Shaaron Biddulph - The Making of Love

Love starts out as a blessing, even a fluke, but it continues as an achievement! Steve and Shaaron Biddulph

Steve and Shaaron Biddulphs classic book on how to find and grow the love between a man and a woman has been credited with saving the marriages of couples across the globe.

Written in their earthy, honest and warm style, and revised and updated for the twenty-first century, it includes:

How to recognise and balance the levels of connection loving, lusting and liking in your relationship

How having children helps you grow up!

Getting through the crises that every couple has

The changes that children bring, and how to make these a plus

A long-term loving relationship is an achievement a craft and it can take years to develop. The Making of Love is unique in that it explores the issues that couples face from both the male and female point of view, and illustrates these through moving stories from peoples lives.

This book was first written in 1988. We had been about ready to retire it, but kept meeting people in shops or in the street who said The Making of Love was the book of all our books that really helped them the most. So instead of a dose of euthanasia, the book has been resuscitated, massaged, Viagrad, and given a major renovation! Its aims are now much clearer, the language is simplified, its methods easier and more powerful.

The books goal is simple: to help you stay married, and enjoying it. And secondly, to help you raise children with a team approach, to survive the dramas and enjoy the delights that children bring. So instead of becoming a divorce statistic, you can be part of a social revolution: the breakthrough generation that learns to make relationships work.

Theres something else you should know. This is NOT a book about COPING with the family or fitting yourself in to make a tame and comfortable marriage. Nor is it about sacrificing yourself to conform to societys wishes. Its about how to turn the situations you are in right now difficulties with sex, problems with partner communication, the challenges of children into a fire-of-honesty which will burn away your hang-ups, your limitations, and leave you freer and more fulfilled than you currently might think possible. To have the kind of family life that (at least most of the time) makes you want to laugh out loud, and smile with pleasure for being in such a buzzing hive of human loving, clashing and growing. To break free from the modern madness of hurry-earn-and-spend, and get a life.

In raising a family, you can plumb the mysteries of life itself. There is no hotter furnace, no deeper pool to dive into than that of married with kids. This, ultimately, is a book about self-liberation: how to bring more love into your life, and into the world around you, where it is so desperately needed.

Theres something more you need to know. Good relationships take time and work; and anyone who tells you differently is lying. It may take twenty years for you to reach the ecstasy in loving that is possible for you and your partner. It may take years for you and your growing children to really understand each other. But if you follow what this books teaches, you will get glimpses and have moments, almost straightaway, that will let you know you are on the right track.

Love is hard. You will have to struggle to be honest, and risk rejection, over and over and over again. It will not always be comfortable; but it will be real, and the intimacy you build will be indestructible and unforgettable.

Some difficulties are necessary but confusion and loneliness are not among them. Our aim is to take away the confusion, to provide a map and tools for the journey. And to let you know through stories and examples that everywhere others are making the same journey, and their learning can be shared.

If you want your relationship and your family to thrive, without compromising your spirit, your heart or your values, then this book is written for you.

We hope you like it.

Steve and Shaaron Biddulph

Summer 1999

About Us

A book is really just someone talking: a very one-sided conversation. Since we are about to bend your ear for a couple of hundred pages, you might well be wondering who we the authors are, and what we are like. So lets get the embarrassing part out of the way!

We are very ordinary. Our house is never tidy, we laugh a lot, have been known to shout at the kids, we have fights with each other and lose the keys to the car. Aged in our late forties, we are getting old and funny-looking, and to the horror of our offspring, we dont really care! We have lived together for twenty-five years and been married for the last sixteen of those. Our kids are fifteen and eight a boy and a girl.

Steve grew up in a caring, but very emotionally constrained and rather isolated migrant family. (You guessed it hes English!) Shaaron is of Irish-German descent. She was born on the canefields of north Queensland, one of five little girls who, with their parents, had to struggle and work very hard to get by.

We were blue-collar kids who were lucky to grow up in the sixties when you could get an education, and advance in the world beyond the horizons of your parents. After a fairly bumpy adolescence, Steve trained as a counselling psychologist. Shaaron trained as a nurse and then a social worker. Looking back, the training was of limited value but we made some good friends, and it gave us something to do while we were growing up.

Steve specialised in families and children. Shaaron worked with deaf people, and before that, as a very young nurse, had to tackle the deep water of illness, death and bereavement.

Being thrown in the deep end at a young age turned out to be a plus. Unsure of ourselves but eager to do great deeds, we found that our patients appreciated our honesty in admitting that we didnt know much. Not having much else to offer, we learned by listening very closely to people and looking carefully at every movement and expression, really wanting to understand life through those we were supposed to be helping.

By getting this close to our clients, we began to know and like them, often more than they liked themselves. Sometimes this approach of listening was helpful to the people we worked with. At other times, looking back, we were quite useless. But we never met anyone with whom we didnt eventually feel some sense of a bond. This included ordinary people, who were easy to like, but also people who were violent or criminal, even people who had killed others.

Counselling work is very absorbing. But after a few years we began to wonder if something was going wrong with family life in the late twentieth century. We were meeting hundreds of parents every year who had almost identical problems with their children. And hundreds of reasonable, caring couples who were struggling to keep their marriages alive. And this was just in one medium-sized country town (Launceston, Tasmania, pop. 62 000). Sometimes after a hard days work, you felt like calling a public meeting and saying: Whats going on, guys? Or to put the question another way: Why is family life so damn hard?