How to Live with Your Partner and Enjoy it

This small book will not attempt to tell you, step-by-step, how to have a happy marriage or partnership. If I did, you wouldn’t follow it anyway – we are all too wonderfully unique and independent. Each couple has the delightful challenge of creating their own “perfect” union. I will simply bring up some important ideas that I have found to be helpful to the many couples I have worked with in couples therapy – and challenges I am still working on in my personal life. I am in my eighties and have been married forty-five years. I have also worked as a psychotherapist and marriage counselor for over forty of those years. I have seen many changes not only in myself but in our society. I am still learning – and my wife, Anne, agrees that I have a lot more to learn. The reason I am using the title How to Live with Your Partner and Enjoy It and use “Partner” and not “Spouse,” is that there are an increasing number of people who live together but are not married, and there are gay and lesbian couples, some who are married and some who are not. Married or not, we live together because we care about one another, and most often, if it is not merely for economic reasons (to share the rent), it is because we love one another. I will sometimes use the words “marriage,” “spouse,” or “husband and wife,” but the ideas are applicable to all intimate relationships, married or not. Before I was a teenager, I learned and sang love songs. I still like the sentiment and many of the ideals, like love makes men Kings and women Queens and that we’ll stay in love forever. Even in my youth, I knew the lyrics rarely brought up the struggles and problems couples encounter on the road to “true” love. It is a road well worth traveling and I hope you will find my words helpful.