The First Year of Marriage: What to Expect, What to Accept, and What You Can Change for a Lasting Relationship

by Miriam Arond, Samuel L. Pauker

The First Year of What to Expect, What to Accept and What You Can Change  is based on a groundbreaking nationwide study of newlyweds. By exploring and presenting the challenges and conflicts newly married couples face, journalist Miriam Arond and psychiatrist Samuel L. Pauker, M.D. break the code of secrecy that surrounds the honeymoon year and gives partners valuable insights, perspective, and solutions to relationship issues. Through anecdotal cases, questionnaires, worksheets, and checklists, this must-read guide helps readers identify problems and solve them. It provides solutions for dealing successfully with parents, in-laws, step-families, intimacy, sex, money work-family balance, communication, and more. 

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Miriam Arond is a former feature writer for the New York Daily News, former editor at Bride's magazine, and a former Editor in Chief of American Health and Child magazines. She was Director of the Good Housekeeping Institute and has spoken to audiences nationwide about marriage, family, health, and consumer trends, attitudes, and issues.

Reviews

[Angela]

I did not read EVERY page of this book, but I did read a lot of it. It focuses on the PROBLEMS encountered in the first year of marriage, and how best to solve them. Lots of therapy type stuff. It was entertaining to read the anecdotes from various once newlyweds. And it did say that of the folks they talked to that were now divorced, looking back, they saw the start of their problems in that first year.

Anyway, best advice/anecdote (from page 348)

"What I can't get over is that what my idea of love was when I first got married is so different from what my idea of love is now. What is love? Love is putting the bowl that I hate and he loves in the middle of the dining room table. Love is taking a day off from work because he asked me to go with him someplace and it's important to him. This is what it's all about - the constant small compromises. The big things you work out right away. It's these little things - like accepting that he never picks up his goddamn socks. That to me is love. (female married in 1973)"

And that to me sums it all up.

[M]

Other than the Christianity references it was a book full of great advice. I'd recommend it for engaged couples or couples in their first few years of marriage.