To Understand Each Other

“Most couples enter into conjugal life with a high ideal for marriage,” states Paul Tournier. “How many of them can say, a dozen years later, that their home has become what they expected of it? All too few!”

This is the problem Dr. Tournier considers in To Understand Each Other. His concern is for marriages that have become the quiet failures.
“When we talk of marriage counseling we think immediately of the extreme cases, of threats to seek divorce, of couples in violent disputes who frequently come to blows,” he says. But there are many other couples whose marriages are no less failure. “They live side by side, without hurting one another, but poles apart, because of no real understanding of one another.”