Читать книгу The Secret of Happy Parents: How to Stay in Love as a Couple and True to Yourself - Steve Biddulph - Страница 7

This book was first written in 1988. We had been about ready to retire it, but kept meeting people in shops or in the street who said this was the book of all our books that really helped them the most. So instead of a dose of euthanasia, the book has been resuscitated, massaged, Viagra’d, and given a major renovation! Its aims are now much clearer, the language is simplified, its methods easier and more powerful.

The book’s goal is simple: to help you stay married, and enjoying it. And secondly, to help you raise children with a team approach, to survive the dramas and enjoy the delights that children bring. So instead of becoming a divorce statistic, you can be part of a social revolution: the breakthrough generation that learns to make relationships work.

There’s something else you should know. This is NOT a book about COPING with the family or fitting yourself in to make a tame and comfortable marriage. Nor is it about sacrificing yourself to conform to society’s wishes. It’s about how to turn the situations you are in right now – difficulties with sex, problems with partner communication, the challenges of children – into a fire-of-honesty which will burn away your hang-ups, your limitations, and leave you freer and more fulfilled than you currently might think possible. To have the kind of family life that (at least most of the time) makes you want to laugh out loud, and smile with pleasure for being in such a buzzing hive of human loving, clashing and growing. To break free from the modern madness of hurry-earn-and-spend, and get a life.

In raising a family, you can plumb the mysteries of life itself. There is no hotter furnace, no deeper pool to dive into than that of ‘married with kids’. This, ultimately, is a book about self-liberation: how to bring more love into your life, and into the world around you, where it is so desperately needed.

There’s something more you need to know. Good relationships take time and work; and anyone who tells you differently is lying. It may take twenty years for you to reach the ecstasy in loving that is possible for you and your partner. It may take years for you and your growing children to really understand each other. But if you follow what this books teaches, you will get glimpses and have moments, almost straightaway, that will let you know you are on the right track.

Love is hard. You will have to struggle to be honest, and risk rejection, over and over and over again. It will not always be comfortable; but it will be real, and the intimacy you build will be indestructible and unforgettable.

Some difficulties are necessary but confusion and loneliness are not among them. Our aim is to take away the confusion, to provide a map and tools for the journey. And to let you know through stories and examples that everywhere others are making the same journey, and their learning can be shared.

If you want your relationship – and your family – to thrive, without compromising your spirit, your heart or your values, then this book is written for you.

We hope you like it.

Steve and Shaaron Biddulph

Summer 1999