Thomas N. Bradbury

Benjamin R. Karney

A clear, balanced, contemporary look at how relationships work, from leading researchers in the field. As the first text to fully capture the excitement of today's research findings on couples, Intimate Relationships answers fascinating questions: How do relationships work? Why are they so hard sometimes? What are the principles that guide them? How can we use what we know to make them better?

Intimate Relationships (Second Edition)

Based on cutting-edge research with more than 1,000 married couples, this “revolutionary book” (Harville Hendrix, PhD, coauthor of Making Marriage Simple) shows you how to bolster your resolve by strengthening your relationship, offering a fresh approach to weight loss that will turn your spouse from diet saboteur into your most loyal health ally. First comes love, then comes marriage…then comes a larger pant size? Many couples find themselves gaining weight as they settle into a relationship, but some couples manage to buck this trend. They exercise (together or separately), they support each other’s healthy eating habits, and their relationships are stronger as a result. What are their secrets? It turns out that many of us are ignoring the most powerful tool we have to help us get healthier and stay healthier—our spouse or significant other. For more than twenty years, Drs. Thomas Bradbury and Benjamin Karney, codirectors of the Relationship Institute at UCLA, have been studying how couples communicate around these issues, witnessing firsthand how partners can help (and hinder) one another’s progress toward better health. In Love Me Slender, they identify the specific principles that successful couples use in their quest to improve their health. Love Me Slender offers new solutions based on a remarkable insight: The powerful connection we share with our mate can influence what we eat, how much we exercise, how well we age, and ultimately how long we live. Strengthening this connection, and using it to influence our daily habits, holds the key to better health. Featuring self-assessments and case studies from real couples working to stay healthy together, Love Me Slender is an eye-opening, uplifting guide to changing the dynamic of your relationship and improving your health—and the health of those you love most.

How Smart Couples Team Up to Lose Weight, Exercise More, and Stay Healthy Together

Love Me Slender

Builds on extensive research to demonstrate how couples can support each other's health goals without becoming saboteurs, sharing strategic advice based on in-depth analysis of the way partners affect health-care habits.

Policymakers are interested in promoting healthy marriages in adulthood by providing services to strengthen the adolescent precursors of healthy marriage, especially within low-income populations. But if programs and curricula targeting adolescent romantic relationships are to be effective, they must be grounded in an accurate understanding of how adolescent relationships function and the role that they play in the development of healthy adult marriages. This report evaluates the current landscape of theory, research, and interventions addressing the role of adolescent romantic relationships in the development of healthy adult marriages. Drawing on a thorough review of the existing theoretical and empirical literature in this area, as well as interviews with practitioners directly involved with developing or administering relationship education to adolescents, the authors bring together relevant research and theory from a wide range of disciplines that have examined these issues, and suggest future directions for research and intervention. In particular, they note that although research describing romantic relationships in low-income populations is sparse, there are already-existing nationally representative data sets that include data from substantial numbers of well-sampled low-income adolescents. Analyses of these data would have relatively low cost and a potentially high yield for informing policies that target low-income youth.

A Review of Theory, Research, and Programs

Adolescent Romantic Relationships as Precursors of Healthy Adult Marriages

John S. Crown

The authors estimate marriage and marital dissolution trends from 1996 to 2005, and the effects of recent deployments on risk of ending a marriage. Marital dissolution rates across services and components are currently similar to those seen in 1996, when the demands on the military were measurably lower. Service members who were deployed had a lower risk of subsequently ending their marriages than those who did not deploy or deployed fewer days.

An Assessment of Data, Theory, and Reseach on Marriage and Divorce in the Military

Families Under Stress

Current and diverse: a perfect match for today's student

Benjamin R. Karney

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