Customer Reviews

Uncoupling: Turning Points in Intimate Relationships

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

What can one say about breakups? When you go through the first one, you think you've literally invented this level of pain, that no one else understands what you've been through, that this is a whole new (and extremely horrible) world you've managed to spiral into. Well, guess what, it's not.
I started reading this book going through my first real breakup, and it was almost uncanny how well it demonstrated each of the steps I had gone through, and what I had done to get there, and where I was heading. Indeed, there is something almost pre-programmed about the way we deal with these things, and Vaughn's book proves this quite beautifully.
When I first started burning through these self-help books, I was after something a bit more solid and based on real research. "Uncoupling" definitely fit the bill, and if you are more technically-minded, then this is the book for you.
Sadly, as one other reviewer pointed out, you never get to this book in time. If you're interested in reading it, you're probably on the verge of ending something, or have been the victim of such an end. But if misery loves company, at least you know you're on the -very- trodden path.

This book is an extremely good, very solid and intelligent description of the dynamics and processes involved in the gradual disintegration of a romantic relationship. I am a marriage therapist and find this book to be refreshingly intellegent, atheoretical, nonmoralistic and unbiased analysis of what takes place when estrangement creeps into and overtakes a once- viable connection between lovers. It is a solid, unprejudiced depiction of the process from both partners' points of views, without being tritely subjective. It is very readable, but certainly not simple-minded in its content. Strongly recommended.

As many have stated, this book is not HOW to do anything. It is, however, quality information about what is happening and the thought processes that people go through when they `uncouple.' It is a sociological study of how people go about uncoupling and can therefore be a bit depressing because it focuses on unsuccessful relationships...not on the few who actually do reconcile. I found the book to be fascinating and saw many parallels with my current situation. I could clearly see the process that led my wife to have an extramarital affair and can now recognize that she was emotionally withdrawing herself from our relationship for some time before then. It doesn't make the realization any easier, but at least I can now understand how it happened and how I let it happen.

First, although you will probably find this book in the "Self help -- Relationships" section, it is important to be aware that it is not a self help book. It is a sociological study of how relationships break down. It is quite academic but extremely readable. More importantly, it is quite brilliant. Diane Vaughan is so insightful that you will wish she was less so. That's because, whether you are "the initiator" or "the partner" -- the book's idealized protagonists -- you will find out some very uncomfortable things about yourself. For instance, suppose you're the initiator and you've pumped yourself all up to leave with some standard self-help fare about "responsibility to yourself" and "personal development" and all that stuff. This book will rip the carpet right out from under your feet, as you realize that your carefully crafted justifications are just that -- justifications. The initiator wants out of the relationship, and constructs an ideology which will facilitate this. This book is a masterpiece, and so it has flaws. The most obvious is a relentless pessimism which has been commented on by several other reviewers. This is clearly an artifact of the methodology: the author conducted interviews with people whose relationships had ended, thus we don't get even a glimpse of people whose relationships somehow escaped the seemingly inexorable patterns described. Do such relationships exist? I hope so. I don't know whether or not Vaughan comments on this limitation, because not being a sociologist, I skipped the methodology chapter. Although this is not a self help book, I feel that it did benefit me in understanding my own troubled relationship. Trust me, when you see "the initiator" and "the partner", you are going to work to make yourself less like them! I highly recommend this book to anyone who is curious and wants to understand their situation better. But, if you want self-validation, keep well clear!

I've been through the mill when it comes to relationship. I've been the dumper, dumpee, cheater, cheated on, etc... This book is an incredible book! It's not a manual, it's not 12 step program, it's not even a rule book...it's a book that opens the window when you lock yourself in a dark room after you've been through a break up. No matter how much it hurts, this book will help you to keep going long after you think you can't.

Thank you to the author who took the time and invest in the research to write this book for the sake of all who suffers in relationships. It's writing like this that make a difference in people's life for the better.

I honestly think the author might just as well have called this one "Unfriending" or "unconnecting" or something similar and reached even a wider audience, although the focus is primarily on couples and marriages.

However, if your primary goal is knowing how this one could help your marriage, here's my take:

Instead of focusing on THE reason or reasons that marriages and relationships fall apart, the author notes that the process of separation - and, inevitably, divorce or estrangement - occurs even before the warning signs may be apparent. That infidelity that seems to be the "cause" of the divorce may be just one more step in a long progression of steps that started long before the actual affair. I think this makes sense.

It made sense to me that things may seem normal in a marriage and yet something is a bit worse than the day before, already shifting off-kilter. That is the type of change this book discusses, the veering away from being a couple and the distance that grows wider, day by day. It is the kind of thing that can be easy to dismiss until the inevitable happens - and by then it could be too late for therapy or counseling to help.

Although I'd call this more of a "philosophical study" than hard core science (even though many couples were interviewed, etc), I found it an engaging and intriguing book. This one would be worth reading before marriage and could help turn many precarious marriages back on track.

One of the most interesting parts of the book dealt with how unhappy partners may "revise" marital or relationship history, turning formerly happy memories into negatives in order to justify a separation.

Just to be clear, this review is not being written by a divorced person or someone in an unhappy marriage. I have no bones to pick, no axes to grind, etc. I simply found the book to be worth reading.

This book was published about three years after i was divorced and I didn't get around to reading it until many years later. When I did, I read it in a single night. It explained everything that had occurred in my divorce. Since then, I have occasionally summarized the book to other people and have yet to meet anyone who does not know one or more married couples who carried out the pattern described in the book and ended up getting a divorce. It turns out that there is a pattern which appears over and over again in marriages where no one is dyfunctional or abusive, but one person (the initiator), nevertheless, is vaguely dissatisfied and doesn't know why, but decides not to tell the partner and instead begins to carry out the pattern. Bascially, the initiator is bored and secretly blames the partner. As the author notes, once the pattern starts it is normally impossible to stop it because whenever the problems raised by the initiator are solved by the partner, the initiator simply invents new ones. At the end the partner has no real understanding of what has happened and is quite devastated, often for years. This book is essential reading for any couples getting married because if both are aware of the pattern, it will not be possible for it to occur. It would also be helpful to those who are married, preferably before the pattern has started, for the same reason. The pattern fits well with what the existentialist Sartre called bad faith or self-deception, since as the author uncovered, many initiators in the study were not even aware what they were doing. It would be a great gift for anyone getting married. Not reading this book is like walking along the side of a cliff blindfolded.