Parenting Marriage

You've met the partner of your dreams and have gotten your happily ever after, but now you've taken on a new role: stepmom. And you have no idea what you signed up for. Or maybe you've been a stepmom for a while now, but things are getting you down. Who do you turn to for help? Where is the stepmothering support group that'll give you the advice you need? A book for all the ins and outs of having a blended family? Who actually gets how hard being a stepmom can be?

In Ten Stupid Things Couples Do to Mess Up Their Relationships, Dr. Laura Schlessinger calls for a return to traditional courtship. Courtship allows couples and their families to get acquainted with each other over a longer period of time, and provides structure and guidelines for that important process.

Ever feel like you're walking on eggshells in your relationship, feeling worried your partner might lose interest or even leave you? If constantly waiting for your love interest to text you or feeling uneasy when your partner's not around sounds familiar, you might be dealing with anxious attachment. And if your partner leans towards avoidant attachment, brace yourself – these triggers can become overwhelming. But fear not; understanding these dynamics is the first step to finding peace and connection in your relationship.

Sex is one of the most common marriage issues (for example, almost 80% of couples are mismatched in how often they want it), but it doesn't have to be that way. Relationship researcher Shaunti Feldhahn and renowned sex therapist Dr. Michael Sytsma have identified eight simple, transformational factors to help you move from disconnection to delight. This is knowledge you can trust, based on vast clinical experience and their breakthrough research, including the largest nationally representative study ever conducted with married couples about sex.

We so often fail in our relationships with our families, our partners, our friends, and fellow humans because we are lazy in our love for one another, says Keion Henderson, pastor of the mega-church Lighthouse Church in Houston. Lazy love prevents us from experiencing the deep, soulful fulfillment we long to know. It keeps us from being known and enjoyed by those around us. In his new book Lazy Love, Henderson unpacks the four kinds of love mentioned in the Bible and shows listeners how each shapes our relationships and our lives.

A fascinating look at the key components of romantic love - sex, idealization, aggression, self-pity, guilt, and commitment - argues that romance does not diminish in a long-term relationship, describes the barriers to lasting love, and offers helpful advice on how to promote an enduring love by eliminating self-destructive efforts to protect oneself from its risks.

When The Dance of Deception was published, Lerner discovered that women were not eager to identify with the subject. "Well, I don't do deception" was a common response. We all "do deception", often with the intention to protect ourselves and the relationships we depend on. The Dance of Deception unravels the ways (and whys) that women show the false and hide the real - even to our own selves. We see how relationships are affected by lying and faking, by silence and pretending and by brave - but misguided - efforts to tell the truth.

We all know that the greatest commandment is to love. However, relatively few of us know how to express our love in the heart language of our family and friends. Fortunately, in The Five Love Languages Gary Chapman identifies the five primary love languages and teaches us how to use these languages to express our love.

Your wife has been giving you signals to tell you something is wrong and one day, you wake up to a slap in the face. She says something along the lines of: I want to separate, I need some space to figure things out, I think we should divorce, I can’t do this anymore, I cheated on you, or the classic ‘I love you but I’m not in love with you.’

Millions of people around the world have insecure attachment styles. Anxious attachment is a common form of insecure attachment, and it creates worry and distrust in relationships. Twenty percent of all people have an anxious attachment style, which makes it hard for those people to build relationships that feel safe. When you have an insecure attachment style, you may tend to self-sabotage relationships, and you may feel unable to trust your partner’s love.

You set boundaries, or as long-married, bestselling author Jerry Jenkins says, “I plant hedges.” Jenkins shares a list he created and adheres to as a gift of love for his wife. These rules are intended to protect his marriage by guarding his eyes, his heart, and his hands.

Why do more than half of all marriages end in divorce? And why is there so much unhappiness in the marriages that survive? Greg Baer offers the solutions for a long-lasting marriage in his anticipated follow-up to Real Love: The Truth About Finding Unconditional Love and Fulfilling Relationships. No matter how many wounds have been inflicted in a marriage, Greg Baer believes that they can be healed, giving both partners the sense of fulfillment and joy they’ve always wanted.

Whether your marriage is feeling the affects of full blown starvation or just suffering from the munchies, this presentation will help you lift your relationship to an entirely new level. With his humorous and energizing presentation style, Matt Townsend will help you and your partner to connect your heads, hearts, hands and hopes.

It can be hard when you are the partner with a higher sex drive. You can be left feeling rejected, unattractive, frustrated, and confused–and it’s likely your spouse doesn’t even realize you feel this way. And if you are the partner with the lower drive, you feel guilty, pressured, and frustrated, not sure how to move past this roadblock.

Many of you grew up assuming that marriage would meet all of your needs and unlock God's purposes for you. But God has far more planned for you than your future marriage. Not Yet Married is not about waiting quietly in the corner of the world for God to bring you "the one" but about inspiring you to live and date for more now. If you follow Jesus, the search for a spouse is no longer a pursuit of perfection but a mutually flawed pursuit of Christ.

Authors Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker believe that every man can meet the secret desires of his wife. The problem is, most of us aren't exactly sure what that desire is and how we can go about fulfilling it faithfully. In Every Man's Marriage, you can discover the common misconceptions about what it means to exercise biblical authority and understand the role of submission in the marriage relationship.

Lasting marriages are built one defining moment at a time. Ultimately, these are invitations from God to consider our direction and pursue transformation. With 37 years of marriage and thirty-three years of pastoring under his belt, Dave Harvey has identified those life-defining moments of a post-newlywed marriage. He wants to help couples recognize them in their own relationships so that they can take a proactive, godly approach to resolving conflicts, holding one another up as change inevitably happens, and ensuring that their marriage survives and thrives.

Nothing destroys trust like sexual betrayal. Beyond broken vows, a woman who discovers that her husband has been viewing pornography or having an affair must deal with devastating blows to her self-image and self-worth. She must grapple with the fact that the man she thought she knew has lied and deceived her. She may even bear the brunt of shame and judgment when the people around her find out.

Currie is well-known as the very first professional dating coach in what is now known as the "Manosphere" to encourage single heterosexual men to use upfront, specific, and straightforwardly honest verbal communication methods (otherwise known informally as "direct verbal game") as a means of quickly identifying women who possess sexually duplicitous tendencies and/or highly manipulative and materialistic desires with men.

When life throws us non-stop challenges and curveballs, how can we have any hope of building a fulfilling and intimate marriage? How do we move from stressed and stretched to energized and inspired, finding the strength to transform both our lives and relationship? Robert Paul and Tara Lalonde equip husbands and wives with practical, biblically based tools to transform their personal lives and grow their marriage into something they’ll both love