Customer Reviews
A "must read" 
2008-07-02
I read this book a number of years after my marriage ended. At the time of the breakup I was left devastated and it took a long time to get up, dust myself off and enjoy life again. However once I read this book the whole process suddenly made sense and I could identify each step of the breakup process and understand where each of us had been at. I understood that the fault was not with me for the breakup - as I had been made to believe. I recall some mutual friends had said to my husband after the breakup that they couldn't understand why he had left as I had not changed during the marriage. He had replied "thats exactly the problem".
I can see the same pattern with my present partner and his ex wife who will not let go. She was the initiator, leaving and returning continually over a period of 3 years or so. She put him through hell, and he turned himself inside out trying to make the marriage work. He even took out a large loan to carry out extensions on the house so that she could have her own private space. That still didn't make her happy. Finally he'd had enough, and he told her not to return. Several months later the door was closed for good on her when we got together. Once she had lost that control over the process, she turned septic, and has done everything in her power to poison his relationships, particularly with me and his son.
Read this one as a starting point for thoughtfulness about the patterns in relationships 
2008-04-16
I honestly think the author might just as well have called this one "Unfriending" or "unconnecting" or something similar and reached even a wider audience, although the focus is primarily on couples and marriages.
However, if your primary goal is knowing how this one could help your marriage, here's my take:
Instead of focusing on THE reason or reasons that marriages and relationships fall apart, the author notes that the process of separation - and, inevitably, divorce or estrangement - occurs even before the warning signs may be apparent. That infidelity that seems to be the "cause" of the divorce may be just one more step in a long progression of steps that started long before the actual affair. I think this makes sense.
It made sense to me that things may seem normal in a marriage and yet something is a bit worse than the day before, already shifting off-kilter. That is the type of change this book discusses, the veering away from being a couple and the distance that grows wider, day by day. It is the kind of thing that can be easy to dismiss until the inevitable happens - and by then it could be too late for therapy or counseling to help.
Although I'd call this more of a "philosophical study" than hard core science (even though many couples were interviewed, etc), I found it an engaging and intriguing book. This one would be worth reading before marriage and could help turn many precarious marriages back on track.
One of the most interesting parts of the book dealt with how unhappy partners may "revise" marital or relationship history, turning formerly happy memories into negatives in order to justify a separation.
Just to be clear, this review is not being written by a divorced person or someone in an unhappy marriage. I have no bones to pick, no axes to grind, etc. I simply found the book to be worth reading.
Straight forward book to help understand an unwanted break-up 2007-05-13
This book is an excellent resource to help put the mechanics of a break-up in perscpective. It is like group therapy. You understand better the problems with trying to convince an unwilling lover to stay in the relationship. The book helps you have an open dialogue with the person who does not really want to talk to you anymore. The book provides in essense the other's persons part of the dialogue. It does not sugar coat what is happening, but allows you to appreciate where you truly are in the timeline of the relationship.
Best book for understanding "How did this happen?" 2007-02-03
Yes, this book is depressing, but only because it offers a clear look into the mind of the partner who has already made the decision to leave the relationship. I found it extremely helpful in coming to understand the "invisible" thought process going on in my soon-to-be ex-husband's mind. I was reeling with confusion and disbelief when my husband of 21 years left me. He said he had come to a decision to "move on". He never gave me the benefit of knowing his reasons or opening a discussion of his concerns in the last few years of our marriage. He claimed to have tried to tell me, but I didn't comprehend the extent of his dissatisfaction. As anyone can attest, most long term marriages have their ups and downs. Especially when you are involved with raising children, you may believe some loss of intimacy is just a temporary phase of the child rearing years. Reading this book made me realize why he wouldn't consider marital counseling to help restore our marriage. I realized that he was past that point, and was already in the final stages of the uncoupling process. For me, what appeared to be a "sudden" decision on his part to leave was in fact being planned for quite awhile without my knowledge.
