Second Honeymoon: A Pioneering Guide for Reviving the Mid-Life Marriage

Make the next half of your life together the second honeymoon you want it to be

At mid-life, everything changes in most marriages. As the "family" focus shifts back to a "couples" focus, serious questions arise for each partner: Who am I now? Who are you? Who are we together? These questions go to the heart of a relationship, and the answers can often lead to conflict and, ultimately, divorce. Even the best relationships can founder as children grow up and leave home. Career change, financial uncertainty, job loss, infidelity, serious illness, or a partner's changing needs, values, and anxieties can threaten marital life. More subtle and dramatic still are the profoundly different personal changes men and women undergo at mid-life—emotional transformations that can irrevocably alter a marriage's dynamic.

But as this wise, compassionate, and groundbreaking book shows, mid-life can also be a time for couples to examine and reinvent their relationships, renew their marital contract—and make a different kind of commitment to each other. Second Honeymoon explores the impact of mid-life on couples and the specific issues partners face—even couples who have never before experienced a serious crisis. Drawing on her long experience working with couples and families, Dr. Sonya Rhodes describes the high-risk roles and behavior patterns that are the stumbling blocks to change, and shows step by step how couples can achieve the critical transformations that will make the second half of their life together the loving second honeymoon they want it to be.