Understanding Marriage: Making It Work, or Knowing When to Leave

by Richard Taylor

Based on numerous interviews with people from both good and failed marriages, his own experience, and years of thinking about the subject, philosopher/marriage counselor Richard Taylor has developed a set of compelling proposals for reforming marriage.
Taylor argues that marriage should not be thought of as a status created by the one-time event of a wedding, but rather as a long-term process. The idea that a legal ceremony can create a marriage is a legal fiction, he says. In reality, couples become married through years of mutual regard and caring, based upon the mutual fulfillment of needs.
By the same token, relationships that don’t work should be dissolved by mediation rather than by adversarial legal proceedings, which make today’s divorces so bitter and costly.
In a culture that produces marital unhappiness by fostering unrealistic romantic fantasies about love and marriage, Taylor’s radical prescription for reforming our attitudes toward matrimony makes eminently good sense.

166 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2004

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database named Richard Taylor.

Richard Taylor was an American philosopher known for his dry wit and Socratic approach, and an internationally-known beekeeper. He received his Ph.D. at Brown University, and taught principally there as well as at Columbia and the University of Rochester, from which he retired in 1985.