Divorce Busting: A Book Review

by Ben

When it comes to keeping your marriage together and improving your sex life, Michele Weiner-Davis is the guru par-excellence. In her New York Times bestseller, Divorce Busting: A Step-by-Step Approach to Making Your Marriage Loving Again, Weiner-Davis takes a no-nonsense brief approach to helping couples on the verge of divorce work through their issues.

Turning problems into solutions, Weiner-Davis forces her readers to work on improving communication around sex, intimacy, and money. She encourages men to roll up their sleeves and help out by doing the dishes and taking out the garbage. She encourages women to pay more attention to the emotional and social needs of their husbands by knowing when to dote, when to nag, and when to back off.

Taking an inside-out approach to helping couples, rather than fixing what’s broken, Weiner-Davis focuses on what works in the marriage. She teaches couples that by strengthening the healthy elements of their marriage, the problems will iron themselves out naturally.

Following are several quotations from Divorce Busting: A Step-by-Step Approach to Making Your Marriage Loving Again which I’ve chosen at random:

I do not get sidetracked by pessimism and hopelessness as I did in days past. Now I know that hopelessness is a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation (pg. 13).
Diagnosing one’s spouse as the source of the problem, a common antecedent to divorce, doesn’t take into account the roles both partners play in the deterioration of the relationship (pg. 13).
Research shows that except in extreme cases of abuse children want their parents together (pg. 13).
For every sex-starved husband, there is a wife with a low sex drive. Every compulsive cleaner is paired with a hopeless slob (pg. 82).
Take a moment to recall specific times you and your spouse routinely reach dead ends. Maybe discussions about money, sex, or careers always end in battle (pg. 106).
How many people imagine utopia when they are asked about goals (pg. 113).

The bottom line is that Divorce Busting: A Step-by-Step Approach to Making Your Marriage Loving Again is a must have resource for any couple (or individual) interested in improving their marriage.