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Couples: How We Make Love Last
These days, many of us enjoy unrivalled freedom and equality when it comes to choosing and building a relationship. Yet new myths about how to live and love compromise that happiness.Kate Figes argues that, whether married or cohabiting, gay or straight, remarried or a couple living apart, the quality of our intimate relationship is fundamental to our long-term health and happiness, because our need for commitment and love hasn't changed.This is not a handbook. There are no easy 'Mars and Venus' universal recipes for success, because relationships are far too complicated, individual and important for easy answers. But learning how others sustain lifelong love, and what really goes on in other people's lives can help us to understand our own partnerships and take responsibility for making them work. Couples is an incisive and important look at how we can learn to make love endure.
416 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 5, 2012
Context: While I was reading this, Mrs Arukiyomi made her first pot in quite a while.
Review: Figes has obviously spent a lot of time researching this lengthy book about the realities of relationships in 21st century Britain. To provide context, she’s also put in a lot of work exploring what relationships looked like in the past. While all this made for an interesting read, I found the preachy tone of the whole thing a bit hard to handle, particularly when there seemed to be no real understanding of the basis of the religious convictions some of us have about relationships… and which occasionally take a bashing in her book.
Somewhat predictably, the chapters work through the life of a relationship from meeting someone, through making some kind of commitment, kids, infidelities and growing old. Figes writes densely with many, many quotes from those she’s interviewed and other works she’s read. I found this a bit relentless and formulaic most of the time. It wasn’t that the facts or quotes were uninteresting, there were just so many of them, and, combined with her tendency to comment on every one rather than let them speak for themselves, it tired me out a bit. I felt like I didn’t have any space to reflect.
It’s typical of our era, especially in the UK, that authors on subjects like this, if you’ll excuse the pun, are bound to be liberal. The book is called “couples” and there’s no restriction in Figes’ mind as to what a couple might be. I expected somewhere in there to come across a mixed race, transgender, surrogate parent of 3 and a half in a committed relationship with a hedgehog. But no. Alas I had to settle for the typically generous (and therefore demographically unrepresentative) helping of gays and lesbians. Seems a bit narrow-minded, no?
And so what really annoyed me about the book was that Figes sets herself up as an authority that can somehow tell us what we are supposed to do in relationships. This I found patronising at best. With all the diversity she describes and the vast range of issues that couples face in long-term relationships, you can’t on the one hand be liberal and on the other make pronouncements about what might be best for us all to do. Please, that leave the moralising to ‘bigots’ like me. At least we profess a faith in a God whose more objective viewpoint might mean He knows something of what the human problem is really about.
So, if it’s the liberal view you’re after and you don’t mind quite a bit of bad language throughout, you’ll probably enjoy this more than I did. What I did appreciate though was that Figes clearly explained to me that in being married, I’m attempting something really, really difficult. I’m glad of that; some days that’s exactly what it feels like.
OPENING LINE99TH PAGE QUOTE‘Apart from war, what could be more interesting than a marriage?’ writes Hilary Mantel in her introduction to Elizabeth Jenkins’s novel of the 1950s The Tortoise and the Hare.
QUOTESWhen you meet someone you think you might want to spend the rest of your life with, take a good hard look at their parents. Familial influences can be of such profound importance that they permeate adult love in all sorts of insidious ways. They affect our choice of partner, how far we trust, how we talk to each other, sexual behaviour, the way we fight and the lengths each of us can go to try to control the other. It isn’t just that each partner brings their presumptions about how life in a relationship should be because of the model they witnessed in their parents’ marriage, or that each becomes more like them as they age. With time, as emotional armour is stripped away, the quality of intimacy touches something visceral and reminiscent of the love that was experienced in childhood.
CLOSING LINELove should be enough to see us through life’s adversities; it means never having to say you’re sorry; it means knowing instinctively what is best for the other – three of the most deceitful statements about relationships ever advocated.
Couples who have rarely set foot inside a church want their vows sanctified there in the hope that, as they sacrifice themselves to this new religion of romance, they might live happily ever after.
RATINGMoments of intense frustration , hatred, loneliness and irritation exist in every long-term relationship, but when the whole is sound, when there is enough love and respect to keep things moving forward together, committed relationship offers us the best crucible there is for psychological growth, contentment and a sense of self and place.
March 19, 2011
I bought this book on the back of enthusiastic broadsheet reviews, in the hope it would give me insights into relationships and inspire my own fiction writing. Indeed, there is much to admire: Figes is clearly wise, sympathetic and well intentioned. Many of her interviewees are intelligent and self-aware. But in places it's somewhat slackly edited, as this example from p66 shows:
"Adanna deeply resents the fact she has had to give up a professional job she loved because she had an impossibly long commute to get to work. With three small children she had to give up work completely. 'I never thought I would give up working, as a mother. I loved my work.'"
We get the point in the first line. But for me the chief problem is the structure: it dips in and out of quotes from 120 interviewees - anonymous couples whose experiences are used to illustrate chapters themed around romance, argument, fidelity, the balance of power etc. As this is an echo of the method used by countless magazine journalists (perhaps not that surprising as Figes writes as a journalist herself), I've found little new here. I confess that I am an avid reader of Easy Living, Psychologies, Red, Elle, the Guardian Family section etc., so perhaps this is just me and others may glean far more. But I'd have liked more time and depth devoted to fewer case histories and suspect this would have made grittier reading. Certainly I'd have relished more social history and a greater global perspective, and a lot less in the way of verbiage. If anyone can point me in the direction of such a tome, I'd be happy to hear recommendations!
"Adanna deeply resents the fact she has had to give up a professional job she loved because she had an impossibly long commute to get to work. With three small children she had to give up work completely. 'I never thought I would give up working, as a mother. I loved my work.'"
We get the point in the first line. But for me the chief problem is the structure: it dips in and out of quotes from 120 interviewees - anonymous couples whose experiences are used to illustrate chapters themed around romance, argument, fidelity, the balance of power etc. As this is an echo of the method used by countless magazine journalists (perhaps not that surprising as Figes writes as a journalist herself), I've found little new here. I confess that I am an avid reader of Easy Living, Psychologies, Red, Elle, the Guardian Family section etc., so perhaps this is just me and others may glean far more. But I'd have liked more time and depth devoted to fewer case histories and suspect this would have made grittier reading. Certainly I'd have relished more social history and a greater global perspective, and a lot less in the way of verbiage. If anyone can point me in the direction of such a tome, I'd be happy to hear recommendations!
March 22, 2012
A look at 'what really goes on in other people's relationships' - a real mixture of some good ones but too many where one partner (often the woman) endures, compromises then regrets. The penultimate chapter 'September Days' opened with the tale of Baucis and Philemon and was the best chapter for me.
December 15, 2013
Good book to shake your thoughts up a bit, acknowledge that nothing is black and white in the realm of relationships and wholly reassuring that there is a path for everyone. I enjoyed it but did find myself hurrying on to the temoignages. Would recommend to anyone interested and/ or needing a different take on their thoughts.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews