Excerpt... The New Marriage

by Drs. Linda and Robert Miles

Many couples live in dead relationships, their unions destined for failure from the beginning. Fewer people than ever before stay together until "death do them part."

What is happening to relationships? How have they gotten so far off course, and what can we do to get them back on track?

Today's couple needs a relationship glossary and a map of love's territory. That's where we come in. Based on our own life experience, and that of hundreds of couples we have treated in the past twenty-five years, we wrote this book to help you make sense of your suffering and to teach you how to enjoy the benefits of a deep, meaningful relationship with your partner.

This book will provide you with the tools you'll need to build, maintain and expand your relationship, if that is what you truly need. Some relationships may need to end. You must be the final judge of that. If you are living in a dead relationship, long past resuscitation, this book may bring home that realization.

We have designed this guide to help you create a relationship that is alive and full of joy, but you won't find any easy ways to bring a dead marriage back to life. We believe that a true marriage is a mystical union that requires much practice and preparation to survive in the modern world.

Other books focus on achieving success, winning friends, acquiring wealth, and preserving health. Here, we are concerned with relating intimately and being deeply loved. Metaphorically speaking, this is a guidebook to help you find your way through desert and jungle to the top of love's mountain. We will point out the dangers and detours, and keep you on the right path.

In this book, we combine the practical and the mystical to provide a map for a happy, long-term relationship. We have taken this journey in our professional work with hundreds of couples, and have chased our own tigers together as a married couple.

If your relationship is not moribund, this book will help it grow and last. If your relationship has lost its way, this book will help put it back on course. It is your guide, your map to the journey of lasting love. It is not intended to replace good counseling, but not everyone will need counseling. If used correctly, this guide will help you know where you are going and provide a road map for getting there. After all, as William Blake attests, "men and women are not alien creatures we all want the same things."