Marriage Sociology

Historians have only recently awakened to the importance of the family, the basic social unit throughout human history. This book traces the development of marriage and the family from the Middle Ages to the early modern era. It describes how the Roman and barbarian cultural streams merged under the influence of the Christian church to forge new concepts, customs, laws, and practices. Century by century, it follows the development—sometimes gradual, at other times revolutionary—of significant elements in the history of the family.

The Third Wave makes startling sense of the violent changes now battering our world. Its sweeping synthesis casts fresh light on our new forms of marriage and family, on today's dramatic changes in business and economics. It explains the role of cults, the new definitions of work, play, love, and success. It points toward new forms of 21st-century democracy.

Navigating the challenges of long-term commitment takes effort - and it just got simpler, with this empowering, step-by-step guide to communicating about the things that matter most to you and your partner. Drawing on 40 years of research from their world-famous Love Lab, Dr. John Gottman and Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman invite couples on eight fun, easy, and profoundly rewarding dates, each one focused on a make-or-break issue: trust, conflict, sex, money, family, adventure, spirituality, and dreams.

In Marriage, a History, historian and marriage expert Stephanie Coontz takes listeners from the marital intrigues of ancient Babylon to the torments of Victorian lovers to demonstrate how recent the idea of marrying for love is - and how absurd it would have seemed to most of our ancestors. It was when marriage moved into the emotional sphere in the 19th century, she argues, that it suffered as an institution just as it began to thrive as a personal relationship.

Heterosexuality is in crisis. Reports of sexual harassment, misconduct, and rape saturate the news in the era of #MeToo. Straight men and women spend thousands of dollars every day on relationship coaches, seduction boot camps, and couples' therapy in a search for happiness. In The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, Jane Ward smartly explores what, exactly, is wrong with heterosexuality in the 21st century, and what straight people can do to fix it for good.

He runs his own business and coaches Little League. She drives a minivan, and she'd be lost without her trusty BlackBerry. They go on date nights. Their kids attend public schools, play sports, and take music lessons. They live in a roomy house in the 'burbs. They're about as mainstream as families come. They're also polygamists. The Dargers move the conversation away from child brides, Warren Jeffs, and the FLDS to more mainstream polygamists who willingly enter into plural relationships as adults.

This original and lucid account of the complexities of love and its essential role in human well-being draws on the latest scientific research. Three eminent psychiatrists tackle the difficult task of reconciling what artists and thinkers have known for thousands of years about the human heart with what has only recently been learned about the primitive functions of the human brain.

Seamos "progres", conservadores o quimeras, el peso otorgado a la idea de exclusividad en una relación amorosa es un tema que levanta pasiones. En el fondo se nos educa para aspirar a una utopía: al día en que finalmente descubramos el Amor Verdadero y encontremos a nuestra media naranja. Pero la fantasía del amor romántico, lejos de ser la eterna felicidad que nos promete, es el origen de muchas de nuestras miserias, y está atravesada por expectativas que conjuntan contexto político, cultural e historia personal.

For more than a century before gay marriage became a hot-button political issue, same-sex unions flourished in America. Pairs of men and pairs of women joined together in committed unions, standing by each other "for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health" for periods of 30 or 40 - sometimes as many as 50 - years. In short, they loved and supported each other every bit as much as any husband and wife. In Outlaw Marriages, cultural historian Rodger Streitmatter reveals how some of these unions didn’t merely improve the quality of life for the two people involved but also enriched the American culture.

In The Two-Parent Privilege, Melissa S. Kearney makes a data-driven case for marriage by showing how the institution's decline has led to a host of economic woes—problems that have fractured American society and rendered vulnerable populations even more vulnerable.

American society has become anti-male. Men are sensing the backlash and are responding. They're dropping out of college, leaving the workforce, and avoiding marriage and fatherhood at alarming rates. The trend is so pronounced that a number of books have been written about this man-child phenomenon, concluding that men have taken a vacation from responsibility. But why should men participate in a system that seems to be increasingly stacked against them?

Conventional wisdom holds that same-sex marriage is a purely modern innovation, a concept born of an overtly modern lifestyle that was unheard of in 19th-century America. But as Rachel Hope Cleves demonstrates in this eye-opening book, same-sex marriage is hardly new. Born in 1777, Charity Bryant was raised in Massachusetts. A brilliant and strong-willed woman with a clear attraction for her own sex, Charity found herself banished from her family home at age 20.

Thousands of books have examined the effects of parents on their children. But almost none have thought to ask: What are the effects of children on their parents? In All Joy and No Fun, award-winning journalist Jennifer Senior tries to tackle this question, isolating and analyzing the many ways in which children reshape their parents' lives, whether it's their marriages, their jobs, their habits, their hobbies, their friendships, or their internal senses of self. She argues that changes in the last half century have radically altered the roles of today's mothers and fathers, making their mandates at once more complex and far less clear.

Moms, do you feel tired? Overwhelmed? Have you continually put off the things you need to do for you? Do you feel like it's all worth it because your kids are happy? Are you "over" being a mother? If you answered yes to these questions, you're not alone. Parents today want to create the ideal childhood for their children. Women strive to be the picture-perfect Pinterest mother that looks amazing, hosts the best birthday parties in town, posts the most "liked" photos, and serves delicious, nutritious home-cooked meals in her neat, organized home after ferrying the kids to school.

In her extraordinary best seller, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc immerses listeners in the intricacies of the ghetto, revealing the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour, gold-drenched drug dealers, and street-corner society. Focusing on two romances - Jessica's dizzying infatuation with a hugely successful young heroin dealer, Boy George; and Coco's first love with Jessica's little brother, Cesar - Random Family is the story of young people trying to outrun their destinies.

There are, in the United States, a significant and growing number of families who live on less than $2.00 per person, per day. That figure, the World Bank measure of poverty, is hard to imagine in this country - most of us spend more than that before we get to work or school in the morning.

Many of us grew up believing in a meritocracy, where hard work and a good education brings rewards. Go to university, get a job, put in the hours and things will be OK. That’s what we were told – but the reality is that life chances and opportunities are no longer shaped by what we learn or earn but by whether we have access to the Bank of Mum and Dad. We’re living in an inheritocracy, where parental support is what matters most – whether that’s covering the cost of university, stumping up for a house deposit or helping with childcare.

Why do more than half of all marriages end in divorce? And why is there so much unhappiness in the marriages that survive? Greg Baer offers the solutions for a long-lasting marriage in his anticipated follow-up to Real Love: The Truth About Finding Unconditional Love and Fulfilling Relationships. No matter how many wounds have been inflicted in a marriage, Greg Baer believes that they can be healed, giving both partners the sense of fulfillment and joy they’ve always wanted.

In a time when communal rituals and cultural ceremonies fail, longtime scholar, storyteller, and ceremonialist Stephen Jenkinson asks what it means to lose cultural inheritance. In examining matrimony and its ritual twin, patrimony, Matrimony contemplates culture-making, building and preserving cultural memory, and the ache of living in a world bereft of meaning and connection. There is a real and palpable consequence to turning away from public ceremony—and not just for the celebrants.

We call it domestic violence. We call it private violence. Sometimes we call it intimate terrorism. But whatever we call it, we generally do not believe it has anything at all to do with us, despite the World Health Organization deeming it a 'global epidemic'. In No Visible Bruises, journalist Rachel Louise Snyder gives context for what we don't know we're seeing. She frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence in our country around key stories that explode the common myths....