Customer Reviews

Still Friends: Living Happily Ever After...Even If Your Marriage Falls Apart

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Still Friends is a wonderful book that is both enlightening and easy to read. Author Barbara Quick deftly tells the stories of couples who discover how to allow divorce to expand their family community, rather than destroy it. We usually associate divorce with the disintegration of relationships, which inevitably hurts the children. In this book we meet couples who transform their relationships instead. I believe that by making these stories available Quick will inspire others to rise to the challenge of moving beyond the narrow confines of our cultural definition of familial success!

I've sent out my share of wedding presents; why not make this book a "divorce present?" STILL FRIENDS charts a way for divorcing couples to travel through disappointment and anger to peace, acceptance and friendship. In this practical and entertaining book, dozens of couples share how they've moved into a comfortable and workable relationship that continues to bring benefits after love and marriage ended. Wouldn't it be wonderful if divorced couples could remain a caring family, if friends and relatives didn't have to choose sides? This book was really needed and does a wonderful job pointing the way to resolution and forgiveness.

Barbara Quick has managed to write an anecdotal, eminently useful book for those who are divorced or will be. She focuses on the truths of post-divorce relationships in all their complexity, while she leads the reader through them, to a happy (and realistic) outcome. As a pastor, I plan to give a copy to any couple who come to me for advice about their divorce. The book will save lives!

A collection of peoples' success stories in maintaining some sort of amicable relationship post-divorce. While many of the stories are inspiring, the book is written in a hodge-podge fashion arranged around subject matter but sharing quotes from the same people over and over. I would have preferred chapter by chapter couple studies that went in depth into the various stages each couple went through as they dealt with their scenarios.

Large print, small format, wide margins, large spacing try to mask that this book simply isn't very long. As another reviewer said, an "easy read"; that's a nice way of putting it.

basically everyone either works it out for themselves....or not.

Could be a cruel read for someone who would love to make a good relationship with an obnoxious ex who refuses to cooperate.

As someone who is just starting down this road, my fervent wish has been to make our divorce as amicable as possible, and for my husband and I to perhaps end up as friends. We have a 24 year shared history and 2 sons. It is important to me to keep our family as "intact" as possible, even after the divorce. I spent hours searching the internet for stories of couples who had managed this and the best I could find were stories of congenial shared custody. Not a real issue here as our kids are both in college. I ordered this book, read it in one sitting, and realized that it can be done. The couples (or ex-couples) whose stories are told share some insightful thoughts about how and why they were able to get through the pain of divorce and value their former partners, their new extended families, and the continued pleasure at having their exes be an integral part of their lives. I gave it to my husband today and asked him to read it, as well. We have a lot of work ahead of us to get through this, but this book has demonstrated an end result which is very much in line with what I believe we both want to attain.

Any one who has worked in a child custody setting or attended the average divorce court will know that STILL FRIENDS Is not a book that addresses the trenchant problems most people face during a divorce. Worse still, one suspects that this book suger-coats some basic facts about the hard work of dismantling a domestic cosmology no matter how educated or therapized the people involved happen to be.. The fact that the book is very small unwittingly validates the impression that the research was slim and the author created a premise and found a few people to support it with biased interviews. It would be great if this author had taken a look at even a handful of literature about family systems therapy: Among other things, she extolls the virtues of infinitely extended families made of spouses and ex-spouses and lovers of ex-spouses and ex-lovers of ex-spouses. This has to be a nightmare for the kids, and one wonders whether any thought has been given to their real feelings.