Product Description

Now in trade paperback, the ground-breaking and carefully documented book that shows how couples come apart.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28527 in Books
• Published on: 1990-09-05
• Released on: 1990-09-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Library Journal
Vaughan's examination of the breakup of relationships from a sociological and psychological perspective identifies the key steps in uncoupling from both partners' points of view. This schema is supported by 103 in-depth interviews and solid documentation from the professional literature. Useful to professionals, this work is also invaluable to lay people both because it normalizes a universal experience often seen as idiosyn cratic and because it will help those in the early stages of uncoupling to identify what is happening, enabling them to take the steps necessary to avoid the ultimate breakdown. Given the current divorce rate of approximately 40 percent, Uncoupling will have a wide readership and is recommended for general collections. John M. Haynes, Mediation Associates, N.Y.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Inside Flap Copy
Now in trade paperback, the ground-breaking and carefully documented book that shows how couples come apart.

Customer Reviews

A "must read"
I read this book a number of years after my marriage ended. At the time of the breakup I was left devastated and it took a long time to get up, dust myself off and enjoy life again. However once I read this book the whole process suddenly made sense and I could identify each step of the breakup process and understand where each of us had been at. I understood that the fault was not with me for the breakup - as I had been made to believe. I recall some mutual friends had said to my husband after the breakup that they couldn't understand why he had left as I had not changed during the marriage. He had replied "thats exactly the problem".

I can see the same pattern with my present partner and his ex wife who will not let go. She was the initiator, leaving and returning continually over a period of 3 years or so. She put him through hell, and he turned himself inside out trying to make the marriage work. He even took out a large loan to carry out extensions on the house so that she could have her own private space. That still didn't make her happy. Finally he'd had enough, and he told her not to return. Several months later the door was closed for good on her when we got together. Once she had lost that control over the process, she turned septic, and has done everything in her power to poison his relationships, particularly with me and his son.

Read this one as a starting point for thoughtfulness about the patterns in relationships
I honestly think the author might just as well have called this one "Unfriending" or "unconnecting" or something similar and reached even a wider audience, although the focus is primarily on couples and marriages.

However, if your primary goal is knowing how this one could help your marriage, here's my take:

Instead of focusing on THE reason or reasons that marriages and relationships fall apart, the author notes that the process of separation - and, inevitably, divorce or estrangement - occurs even before the warning signs may be apparent. That infidelity that seems to be the "cause" of the divorce may be just one more step in a long progression of steps that started long before the actual affair. I think this makes sense.

It made sense to me that things may seem normal in a marriage and yet something is a bit worse than the day before, already shifting off-kilter. That is the type of change this book discusses, the veering away from being a couple and the distance that grows wider, day by day. It is the kind of thing that can be easy to dismiss until the inevitable happens - and by then it could be too late for therapy or counseling to help.

Although I'd call this more of a "philosophical study" than hard core science (even though many couples were interviewed, etc), I found it an engaging and intriguing book. This one would be worth reading before marriage and could help turn many precarious marriages back on track.

One of the most interesting parts of the book dealt with how unhappy partners may "revise" marital or relationship history, turning formerly happy memories into negatives in order to justify a separation.

Just to be clear, this review is not being written by a divorced person or someone in an unhappy marriage. I have no bones to pick, no axes to grind, etc. I simply found the book to be worth reading.

Straight forward book to help understand an unwanted break-up
This book is an excellent resource to help put the mechanics of a break-up in perscpective. It is like group therapy. You understand better the problems with trying to convince an unwilling lover to stay in the relationship. The book helps you have an open dialogue with the person who does not really want to talk to you anymore. The book provides in essense the other's persons part of the dialogue. It does not sugar coat what is happening, but allows you to appreciate where you truly are in the timeline of the relationship.