Happily Married, by Susan Page

Just when you think your marriage is humming along nicely, you hit a rough patch, for obvious or sometimes less obvious reasons.  Or, you feel pretty good about your marriage and you get to know another couple who really has it together.  Wherever you are on your marital journey, Susan Page has some words of wisdom.  Hopefully you have a few older couples or peers who have marriages to which you can look for examples.  If you don't, or even if you do, you will find some helpful models and ideas in Page's Happily Married: The 8 Essential Traits of Couples Who Thrive.

As an experienced marriage counselor, Page has interviewed, counseled, and been in group sessions with hundreds of couples.  She has distilled 8 traits which she repeatedly sees in happy couples.  The reader without a lot of time can glean some ideas from simply reading the table of contents.  But Page fleshes out the traits with plenty of explanation and examples from actual couples.  The couples' narratives get a little long-winded, but they do provide illustration of the concepts.

I like her stated goal: she doesn't want to tell couples what to do, but how to be to have a happier marriage.  "In order to have a joyful marriage you have to change not your marriage but your mindset." Page's recommendations won't be surprising to most readers, but there may be some "aha!" moments, when she shines the light on simple changes you can make in your mindset to take steps toward a happier marriage.

More traditional readers will discern in Page a clear openness to same-sex relationships, unmarried live-in relationships, and extra-marital sex.  Given that Page's credentials include being the one-time "Director of Women's Programs at the University of California, Berkeley, where she helped found the nation's first university-based human sexuality program," it's no surprise that her views on many issues would not appeal to conservative Christian readers.  Happily Married can certainly be helpful and relevant to all couples, even if they don't share her ideological or theological framework, but some Christians will be offended by her perspective at times.

A word on the editions: As best I can tell, Happily Married is the same content as Now That I'm Married, Why Isn't Everything Perfect? (1994), and The 8 Essential Traits of Couples Who Thrive (1997).  Not that there's anything wrong with publishing the same content again; it happens all the time.  It's just something to be aware of.  Page has also published a book called How to Get Published and Make a Lot of Money.  I haven't read that one, but maybe one of her time-saving tips is to publish the same book again as many times as possible!  Oh, and appearances on Oprah apparently don't hurt book sales!



Thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!