On My Radar (Thursday Edition)

 
I am not against love.  But I am increasingly against marriage.  I have never been married but I have been in love many, many times.  I expect married folks will not agree with me -- that is to be expected.  Humans protect their own interests.

We all have heard the statistics:  half of all marriages end in divorce.  Even if you look at if from the glass-half-full perspective, "half of all marriages never end in divorce," it still doesn't sound great, does it? 

In my day job I help people in what is sometimes bad financial shape -- often worse than bad.  It is my experience that a majority of the problems these people have stem from the fact that they have legally tied their financial lives to another person and therefore are to some extent at the mercy of other people's whims and decisions. 

Listen, I have no issue with people who decide to marry...good luck to you all.  I sincerely wish nothing but happiness and love for you for the rest of your lives.  But I'm playing the odds here.  I state for the record that the only way I will ever marry is if I am overcome by the insanity of medical intervention late in life while in the care of an old folks home.

But, really....good luck to you.  You'll need it.




Which brings me today's featured book:


Love Shrinks: A Memoir of a Marriage Counselor's Divorce
by Sharyn Wolf
Soho Press
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

For twenty years, Sharyn Wolf, a practicing psychotherapist and "relationship expert," helped revitalize the marriages of countless couples. But while she was being interviewed on Oprah and 48 Hours about her nationally bestselling books on how to flirt, find mates, and "stay lovers for life," she was going home every night to a disastrous marriage of her own.

How bad does it have to get before you leave? In fifteen years of marriage, Sharyn and her husband had sex twice. Despite the fact that she was a national bestselling self-help author, her husband couldn't bring himself to read a single one of her books. Communication between them had failed so utterly that the simple domestic activity of buying a couch together escalated to disastrous proportions. Yet through it all, they stay together. In an effort to explain why, Sharyn ends each chapter with a story about her husband that shows why she couldn't bear to leave this man who made her so unhappy.

Painted against the backdrop of her psycotherapy practice, real-life patients, and the wacky story of her career trajectory, Sharyn turns her analytical eye on herself and her husband and deftly depicts a marriage on its long last legs. The result is a beautiful and sad tapestry of a hidden and omnipresent human condition. You will not be able to put her book down.

Author website

Excerpt on scribd.com


Interview with the author