couples seeking to improve their relationship. Loving With the Brain in Mind explores ways to help couples become proactive in revitalizing their relationship. It offers an in-depth understanding of the heartbreaking dynamics in unhappy couples and the healthy dynamics of couples who are flourishing. Sharing her extensive clinical experience and an integrative perspective informed by neuroscience and relationship science, Mona Fishbane gives us insight into the neurobiology underlying couples’ dances of reactivity. Readers will learn how partners become reactive and emotionally dysregulated with each other, and what is going on in their brains when they do. Clear and compelling discussions are included of the neurobiology of empathy and how empathy and selfregulation can be learned. Understanding neurobiology, explains Fishbane, can transform your clinical practice with couples and help you hone effective therapeutic interventions. This book aims to empower therapists— and the couples they treat—as they work to change interpersonal dynamics that drive them apart. Understanding how the brain works can inform the therapist’s theory of relationships, development, and change. And therapists can offer clients “neuroeducation” about their own reactivity and relationship distress and their potential for personal and relational growth. A gifted clinician and a particularly talented neuroscience writer, Dr. Fishbane presents complex material in an understandable and engaging manner. By anchoring her work in clinical cases, she never loses sight of the people behind the science.