Inside the American Couple ― New Thinking, New Challenges

"By interrogating rather than accepting traditional platitudes about our need to be coupled, this vital and original collection both broadens our understanding of what constitutes a couple and deepens our appreciation for the human needs that coupling meets."--Michael S. Kimmel, author of Manhood in America: A Cultural Reader

"Reading this book is like looking at a crystal-first one interesting facet of coupledom and then another comes into view. It's entrancing!"--Barrie Thorne, Director, Center for Working Families, University of California, Berkeley

"This wonderfully important book shows where the couple has been and where it is going, challenging us to simultaneously remake and redefine coupledom for ourselves. Reassuring and enlightening, Inside the American Couple is essential reading for anyone concerned with joining in partnership and love with another human being."--Rebecca Walker, author of Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self

Marilyn Yalom is Senior Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University and author of A History of the Wife (2001), A History of the Breast (1997), Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women's Memory (1993), and Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness (1985). Laura Carstensen is Professor of Psychology and the Barbara D. Finberg Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University. She has published more than eighty articles and chapters on life-span development, marriage, and emotion.