Becoming Partners

Carl Rogers Becoming Partners: Marriage and its Alternatives (New York: Delacorte, 1972) 243 pages This book consists mostly of interviews with ordinary people who have normal problems in their loving relationships. Rogers is open to rational experimentation with new forms of marriage. Looking for more recent books along this line? Search the Internet for the following bibliography: "The Best Books Critical of Traditional Marriage".

Carl Rogers (1902-1987) was an influential American psychologist and (along with Abraham Maslow) among the founders of humanistic psychology. He states in the Introduction to this 1972 book, "The book is... a series of slices, pictures, perceptions---of relationships, breakdowns, restructurings---in a wide variety of partnerships. These inner views are presented in a nonevaluative fashion. Are the unions 'good' or 'bad' or do they belong in some other judgmental category? I do not know. They EXIST. It is my belief that you will find here highly intimate and meaningful accounts of the man-woman relationship as it is actually lived---with all its tragedies, dull plateaus, ecstatic moments or periods, and instance after instance of exciting growth." Here are some quotations from the book: "It is becoming increasingly clear that a man-woman relationship will have permanance only to the degree to which it satisfies the emotional, psychological, intellectual, and physical needs of the partners. This means that the permanent marriage of the future will be even better than marriage in the present, because the ideals and goals for that marriage will be of a higher order. The partners will be demanding more of the relationship than they do today." (Ch. 1) "Marriage and the nuclear family constitute a failing institution, a failing way of life. No one would argue that these have been highly succesful. We need laboratories, experiments, attempts to avoid repeating past failures, exploration into new approaches." (Ch. 10)