Couples: Scenes From the Inside - Hardcover

Cline, Sally

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0879519460 ISBN 13: 9780879519469

Publisher: Overlook Books, 1999

Synopsis

What exactly are the benefits and costs of couplehood? In her radical new book, Sally Cline explores how our lives can be enhanced or destroyed by intimate partnerships. Reinterpreting and enlarging definitions of heterosexual, lesbian and gay male relationships, she explodes the myth that traditional partnerships are necessarily the ideal way of life. She also distinguishes between the idealized perceptions of coupled life and the rather more complicated -- and often more rewarding -- realities.

About this title

Review:

Equal parts sociology, advice guide, and domestic thriller, Sally Cline's study of the institution of coupledom will reassure readers that there is always someone in a weirder, wilder, or less workable relationship than oneself. Drawing on interviews with straight and gay couples of various ages, races, and social backgrounds, Cline establishes that strong couples have six qualities in common. She calls these "the five C's and the one I"--Commitment, Communication, Coping, Cherishing, Compromise, and Interdependence. (Coitus and Cohabitation are not even on the list.) With the help of long quotes from Cline's subjects, Couples describes how partners feel about each other and about the rewards and constraints of a shared life. Although she has tried "to separate the institution of coupledom from the experience of individual couples," the conclusions Cline draws are inevitably drier than the individual stories, which often leap off the page--like the absorbing section on creative couples, in which she interviews writers Michael Holroyd and Margaret Drabble. --Regina Marler

About the Author:

The author of several books, Sally Cline is the recipient of an Arts Council Writers Award (1995) for outstanding literary merit for her work on this book and a Harry Ransom Research Center Fellowship for her work on her forthcoming biography of the novelist Radclyffe Hall. She was for many years Co-Course organizer for Women's Studies at Cambridge University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Overlook Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0879519460
• ISBN 13: 9780879519469
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 390