The Secret of Happy Parents: How to Stay in Love as a Couple and True to Yourself
Bestselling authors and communication and parenting experts Steve and Shaaron Biddulph bring you a humorous, loving guide to creating a successful long-term relationship.Illustrations are best viewed on a tablet.This highly readable book guides you through the ups and downs of life as a couple or family and gives you the skills you need to survive as a loving partner and parent.Everybody wants to find love, but in the real world love is something you learn one day at a time. Being a good partner or parent takes courage, honesty and a sense of humour – this book will help you with all three.The message of this entertaining and informative book is that ALL healthy couples have clashes, and sexual and communication problems can act as sparks that ignite new honesty and closeness – you just need to learn how to deal with them in the right way.This essential guide for anyone looking for advice on how to deal with life as a couple or a family includes:• How to grow commitment in small, safe steps.• Love, Lust and Liking – telling them apart and bringing them together.• Diagnosing your ‘couple style’.• The ‘make-or-break’ crises that every marriage or partnership has – and how to use them to make your relationship stronger.• The Sex-Romance alliance – love that gets better.• How children can help us grow up and develop a more fulfilling relationship.
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The Secret of Happy Parents
How to Stay in Love as a Couple and True to Yourself
Steve and Shaaron Biddulph
Thorsons
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Australia and New Zealand as The Making of Love by Doubleday 1988
Revised and expanded edition by Doubleday 1999
Published in the UK as How Love Works by Thorsons 2000
Copyright © Steve and Shaaron Biddulph
Steve and Shaaron Biddulph assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780722536698
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2013 ISBN 9780007373598
Version: 2016-08-24
It doesn’t much matter whether you are a billionaire, or you work in the corner shop.
It doesn’t matter if you are good looking, educated, famous, or unknown.
You are here, in this life, to learn how to love, and that’s all.
You have always known this.
Contents
Chapter 2 Compatibility: The Ways We Connect
Chapter 3 Why We Choose Who We Choose
Chapter 4 Commitment: The Freedom You Can Count On
Chapter 5 What Kind of Couple Are You?
Chapter 6 How Solving Problems Brings You Closer
Chapter 7 Fighting Your Way to Closeness
Chapter 8 Then Along Come the Kids
In the book we use the word ‘married’ in a specific way; that is, to indicate two people in a committed long-term project of loving and learning. It is not necessary to be legally married to do this (and it is possible to be legally married and not in such a project).
Though the book is primarily written with heterosexual couples in mind, we hope gay and lesbian couples will find it just as useful.
This book was first written in 1988. We had been about ready to retire it, but kept meeting people in shops or in the street who said this was the book of all our books that really helped them the most. So instead of a dose of euthanasia, the book has been resuscitated, massaged, Viagra’d, and given a major renovation! Its aims are now much clearer, the language is simplified, its methods easier and more powerful.
The book’s goal is simple: to help you stay married, and enjoying it. And secondly, to help you raise children with a team approach, to survive the dramas and enjoy the delights that children bring. So instead of becoming a divorce statistic, you can be part of a social revolution: the breakthrough generation that learns to make relationships work.
There’s something else you should know. This is NOT a book about COPING with the family or fitting yourself in to make a tame and comfortable marriage. Nor is it about sacrificing yourself to conform to society’s wishes. It’s about how to turn the situations you are in right now – difficulties with sex, problems with partner communication, the challenges of children – into a fire-of-honesty which will burn away your hang-ups, your limitations, and leave you freer and more fulfilled than you currently might think possible. To have the kind of family life that (at least most of the time) makes you want to laugh out loud, and smile with pleasure for being in such a buzzing hive of human loving, clashing and growing. To break free from the modern madness of hurry-earn-and-spend, and get a life.
In raising a family, you can plumb the mysteries of life itself. There is no hotter furnace, no deeper pool to dive into than that of ‘married with kids’. This, ultimately, is a book about self-liberation: how to bring more love into your life, and into the world around you, where it is so desperately needed.
There’s something more you need to know. Good relationships take time and work; and anyone who tells you differently is lying. It may take twenty years for you to reach the ecstasy in loving that is possible for you and your partner. It may take years for you and your growing children to really understand each other. But if you follow what this books teaches, you will get glimpses and have moments, almost straightaway, that will let you know you are on the right track.
