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

Written by Edward Hallowell, Sue Hallowell and Melissa Orlov

Narrated by Sue Hallowell and Edward M. Hallowell, M.D.

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 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.

• 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 crazy busy 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. Married to Distraction will set couples on a course of understanding, healing, and love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio
• Release date: Mar 16, 2010
• ISBN: 9780307713131

Reviews for Married to Distraction

[chsbellboy_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book has some interesting sociological comments on modern culture, but lacks substance and follow through on the 'advice' presented. I would not recommend this book to a couple looking to strengthen their marriage.

[heina_54 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The book offers some good pointers scattered throughout the short chapters, but it drags on a bit. Also, it discusses "The Internet" as if the Internet were some kind of foreign entity that forces people to do its will. It's almost not worth mentioning that the book is heterocentrist (the title does include the word "Married"), but on top of that, the authors assume that men cheat and women don't and that porn is something that only men consume while feeling alone and guiltily so. All of that isn't so surprising when you get towards the end of the book and the authors start waxing poetic on how believing in the Christian god is some sort of amazing and scary challenge for only the brave, just like how they think marriage is. If I wanted a Christian book, I would have gotten an explicitly religious one, not one that does not denote itself as such; furthermore, in a society dominated by the religious and where atheists are the least trusted minority despite evidence that we commit far fewer crimes than religious people, it's far scarier to be an atheist than a mainstream Christian theist. If there were a Jesus fish on the cover of this book or some similar sort of warning, then this book would have escaped my negative review and low rating, but as it stands, I wish I hadn't wasted my time on it.