Pepper SchwartzRezensionen

Read for research purposes for book. Like most of these kind of books, pretty basic info. Does cover the Wild West of internet dating, though, and talks about all the things you really should think about when getting back into the game.

Everyone agrees parents must talk to their children about sex, but the questions always arise: How do I start? What should I cover? Ten Talks offers advice on exactly how to begin and what to say -- not just about sex, but about safety, character, peer pressure, ethics, meeting people on the internet, and mixed messages from TV. Ten Talks is based on innovative and proven approaches that the authors are using in parent workshops across the country. The talks can be adapted for all kinds of families and offer immeasurable rewards, strengthening the relationships of parents and children. This innovative and illustrated book helps prepare kids for the complex world of relationships, sex, and growing up. Selected Reading Questionnaire.

Even though it's talking about the statistical norm, there's something about the title of this book that's deeply objectionable. It's not pop psychology; it's barely even Anthropology Lite. It's crowdsourced opinions about relationship satisfaction, which might be interesting as a listicle, but not so much as a full book. I was looking forward to some good infographics or otherwise easily digestible statistics, and what I got was anecdata and superficially extrapolated advice with a side of percentages. A lot of it is of the "no duh" variety: happy people communicate well, make each other feel wanted and appreciated, and work on being good partners. Unhappy people tend not to do those so well.

This good book on relationships is a refreshing view of many of the pathos that impede so much happiness and fulfillment. Some of her chapters (debunked myths) do not go to the logical extreme because that would require an even more shocking view of human sexuality. In a few instances her focus on the importance of selfish interests seems a bit overdrawn but her conclusions and points are well made. I just wish she would have focused on the selfishness of the partner more rather than using one's own selfish interests as a basis for a judgment. I recommend this for anyone struggling with a relationship issue. It will help clear your thinking and have better insight to what is realistic, truly meaningful and how to get more joy from life and sex.

Some of the other reviews I've read mentioned that this was a bit of a how-to for peer marriage but it's not. It really isn't, but it does take a good look at marriage and groups them all into traditional, near-peer, and peer. For me, this was an interesting read. I appreciated the author admitting her bias toward peer marriage right in the beginning but also making every effort to keep the material itself objective. For every benefit of peer marriage, she also brings up a hardship and then she does the same for traditional marriage. She also throws in some information for and about those who reach and come close to peer marriage but just miss the mark.

Being in a peer marriage myself, this book gave me a lot of comfort. We have dealt with a lot of the problems mentioned in the book and we've reaped almost all of the benefits mentioned as well. It made me feel like we were a little less alone in the endeavor to attempt peer marriage, though we wouldn't have thought to call it that on our own. It's good to have a reference now and somewhere to direct people who want to know a bit more about it.

The segments on traditional marriage made sense and seemed to line up pretty well with most of the people I've known in these marriages too. It was also interesting to see how easy it can be to fall away from peer marriage, into what she calls near-peer and then into traditional marriages as we let society, culture, work, children or whatever else put too much weight on our ideals. Children and parenting get their own chapter, as does the provider role, due to the unique challenges that these things bring to marriage. It was great to read about fathers enforcing their desire to participate more and the guilt that mothers can get from getting the ways of those fathers. It is a complex situation and the author explains it well.

Overall, this was a great examination into marriage and some of the different ways that we all choose to do it. I thought it was interesting in the beginning when she mentions that homosexual couples have a greater tendency to create relationships that "both partners felt were fair and supportive to each other" and attributes this to that they don't have to overcome traditional gender roles. The book focuses exclusively on heterosexual couples after that and how some have overcome those traditions and how others intended to but did not, and still others never even wanted to.

I enjoyed it and definitely recommend it to anyone getting married and debating what kind of marriage they want.

I was intrigued by the premise of this book: an enormous survey provides information about all aspects of relationships, giving us a sense of what “normal” is. And the book lived up to the concept, more or less. There are all sorts of interesting nuggets here, and it was a relatively quick and enjoyable read. There’s nothing really groundbreaking, but the material is certainly interesting enough on its own. Topics range from romance to communication to money to sex, with enough detail about that last one that I wouldn’t recommend the book to the prudish: you’ll learn, for example, that 52% of women swallow semen when performing oral sex.

I did have some concerns about the reliability of the data and the degree of analysis, though. There isn’t really much analysis to speak of; this is more a collection of “x percent of people said this, and y percent of people said that”. There were times when it might have been just as enlightening to see a straight-up table of results. The book is filled out by personal anecdotes from the survey subjects and various pieces of advice for improving our own relationships, sometimes offered up in an overly chipper tone. Some of the advice is good, but again, it wasn’t groundbreaking.

I was also a bit worried about the methodology, which is described in an appendix at the end of the book. All the data is based on a voluntary survey, where participants have a choice about which two topics they answer questions about. There are some core questions that everyone answers, but in general, the responses about family are from people who specifically chose to do questions about family, while the responses about sex are from people who specifically chose to do questions about sex. As the authors acknowledge, this means that the results are neither representative nor unbiased. They dismiss this an unimportant, with the arguments that a) it’s becoming harder and harder to get a truly random sampling; and b) it’s okay that the respondents are particularly interested in the quality of their relationships, because the book’s readers are like that too. I wasn’t entirely convinced.

Despite these flaws, I did enjoy the book as I was reading it. It didn’t take me long to finish, and I wasn’t bored. I’m just not sure how much important information I really took away from it in the end. If you’re interested in the topic, I’d cautiously recommend it, if only because I don’t know of any similar book to suggest as a substitute.½