Shaunti Feldhahn is a researcher and author on marriage. She, along with her husband, have written numerous books on the subject. Her best-selling work was For Women Only and its partner volume For Men Only. She is noted for her analytical and statistical approach to the study of marriage and family. She brings a unique perspective to the subject since her educational and work background have been in financial analysis.
To produce this book she spent three years interviewing and surveying 1,000 couples to uncover the most important habits of the most happily married couples. The book consists of 12 habits of highly happy couples. These twelve concepts are not your typical marriage points covered as the essential components in most books and literature. She says, “it’s usually not the biggies—in-laws, money, sex—that determine the level of day-to-day mutual happiness in a marriage. Much more often, it’s daily unspoken beliefs, assumptions, and practices that make the difference regardless of the big issues.” (Loc. 227).
The book often focuses on the attitudes which results in loving actions of highly happy couples. For example, highly happy couples believe the best, boss their feelings around, fully risk it all in marriage, believe they have hit the jackpot, and keep score not of their partners wrongs but of their contributions. She investigates some famous ideas like should couples avoid going to bed mad and gains some interesting results. Each chapter is supported by statistical data which can be analyzed and used by the reader.
While written from a Christian perspective, she uses couples from various faith backgrounds in her research. One chapter that makes a great sermon or Bible class was entitled “How Highly Happy Couples Look Higher.” This chapter is about how happy couples put God at the center of their marriage. She gives six descriptive ways this plays out in the lives of highly happy couples. (See this post to see these six points.)
The book contains lots of variety, is practical, and easy to understand. It offers some unique contributions in the midst of a plethora of books on marriage enrichment. It is not a basic foundational book on marriage like His Needs, Her Needs, 5 Languages of Love, or Love and Respect, or even the author’s own works in For Women Only and For Men Only, but serves as a great supplement to these volumes because it deals with different topics. It goes to the core attitudes and actions that take a marriage from simply existing together to being highly happy together. It deals with the fine tuning issues that make a marriage happy! It does this in an informational and powerful way.
