cover image The Seven Marriages of Your Marriage: How Couples Can Make Love Last by Understanding and Managing..

The Seven Marriages of Your Marriage: How Couples Can Make Love Last by Understanding and Managing..

Mel Krantzler, Patricia Biondi Krantzler. HarperOne, $18 (249pp) ISBN 978-0-06-250633-7

The Kranzlers, California psychologists who are married to each other, describe the seven stages (``marriages'') of married life in this Passages for married couples. They take readers from the initial ``Movie-Marriage-in-Your-Mind'' stage (characterized by the ``clash of expectations with reality'') through career-building, child-raising, middle-age and retirement stages to the final ``After-Death Marriage'' of the surviving spouse. Along the way they point out the threats to mutual love and opportunities for personal growth inherent in a developing relationship, citing examples from their own lives and from their shared practice as illustration. Their occasional forays into the issues of the day--women's rights, the need for affordable child care--add to their sound, if stolid self-help manual's appeal. $60,000 ad/promo; author tour. (Oct.)