7 Best Marriage Books to Read As a Couple

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Khalil Gibran wrote in his poem On Marriage that love in which the couple was tied too tightly would strangle love. But loose bonds come with their own slippages. A hundred years after Gibran, couples still search for clues as to why some marriages make it to their Diamond (60th) anniversaries while others are over before their first year. Many couples wonder how to get over the hump years of marriage—those middle decades—where the pressures of work and the challenges of never-enough time can bust couples wide open. These seven books on marriage offer a variety of perspectives on how couples can get from the “right now” to the “ever after.”

Featured Image: @klwsk via Twenty20

Last Couple Standing

Matthew Norman

Jessica and Mitch have watched the marriages of their three closest couple friends come to shattering ends, and, after fifteen years of marriage, they’re afraid that they’ll be next. So, they agree to new rules on how to conduct their marriage. But can a long-term relationship sustain itself when its bonds have been changed? In this sexy novel, Jessica and Mitch find that the desire to save their marriage may endanger their love.
Marriageology

Belinda Luscombe

Belinda Luscombe knows that the last thing most of us would rather read is yet another marriage manual. But in this funny and delightfully honest guide, Luscombe takes her ten years as the relationship guru at Time to argue that the elements that fracture relationships can be recognized before they break up your marriage. Filled with illustrative anecdotes, fact-based studies, and suffused with humor, Marriageology offers skills to take marriages into the Ruby, Golden, and Diamond decades.
Astrology for Real Relationships

Jessica Lanyadoo

Jessica Lanyadoo offers more than a “which sign am I most compatible with?” approach to understanding how our astrological designations provide a means of understanding ourselves and others. Her help in interpreting not just the sun sign, but also planetary alignment in other houses, offers direction for a better knowledge of the self that will make it easier to understanding relationships with loved ones.
Love Poems for Married People

John Kenney

Are You in the Mood?
I am.
Let’s put the kids down.
Have a light dinner.
Shower.
Maybe not drink so much.
And do that thing I would rather do with you than with anyone else.
Lie in bed and look at our iPhones.

John Kenney writes funny love-filled poems about the quotidian pleasures of marriage while acknowledging the forces that pull each marriage partner away from the other. In doing so, he makes couples laugh, and sometimes, humor is all you have to get you through the tough times.
Marriage of a Thousand Lies

SJ Sindu

Lucky and Kris are the American children of South Asian immigrants. For both, their parents’ beliefs about gender and sexuality conflict with who their children really are. As a means of appeasing their families, Lucky and Kris marry, despite the fact that both of them are LGTBQ. In examining the function that their marriage serves, S.J. Sindu explores the ways that the couple finds to express their true selves.
A Separation

Katie Kitamura

A woman goes in search of her missing husband in Greece. As she searches, she remembers the days of her marriage—the early infatuation, the maturing relationship—under the glare of a Greek sun and a burnt landscape. All her adult life, she has worked as a translator, but she runs up against the limits of language in describing the knots that bind us to one another.
Last Letters: The Prison Correspondence between Helmuth James and Freya von Moltke, 1944-45

Helmuth Caspar von Moltke

For five months during the last days of World War II, Helmuth James von Moltke sat in a Nazi prison cell after being arrested for his role in the German resistance. The prison chaplain was also part of the resistance, and he ferried letters back and forth between Helmuth and his wife, Freya. Their letters are full of their love and devotion to one another and their unwavering dedication to their work opposing Hitler. They serve as a testament to a love that a prison cell could not bar.