Maggie Scarf - Intimate Partners: Patterns in Love and Marriage

Scarf is a gifted interviewer, and the reader becomes personally involved in the unfolding of each story. Scarfs analysis of different emotional triangles and how couples use them is brilliant. A sure hit.

Psychology Today

So much mumbo jumbo about relationships between men and women finds its way into print these days. Mumbo jumbo this is NOT. The testimony of her examples has a momentum all its own.

The Atlantic

One of the rare books to offer more than that sort of quick-fix self therapy is INTIMATE PARTNERS.

The Seattle Times

Her calm, commonsense look at the things that drive most of us nuts is soothing and informative. One of the most compelling nonfiction books about men and women Ive readI think it should be required reading for everyone.

S USAN C HEEVER

Trains a powerful searchlight on our passionate attachments, illuminating conflicts that sabotage couples. Its hard to read two consecutive sentences in this hook without experiencing a shock of recognition, followed by an aftershock of understanding.

New Woman

Probing literate study on the nature of intimacy The authors clear-headed, constructive advice about marital problems, including guidance on sexual adjustments, should be of help to couples at all stages.

Publishers Weekly

Every marriage contains a story, and it begins long before the wedding, Maggie Scarf tells us in her ambitious, thought-provoking ultimately compelling study. Read it and feel consoled.

USA Today

A storehouse of information for committed partners who want to have joyful and mutually rewarding marriages. Short of marital therapy itself, INTIMATE PARTNERS may well be the most helpful boost to come along in years for stumbling marriages.

The Providence Journal

A manual on how to render the marital dilemma not just tolerable but sensational.

The Kirkus Reviews

Scarf is remarkably skilled at inducing couples to reveal in fascinating detail their probetas with intimacy. Highly recommended for popular collections.

Library Journal

INTIMATE PARTNERS is a carefully researched yet eminently readable examination of how a healthy marriage can be threatened by ghosts of past relationships.

Salem Press

BODY, MIND, BEHAVIOR
INTIMATE PARTNERS
UNFINISHED BUSINESS

Published by Ballantine Books

Copyright 1987 by Maggie Scarf
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy: Excerpts from Extramarital Sexual Crisis: Common Themes and Therapy Implications by Anthony Thompson. Reprinted from Vol. 10, No. 4 of Journal of Marital and Family Therapy. Copyright 1984 American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. Excerpts from Dysfunctional Marital Conflict: An Integrative Interpersonal Intrapsychic Model by Larry Feldman. Reprinted from Vol. 8, No. 4 of Journal of Marital and Family Therapy. Copyright 1982 American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy. Reprinted by permission.

Family Process, Inc.: Excerpts from Individuation: From Fusion to Dialogue by Mark Karpel in Family Process, Vol. 15, 1976. Reprinted with permission.

Thomas F. Fogarty, M.D.: Excerpts from The Distancer and the Pursuer by Thomas Fogarty in The Family, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1979.

Gardner Press, Inc.: Excerpts from The Joining of Families Through Marriage: The New Couple by Monica McGoldrick in The Family Life Cycle: A Framework for Family Therapy, Elizabeth A. Carter and Monica McGoldrick, eds., 1980.

Grune & Stratton, Inc.: Excerpts from On Children, Adults and Families: The Critical Transition from Couples to Parents by Kitty La Perriere in Family Therapy: Combining Psychodynamic and Family Systems Approaches, John K. Pearce and Leonard J. Friedman, eds., 1980. Reprinted with permission of the author and publisher.

Hospital Publications, Inc.: Excerpts from Commentary on a Paper Delivered by Bernard Greene, Ronald Lee and Noel Lustig, by Stanley Willis. Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality Hospital Publications, Inc. Published September 1984. Reproduced with permission of the publisher.

Pantheon Books: Excerpts from Secrets in the Family by Lily Pincus and Christopher Dare. Copyright 1977 by Lily Pincus and Christopher Dare. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

Pergamon Press: Excerpts from A Model of Marital Interaction by Ellen Berman, Harold Lief and Ann Marie Williams in The Handbook of Marriage and Marital Therapy, G. Pirooz Sholevar, ed., 1981. Reprinted with permission of the authors and the publisher.

http://www.randomhouse.com

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 86-10111

eISBN: 978-0-307-77503-0

v3.1

F OR H ERB

What is intimacy, and what happens in intimate relationships? In this compelling book, Maggie Scarf takes us beyond the exterior appearances of marriage to explore its underlying architecture. Intimate Partners: Patterns in Love and Marriage offers us a comprehensive and absorbing view of the complex problems encountered by couples today.

Our ideas about the nature of the marital relationship have changed in recent years. We no longer look to marriage primarily for offspring, security or care taking; we also expect companionship, love, sex and togetherness. We ask a great deal of each other, and the greater the burdens that we place upon our intimate relationships, the more stressed and fragile they become. It is not surprising, therefore, that the field of marital and family therapy has not only evolved within the last few decades, but that it continues to flourish.

Maggie Scarf has a unique ability to enter the lives of the marital partners she interviews and to weave their life stories into a clear discussion of the important theoretical issues of marriage. She explores the interactions within the couples relationship, and the ways in which the partners preexisting psychological and cultural histories are affecting what happens between them in subtle, often unnoticed ways.

Contemporary couples are attempting to cope with vast and widespread changes in societal patterns. Ms. Scarf addresses here, with sensitivity and skill, the intricacies of the problems that can and often do develop in intimate relationships. She discusses the ways in which people bring to a marriage disparate expectations and valuesdreams and visions often based more on wishes and romanticized fantasies than on what reality can offer. Most important, she delineates the manner in which couples tend to resurrect, in their current relationships, unresolved dilemmas carried over from their original families.

In this lively, absorbing work, Ms. Scarf also discusses the tendency of distressed couples to deflect their difficulties onto a third partya parent, an in-law, a child, a friend, lover, or even a colleague or boss. Not only does she explore the problematic patterns that can crystallize in close relationships but she also offers some practical and intriguing suggestions for changing them.

Maggie Scarf has captured the essence of our search for intimacy; she alerts us to unanticipated problems and also suggests unexpected resolutions. In her elegant section on sexuality, for example, she points out what might be considered obvious, but is nevertheless often completely unrecognizedthe changes in sexual functioning that accompany ordinary aging. These are, as she explains, experienced by many couples as a defeat, rather than a normal human change accompanied by its own promises and challenges.