Good Marriages Don't Just Happen: Keeping Our Relationship Alive While Raising Our Ten Sons

I found this book quite interesting and useful, but it was definitely rather long-winded. In every chapter, the authors each interject into the general advice with lengthy personal narratives about their own personal experiences. This starts out being helpful and interesting, but gets quite repetitive and overly long. It becomes difficult not to skip-and-skim through those sections. What I took away from this book, rather than picking up a lot of unique advice or techniques, was more of a general sense of what it takes to have a good marriage. I do think it was a helpful book, but it could have benefited from chopping a third of its length. I do have one substantive "nit-pick" with this book. Although the book doesn't say this, it seemed to me that a lot of the book was written by the wife. Or at least, a lot of the problems described in the couple's marriage seemed to stem from the husband: his inability to express his feelings, his lack of respect for his wife's time, his preoccupation with work, his blindness to her emotional needs, etc. A lot of the book is about how he learned to overcome these troubles and so make his wife more happy. Maybe this is how it really was in their marriage, that most of the problems were from his side...but if not, then it seems a bit unfair that he is portrayed as more of the "bad guy" here. I would have liked it if she also described more of her own problems and how she had to overcome them, rather than mostly describing how she learned to deal with his problems.

I'd recommend this book for any of my married friends. The Garcia-Prats have done an excellent job of writing a really engaging book. It makes you think about the importance of marriage, to not just the couple but the entire family and our society as a whole. So many families today are searching for answers. This is a place to get some. I can't say I agree with everything in the book, but it certainly made me think about my own marriage in a new light.

After fifty five years of marriage- I wish this was available when we were married. It also puts us back in focus of our own marriage. LOVE AND UNDERSTANDING is still the way to go.