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Back to news archiveWelcome new book on Couples from Kate Figes
New and welcome book on couples
Couples: the truth, by Kate Figes
Marriage Care welcomes this new publication from Kate Figes. The book details many different aspects of different relationships but mainly serves, we feel, to normalise relationship difficulties or issues in all long-term relationships. It’s a refreshing book since Kate combines theoretical perspectives on couple relationship and then let’s ordinary people tell it like it is!
We decided to ask Kate some questions about the book itself, how she came to write it and how she was hoping it would impact on support for all couples. Please find below the questions and Kate’ answers.
Marriage Care: How do you think this will help young couples?
Kate Figes: We seem to be surrounded by so many romantic myths about love and marriage - that we need to find our soul mate, that love means never having to say you are sorry, that we wouldn’t fight if we really loved each other and that love should be enough to see us through all adversity…………. difficulties are common and….. how you deal and work through to accepting the differences between you marks the real beginning of a committed relationship. The most important thing is to take responsibility for the welfare of your relationship, with honest communication, the courage to go to the roots of your differences before they become entrenched and far more difficult to unravel.
MC: How will this help couples who have been together for a longer time?
KF: It is easy to get stuck into a rut, taking each other for granted once you have been together for some time. For unhappy couples there is often a sense of resignation – that it is too late or too difficult to separate or change things. But if a relationship is to last us through life, we have to be prepared to renegotiate the terms as circumstances and our individual needs change.
MC: What surprised you in your research?
KF: The way that the family you come from always seems to influence your relationship…. It never occurred to me that the experience of intimacy as a child could resurface so profoundly as our defences are stripped away with time in a relationship… but as soon as I stopped to think about it was obvious! The good news is that with just a modicum of self awareness we can break negative patterns and heal old wounds and insecurity within an adult relationship.
MC: What was your main learning?
KF: I think a fundamentally good relationship does not require people to fuse and abandon aspects of their individuality. A sense of oneself as an autonomous being is crucial and from that principle others spring – the need for spaces between togetherness, the same courtesies as one would extend to a good friend, the need for appreciation, gratitude, trust, and, most importantly of all perhaps an acceptance that we have no right to control another human being.
MC: What do you feel is the main message of the book?
KF: There are lots of messages really….the importance of good relationship for our health and social welfare, for raising children and for a sense of self and place. Finding ways to shore up our personal lives and the support that a good relationship can offer has never been more important.
……..family life and our need for a loving relationship is not in a state of decline, it is in a state of transition. We have to take responsibility for making it work rather than trusting everything to luck or love, and when the distances between us are just too wide to fathom, we also have to be grown up enough to take responsibility for separating with civility.
But the only way we are going to be able to forge happier relationships for the future is by tackling them, warts and all, head on ourselves. We can seek counselling or relationship support. We can share the burdens more outside the nuclear family with the new extended family networks being formed today.
Marriage Care is happy to support and endorse this book. If you want to buy this book, you can go to the weblink below to order:
https://www.offersontheweb.co.uk/couples/
date : 03/02/2010