Uncoupling: Turning Points in Intimate Relationships [Hardcover]

Diane Vaughan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 16, 1986

Many books explain why relationships end, but never before has a book shown in riveting step-by-step detail precisely how they end. Through extensive interviews and original research, Diane Vaughan reveals the underlying pattern beneath every disintegrating relationship. This is a groundbreaking book that will help anyone who has ever left a relationship--or been left--to understand "what happened". Perhaps even more important, it will help some people who don't even know their relationship is in trouble to see what is happening. Armed with a new awareness of what is usually an unconscious process--until it's too late--the partners acquire the ability to either live with it, control it, or change it. Vaughan shows that no matter what the characteristics of the couple involved, rich or poor, straight or gay, married or not, and whether they've been together 18 months or 18 years, the dynamics of the uncoupling process are essentially the same. The key to understanding how two people separate, according to Vaughan, is the role they assume in the leavetaking. Most often, one partner--the initiator--wants out of a relationship while the other wants the relationship to continue. Although both people must go through the same steps in altering their perceptions of each other and themselves, they do so at different times. By the time the still-loving partner realizes the relationship is in serious trouble, the initiator is already gone in a number of ways. Uncoupling begins with the initiator's first secret awareness of discomfort, depicts his or her search for a confidant (who is selected is a telling factor), and reveals the subtle, often barely perceptible signalling of his discontent to the partner. Vaughan traces the initiator's groping for and testing of a new single identity and depicts the initiator's confrontation with the partner. She shows how two people try and why trying often fails. Finally, she explains how the partner makes his or her own transition out of the relationship. Replete with case histories, many poignant, the book provides answers to many puzzling questions: why one person can sometimes take the end of a long-term relationship so calmly...why counseling so often fails...why one member of a couple can be so much better prepared for a single life than the other...why some people never psychologically separate...and much more.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Vaughan's examination of the breakup of relationships from a sociological and psychological perspective identifies the key steps in uncoupling from both partners' points of view. This schema is supported by 103 in-depth interviews and solid documentation from the professional literature. Useful to professionals, this work is also invaluable to lay people both because it normalizes a universal experience often seen as idiosyn cratic and because it will help those in the early stages of uncoupling to identify what is happening, enabling them to take the steps necessary to avoid the ultimate breakdown. Given the current divorce rate of approximately 40 percent, Uncoupling will have a wide readership and is recommended for general collections. John M. Haynes, Mediation Associates, N.Y.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Inside Flap

Now in trade paperback, the ground-breaking and carefully documented book that shows how couples come apart. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 259 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (October 16, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195039106
• ISBN-13: 978-0195039108
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #897,273 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The last few chapters of the book of relationships., April 13, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Uncoupling: Turning Points in Intimate Relationships (Paperback)

I'm very picky and critical of self-help books, but Vaughan's Uncoupling is the next best thing to a counsellor. More than a psych book, it is the definite beginning-middle-end about how couples become uncoupled.

I picked up this book by instinct, as I needed to read something--anything--about how relationships end. I don't care about the why's anymore; I just wanted to understand what was happenning in my own relationship.

This book will not tell you how to save your relationship, or whether it's worth saving or not. Vaughan argues that there is a pattern to how relationships end. And in the telling, she gives the story that makes sense of everything--and that is all we need when we go row into the choppy waters of a faltering relationship.

113 of 130 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The devestating truth you may not be ready to hear or face, January 18, 2000

By 

[e-mail] (Phoenix, Arizona) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Uncoupling: Turning Points in Intimate Relationships (Paperback)

Regrettably, chances are that you will look for and find this book far too late in the process of uncoupling to save your own relationship. For the "initiator" has all the power to end or save a relationship and put the "partner" through hell in the process.

If you're the initiator, stop what you are doing, read this book and carefully consider the spiraling path to relationship destruction you are on.

Either way, I believe that you will learn more from reading this book than a dozen others. Much more than from marriage counselors or even Psychologists.

But the truth may be hard to take. It was for me as I was looking for help in saving my relationship from my wife's affair. Alas, she had long since started a transition out of our relationship and redefining me in negative terms.

This book will help you understand why the person you love can turn on you like a rabid dog, rip your beating heart from your chest, throw it in a blender and hit frappe!

Eventually you will want answers whatever the emotional cost and this book is filled with them.

However, if you are one of the fortuitous or lucky ones fortunate enough to find this before it is too late, then read, learn and act now before your life is sucked through a crushing black hole of change very few are ready for.

55 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sociology, not self-help, November 7, 2000

By 

Sabreur (Germany) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Uncoupling: Turning Points in Intimate Relationships (Paperback)

This book is a sociological study--it discusses processes and patterns that typically occur as relationships fall apart.

As such, it does not provide solutions, fingers to put in the dike, compresses to stop the bleeding--in fact, it makes clear that most such measures are, finally, ineffectual.

At the same time, every relationship is singular--statistics portray the behavior of groups, without necessarily predicting individual outcomes.

If you are looking for a book that forces you to consider the individual and personal perspective in a damaged relationship, I strongly recommend "Should you leave?" by Peter Kramer.

Nonetheless, it is both enlightening and depressing to recognize "Damn, we've done that" as you read this book.

One final note: Ms. Vaughan's writing style is academic and often less than felicitous. The comparison between the liveliness and complexity of life shown in the quotations and her own dry, sometimes reductive commentary frequently annoyed me.