How to Keep Your Marriage From Sucking: The Keys to Keep Your Wedlock Out of Deadlock

by Greg Behrendt, Amiira Ruotola

Overview

A hilarious and hopeful primer to prevent, combat, and eliminate the suckage in modern marriage by doing it right in the early years, from one of the minds behind the series Sex and the City and the New York Times bestselling authors of He’s Just Not That Into You, It’s Called a Breakup Because It’s Broken, and It’s Just a F***ing Date

Some marriages start out storybook. Perfect proposal, perfect engagement, perfect wedding, perfect honeymoon, and perfect newlywed years.

Greg Behrendt and Amiira Ruotola stumbled right out of the wedding gate. Their choices in the early years, they’ll tell you, nearly bought their marriage a one-way ticket to Suckville.

The New York Times bestselling authors explore all the adventures of early wedlock, from the moment one of you gets on one knee to the day when sex starts to feel like work instead of play. In this guidebook, Behrendt and Ruotola explore their own marriage and, with gleeful candor, tremendous warmth, sharp humor, and piercing insight, look at what we who have decided to “settle down” hope to get out of our most lasting relationship. We venture through volumes on the engagement, wedding planning, the Big Day, the wedding hangover, the (blissful?) first year, the hard work of marrying two lives, fights, and sex-pectations versus sex-pectreality.

The perfect book for those who have just put a ring on it or are thinking of putting a ring on it, Behrendt and Ruotola’s work is a brilliant guide for the first stretch of that wild ride we call marriage.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635763867
Publisher:	Diversion Publishing
Publication date:	07/17/2018
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	923 KB

About the Author

Greg Behrendt is a comedian, author and musician. Co-author of the New York Times bestselling book He’s Just Not That Into You, which was adapted into a major motion picture, he was also a script consultant to the series Sex and the City. Greg currently spends time parenting, touring as a standup, recording his podcast Rock Out with Your Doc Out with Kay Hanley, and playing with his band The Reigning Monarchs. He someday hopes to lie down.

"Amiira Ruotola took to writing after retiring from a tremendously adventurous career the music business at a young age with little hearing left to speak of. Amiira and her TV writing partners have sold several scripts to FOX, CBS and NBC and she currently is developing a one-hour YA procedural with Ben Stiller’s Red Hour Films for YouTubeRed and continues to work in the relationship field. She cannot keep fish alive and may or may not have been raised by spies. Together, Amiira and Greg have written It’s Called A Breakup Because It’s Broken and It’s Just A F***ing Date. They appeared with Oprah Winfrey for an Oprah’s Lifeclass based on their work, and they now host the podcast Maybe It’s You. They live in Los Angeles, raising their two ridiculously incredible children and three dogs."

Table of Contents

Introductions 1

Chapter 1 Marriage Schmarriage 7

Chapter 2 I Know I Want to Make You Mine 15

Chapter 3 The Bad Proposal 27

Bonus Section: Proposal How-to Guide 49

Chapter 4 The Engagement 59

Chapter 5 Wedding Truths 75

Chapter 6 The Ultimate Wedding Planning Guide from the Couple Who Couldn't Plan Their Own Wedding 93

Chapter 7 It's About You but Not Only You 105

Chapter 8 The Parties and the Panic 121

Chapter 9 Wedding Hangover 131

Chapter 10 Newlyweds! 137

Chapter 11 Marrying Your Lives 149

Chapter 12 Touchy Subjects 163

Chapter 13 Fighting Married 173

Chapter 14 Sex-pectations vs. Sex-pectreality 185

Chapter 15 Glory and Struggle 195

Acknowledgments 205

About the Authors 209

Editorial Reviews

Praise for IT'S CALLED A BREAKUP BECAUSE IT'S BROKEN:

"You will get through this, and you'll do it faster with the help of It's Called a Breakup Because It's Broken." —Glamour

"Behrendt's frankness-never too harsh-is as winning as ever." —-Publishers Weekly

"Insightful, been-there-have-the-scars-to-prove-it wisdom." —New York Post

From the Publisher

2018-05-15
Behrendt and Ruotola (It's Just a F***ing Date: Some Sort of Book About Dating, 2013, etc.) are back, this time with a playful and useful self-help guide to help readers through the newlywed stage of "wedded bliss."Candid, conversational, and occasionally profane, the book is packed with short, often hilarious nuggets culled from personal experience. "My marriage to Amiira has been beautiful, but it has—at times—downright sucked ass," writes Behrendt early on. The brutal honesty builds from there, as the authors seek to warn new couples that "historical resentments and patterns that can demolish a marriage usually start out as something seemingly unimportant." This includes financial differences, plans for children, family traditions, sex, and even the marriage proposal. "The story of my proposal is so agonizing, writes Behrendt, "that it sits in my gut like a hibernating bear that awakens every time I'm asked" about it. Instead of using a ring, he proposed in a chintzy beach-house bedroom with a Christmas ornament of a male angel with "a comically big nose holding out a gold heart." Ruotola: "Finally, I confessed to Greg that I was embarrassed to tell anyone that I was engaged because the first thing anyone wants to see is THE RING." Fortunately, the couple recovered. Behrendt proposed again, but "alas," he writes, "the bad proposal isn't a thing I'll ever get to take back." While the advice is occasionally repetitive of obvious details—yes, planning a wedding is stressful—the narrative's cautionary tale format works thanks to the self-deprecating approach. Formatted in short chapters of real marriage examples, listicles, Q-and-As, and checklists, the overarching message is that, just like creating a meaningful proposal, a long and happy union is built on "an exceptional set up….We repeat what we don't repair, so if you want to have a suck free marriage it requires working through the hiccups and hurt to rid yourself of their stain."Sandwiching hard truths between hilarious anecdotes makes for an entertaining alternative to couples therapy.

Kirkus Reviews