Toward Commitment
A Dialogue About Marriage
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
With extraordinary candor and generosity, Diane Rehm, the nationally known Public Radio broadcaster, and her lawyer husband, John, open up for the reader their marriage of forty-two years, revealing the strong and passionate bond between them as well as the conflicts and turmoils that can overtake a relationship. In a series of highly charged dialogues, they grapple with their pronounced differences of background, attitude, and expectation, so that we actually watch them working to understand each other and themselves, and to resolve issues that even after their decades together have remained hurtful and destructive.
Their book is divided into twenty-six chapters, each centered on a difficult and important issue: the expression or repression of anger; strong disagreements about money, about family, about religion, about raising children; temperamental differences—she gregarious, he a loner; the complexities of sexual relationships, and the dangers of sexual estrangement and of the intrusion of a third person into a marriage; challenges arising from professional conflicts, from retirement, from aging, from illness.
What makes Toward Commitment so fascinating is the opportunity to overhear a husband and wife bravely anatomizing their relationship and confronting their points of discord. What makes it so extraordinary—and so valuable—is their total honesty. These perceptive and searching discussions will resonate with any two people who care enough about each other to reach painfully deep inside themselves in order to resolve their difficulties and emerge closer than ever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Rehms met in 1958, when Diane had been married and divorced once and John had had "scant experience with women." They married a year later, and that they are still happily married poses the inevitable question, "How did you do it?" In an unusual format of essays and dialogues, they offer their response "in the belief that an honest account of a marriage of more than forty years may encourage other marriages and comparable relationships not only to endure, but to flourish." Diane has been a well-known radio talk-show host for more than 20 years, and except for her highly successful career (which did not begin until their daughter was at boarding school and their son was working abroad), theirs has been a traditional marriage for their generation. John, an attorney first in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and then in private practice, attended more to his career than his family for many years, and the authors discuss this and other common marital issues, in alternating voices. Each chapter covers a single topic, including expectations, anger, sex, solitude, money, careers, religion, parenting, friends, in-laws, retirement, illness and aging. Focusing solely on their own personal experience restricts the amount of knowledge they have to offer on some subjects, while in other cases they speak generally rather than providing detailed real-life anecdotes (perhaps the fault of the dialogue format). Blaming the difficulties in their marriage on ignorance of themselves and each other, they recommend individual therapy, premarital counseling, couples counseling and thoughtful discussions of both marital issues and childhood experiences affecting assumptions and behaviors within the marriage. Insufficient as either a marriage manual or revelatory memoir, this "dialogue" offers useful, if limited, relationship advice from a seasoned married couple.
