I recently read The All or Nothing Marriage.  Here are some excerpts:

The major change over time is not an overall increase in how much Americans expect from their marriage, but rather a dramatic shift in the substance of their expectations.  In contrast to our predecessors, who looked to their marriage to help them survive, we look to our marriage to meet our needs for passion and intimacy and to facilitate our voyages of self-discovery and personal growth.

It took centuries for the love-based, breadwinner-homemaker ideal to become the dominant model of marriage in America.  It took only fifteen years to shatter that ideal.

Relative to marriages in earlier eras, marriages today require much greater dedication and nurturance, a change that has placed an ever-larger proportion of marriages at risk of stagnation and dissolution.

The proportion of spouses whose marriages fall short of expectations has grown.

The science is clear that holding strong destiny beliefs is perilous.  People who believe in romantic destiny tend to become unhappy quickly when relationships go through challenging times.  And, of course, going through challenging times is virtually inevitable in a long-term relationship.

Building a happy marriage requires that spouses successfully navigate a dense thicket of challenges and opportunities, frequently without a good map of the route ahead.

Love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering.  Nobody would seek to be successful at playing the violin by waiting for the right instrument to come along, but many of us seek to be successful at relationships by waiting for the right partner to come along.  We would be better served by cultivating our ability to love--to become skilled, mature, and self-aware relationship partners.

A key feature of effective communication is understanding when our spouse doesn't want to talk and, more generally, understanding that he or she is entitled to some privacy.

We are not the same persons this year as last, nor are those we love.  It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

Achieving ambitious goals is hard work and helping a loved one do so can sometimes require criticism rather than warmth, challenge rather than comfort.  Therein resides the spouse's dilemma: As we seek to help our partner become the best version of him- or herself, to what extent do we employ critical feedback in order to motivate versus supportive feedback in order to nurture?

Mothers and fathers in dual-income households spent an average of 33.5 hours parenting the newborn.  If you're married without children, it might be difficult to understand how much the arrival of the first baby changes things.  Where would the two of you find an additional 33.5 hours per week?

Relative to femininity, which typically doesn't require social validation, masculinity is more fragile; it requires repeated demonstration and social proof.

I recently read "The Science of Happily Ever After: What Really Matters in the Quest for Enduring Love."

Here are some excerpts from the book that I found interesting and thoughtful:

• For most of the five thousand years that marriage has existed, deciding whether you were in love with a partner did not matter, because until the eighteenth century marriage was primarily an economic agreement between families.

• The traits a partner possesses during the first couple years of dating are indicative of how the partner will behave as your roommate, your financial partner, your friend, and a parent.  The stability of traits can be good news or bad news depending on what kind of traits you chose in the first place.

• Partners consistently engage in "strategic self-presentation" by putting their best traits on display while concealing their negative traits... our partners are on their best behavior during the first few months of a relationship.  This makes positive traits the easiest to see.

• Potential partners likely know just how costly displays of emotional instability are when trying to attract a mate, which makes it more likely that they will do their best to conceal this trait.

• People's reactions under stress can be telling. Pay extra close attention to what happens in stressful situations and how a partner reacts to intense situations.

• There is no reliable association between physical attractiveness and relationship satisfaction.  If you are physically attractive, you are no more satisfied in your relationship than someone who is less attractive and if your partner is physically attractive, you are no more satisfied in your relationship than someone partnered with someone who is less attractive.  There is also no evidence to suggest that attractiveness increases relationship stability.

• The lingering tendency to choose a partner based on physical attractiveness is understandable, because 99 percent of human history, when survival and reproductive success were far from guaranteed, the advantages signaled by physical attractiveness yielded many benefits.

• Humans came to value two traits when basic needs and longevity were far from guaranteed: partners with access to resources and partners who looked healthy.  These traits were valued for thousands of years, across hundreds of generations... All species, including humans, tend to retain mechanisms of survival long after those mechanisms have lost their usefulness.  The preference for mates who are physically attractive and who have resources can be thought of in this way, because privileging these two characteristics made sense for most of human history.

• It is easy to miss good people because unlike visual traits such as physical attractiveness, desirable psychological traits are not well advertised. They are discerned when we are carefully observant of individuals' subtle and thoughtful behaviors.

• Having a lot of money is not a great predictor of relationship outcomes.

• Partners usually don't possess uniformly good or bad traits.  People often possess some good traits, such as being smart and funny, and these are often mixed with undesirable traits, such as emotional instability and low self-confidence.

• There is a continuity between the attachment style individuals form in childhood and the attachment style they display in adulthood.  There may be some fluctuations over time, but overall, the attachment style people have as children is usually the attachment style they have as adults.

• In the end, there are few things in life so worthwhile of careful study and judicious decision making as whom to love.  For there are few things in life so demoralizing as the disappointment accompanying a broken heart, and conversely, there are few things so elevating as finding love that endures.