The Medical Marriage: A Couple's Survival Guide

What makes a good marriage when one or both spouses are physicians?
Physicians experience stress, depression, substance abuse, obsessive-compulsiveness, and workaholism and commit suicide more often than the general population. In addition, the spouse of a physician can become trapped in a self-focused style of coping that ruins the marriage. But all is not dismal! The Medical Marriage sheds light on the secrets of the medical couples who manage to avoid or escape a bad marriage.
Over the past sixteen years, Wayne and Mary Sotile have collectively spent more than 60,000 hours counseling high-powered couples, including hundreds of physicians. Their book offers provocative answers to a number of questions: Why is the traditional medical marriage quickly becoming a thing of the past? Why are female physicians 40 percent more prone to divorce than their male colleagues? Are physicians' careers being hurt or helped by their efforts to better balance their professional and personal lives?
The Medical Marriage is the first book to address the intimate lives of medical couples. Here doctors and their spouses will learn about the stages of the medical couple's journey; the issues that make money a source of stress in the medical marriage; eight type of medical marriages - their strengths and weaknesses; nine characteristics of highly successful medical couples; the Intimacy Formula for a high-passion medical marriage; and six keys for negotiating differences without damaging the relationship.
Written with the insights of professional marriage therapists and the compassion and empathy of a couple who themselves are juggling the roles of professionals, parents, and passionate partners, The Medical Marriage is destined to become the classic self-help guide for couples facing the challenges that fill both medicine and marriage in contemporary times.

Wayne M. Sotile is director of Sotile Psychological Associates in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.