Harry Benson - What Mums Want (and Dads Need to Know)

I sometimes say, slightly light-heartedly, that I have been in the family breakdown business for more than eighty-five years: forty-five of them working at every level of the family justice system (barrister, QC, and High Court Family Judge) and forty-three being married to the same wife! This remark is made usually in the context of explaining why I felt driven to establish Marriage Foundation in 2012, having experienced both the pain and pleasure associated with marriage. It also explains the context in which I first met Harry, and later Kate, Benson. Because where they are concerned, I must start by declaring an interest, for they have become over the course of the last five years good and close friends, and, in large measure this is through our shared passion to do something about the level of, and painful fall out from, family breakdown.

Our paths first crossed in a strange way. In 2009 Harry and I both took part (unaware of the others existence) in a high quality BBC documentary about family breakdown produced by a serious journalist (John Ware). In fact, we never actually met during the production, but I saw Harry on the TV in the finished programme. At the time, he was running relationship education courses for the Bristol Family Community Trust. Having seen him on screen I knew immediately that he was the person who would be able to help me spearhead an organization dedicated to confronting and tackling this national tragedy by championing marriage as the primary antidote. Three years later, in 2012, and a few months before the launch of Marriage Foundation, I asked him if he would head up our research department. This was for the simple reason that there was literally no one else in the country with his depth and breadth of knowledge and understanding of both the theory and reality of family breakdown, its causes and cures. He accepted immediately (our initial and seminal discussion took place on mobile phones when he was in the Sainsburys car park in Taunton where he had just completed the weekly shop, and I was in the Royal Courts of Justice in London during a break from a harrowing child abuse case).

Over the intervening period my confidence in his expertise and my respect for his profound and original take on this whole problem has increased exponentially. In my opinion and experience he remains the person who knows more about this business from every angle than anyone else around. His fertile mind never ceases to explore new angles and approaches. And much of the new and best research has been done via Marriage Foundation. But it is not just the theoretical causes which he has explored. Crucially, so far as this book is concerned, he and Kate have bravely made no secret of the fact that they have been to the very brink of family collapse and come back older and wiser and with six (sic) children.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of books of advice about how to have and maintain a happy marriage. Almost none of them are written, as here, jointly by the two sides of the marriage and none of them combine huge resources of expert and original research with personal and painful experience.

Harry and Kates book looks at the tough problems of long-term relationships straight in the eye, and in the end prescribes research-based but simple, age-old, tried-and-tested solutions. It is brutally honest. But when you have steeped yourself in their joint wisdom and experience you are left knowing you are in the presence of experts you can rely on and trust completely. That cannot be said about a number of the books in this area.