Married to Distraction: Restoring Intimacy and Strengthening Your Marriage in an Age of Interruption

Are you more distant from your spouse than you’d like to be? Do you sometimes get into big struggles over what amount to mere administrative details? Do you or your spouse waste time “screensucking”—mindlessly viewing email or surfing the Web? Welcome to the club! Modern marriage is busy, distracted, and overloaded to extremes, with ever-increasing lists of things to do, superficial electronic connections, and interrupted moments. Now Edward M. Hallowell, the bestselling co-author of the hugely popular Driven to Distraction and Delivered from Distraction, teams up with his wife, Sue George Hallowell, a couples’ therapist, to explain the subtle but dangerous toll today’s overstretched, undernurtured lifestyle takes on our most intimate relationship. The good news is that there are straightforward and effective ways to maneuver your marriage out of the destructive roadblocks created by the avalanche of busy living. Just thirty minutes of effort a day for thirty days can restore and repair communication and connection, resurrect long-buried happiness and romance, and strengthen—even save—a marriage.

We deal with overload by tuning it out, but the repercussions on couples and commitment are serious. Without attention, there is no intimacy. And without intimacy, there is no connection. So how do couples find their way back?
 
• Observe the natural sequence of sustaining love: attention, time, connection, and play.
• Develop and nurture empathy—the essential building block to healthy communication.
• Carve out small moments of uninterrupted attention for each other.
• Identify the pressures that our crazybusy lifestyles put on love and marriage, and fight back with tenderness and appreciation.
 
    All of us who have been part of a couple for more than a few years will recognize ourselves in this reassuring book. Complete with scripts, tips, specific communication and interaction techniques, and a detailed 30-day reconnection plan, as well as inspiring real-life stories from relationships that were brought back from the brink, Married to Distraction will set couples on a course of understanding, healing, and love.

Edward M. Hallowell, M.D., was an instructor at Harvard Medical School for twenty years and is now the director of the Hallowell Centers for Cognitive and Emotional Health in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and New York City. He is the co-author of Delivered from Distraction and Driven to Distraction as well as the author of CrazyBusy, The Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness, and Worry, among other titles.

Sue George Hallowell, LICSW, has been a practicing couples’ therapist for more than twenty-five years. The Hallowells are the parents of three teenage children. They live in Arlington, Massachusetts.