Making a Success of Marriage: Planning for Happily Ever After

More than 2 million Americans marry every year, each couple determined to live together happily ever after. Tragically, half of all first marriages fail, and subsequent attempts are even more likely to end in divorce. David Yount knows that lasting wedlock requires more than romantic love. Success depends on a couple's commitment and compatibility of heart and mind to survive the inevitable trials of facing life together. Drawing on decades as a counselor and his own experience as a husband and parent, Yount puts readers on the path to build joyful, loving, and committed relationships. Yount offers no-nonsense advice on a wide range of issues, including financial budgeting, maintaining health, dealing with in-laws, parenting, sharing responsibilities, establishing common values, and recovering from divorce. He includes questions designed to stimulate reflection and discussion on key issues, such as compromise, religious beliefs, equality in marriage, and more-some surprising. Marriage is the great adventure into the unknown. Making a Success of Marriage is a user's guide to that adventure.

Experienced counselor and author David Yount offers road-tested, gimmick-free advice on topics ranging from finances and in-laws to intimacy and children to help couples build a marriage that lasts _till death do us part._ Yount also includes chapters on divorce and marrying later in life, as well as a 100-question questionnaire designed to stimulate reflection and discussion on key issues. With over 50% of marriages today ending in divorce, this timely book offers helpful suggestions for couples, whether newly engaged or long-married, on reaching shared expectations and building a long-lasting and joyful marriage.

Publishers Weekly

In a crowded field of marriage self-helps, author and pastoral counselor Yount (America's Spiritual Utopias) crafts a fresh entry full of excellent insights, as well as above-average inspirational quotes from luminaries like John Donne and Tolstoy. Yount covers all the bases in one volume, from the decision to marry to the decision to divorce, but always emphasizing the importance of taking marriage vows seriously to keep a marriage strong, or at least sustained, through complicated situations such as troubled children or long-term illness. Though his approach doesn't present a new set of solutions, Yount's text is full of vivid examples that demonstrate his ideas working in real marriages. Sticking close to the topic of wedded bliss (rather than, say, salvation), Yount keeps his Christian perspective on marriage apparent but far from overwhelming; a useful 101-question "compatibility test" offers a serious inventory of issues that every couple should consider for their long-term health.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

David Yount, an experienced pastoral counselor and previous Marriage Encounter leader, is the author of thirteen books. His column, Amazing Grace, is syndicated weekly by Scripps Howard to newspapers with a combined readership of 25 million.