As other reviewers have pointed out, this book will not help you or give you hope in saving a relationship. But for understanding the mind of person who doesn't care anymore about making the relationship work, it is invaluable. The truth of the matter is, while it takes two to make a marriage, it only takes one to end it. This book explains that concept and why you can't do anything about it. Understanding this helps with accepting the inescapable truth: your relationship is over.
Paperback medicine 2006-12-24
When I divorced my first husband, I lost everything. Self-esteem, possessions, family, concentration--and then I sat down and read this book, in a couple of hours, and found that finally I could concentrate on something again. I read it with tears pouring down my face and started to accept the very harsh, destructive, debilitating, demoralizing, soul-destroying truth. No one is going to tell you it's easy, but at least you can use this book to get the closest thing to an answer that you can get to the bigger question of, "Why?" Then you can move on to the anger stage. Try a DVD copy of "Audition." Kiri kiri kiri kiri!
The Essential Book for Anyone Already Married or Getting Married 2006-06-30
Now in trade paperback, the ground-breaking and carefully documented book that shows how couples come apart.
I keep giving this book to friends in the love blender 2006-01-08
I found this book looking blindly as I was after a horribly painful break up. Since then I've given no fewer than three copies of this book to friends who've had their hearts ripped out and all found some solace here. I personally read Uncoupling cover to cover on a flight home for the holidays shortly after my three year relationship came to an abrupt end. Although harsh, it was a wonderful antidote to the poison in my heart at the time. It was surprising to me that a book of research could be more useful than a self-help book. By the way, unlike the (mostly) excellent comments above, I would like to point out that Vaughan actually does give a few suggestions toward the end as she analyzes the data. If I remember correctly, she claims that the "partner" needs to be conscious of the "initiator" slipping away (who is creating a parallel or counter narrative) very early on and must address issues squarely and head on if there is to be much hope. She also seemed to indicate that there was some kind of grace period (or in-between period) where the initiator has begun a counter-narrative (of what has occurred, who the other person is). It is during this period that the initiator is pulling away, maybe even cheating on their partner, YET, there is still hope for the partner to become aware and stop the damage. A slight limitation of this book (acknowledged by Vaughan herself) is that, for a variety of reasons, she had to limit her study to middle-class white folks. There ought to be federal funding for Diane Vaughan to expand and update this book(with an army of people like Kinsey) so that a blind public might begin to grapple with, if not offset this "emotional plague"(to quote Wilhelm Reich). Perhaps then we might begin to get down to the details, the gritty nuts and bolts, of the corrosive elements (within our institutions and our histories), that make us play out these heart-destroying rituals.
Quality Information 2004-08-19
As many have stated, this book is not HOW to do anything. It is, however, quality information about what is happening and the thought processes that people go through when they `uncouple.' It is a sociological study of how people go about uncoupling and can therefore be a bit depressing because it focuses on unsuccessful relationships...not on the few who actually do reconcile. I found the book to be fascinating and saw many parallels with my current situation. I could clearly see the process that led my wife to have an extramarital affair and can now recognize that she was emotionally withdrawing herself from our relationship for some time before then. It doesn't make the realization any easier, but at least I can now understand how it happened and how I let it happen.
Demystifying breakups 2004-07-04
What can one say about breakups? When you go through the first one, you think you've literally invented this level of pain, that no one else understands what you've been through, that this is a whole new (and extremely horrible) world you've managed to spiral into. Well, guess what, it's not.
I started reading this book going through my first real breakup, and it was almost uncanny how well it demonstrated each of the steps I had gone through, and what I had done to get there, and where I was heading. Indeed, there is something almost pre-programmed about the way we deal with these things, and Vaughn's book proves this quite beautifully.
When I first started burning through these self-help books, I was after something a bit more solid and based on real research. "Uncoupling" definitely fit the bill, and if you are more technically-minded, then this is the book for you.
Sadly, as one other reviewer pointed out, you never get to this book in time. If you're interested in reading it, you're probably on the verge of ending something, or have been the victim of such an end. But if misery loves company, at least you know you're on the -very- trodden path.
The truth hurts 2004-06-18
First, although you will probably find this book in the "Self help -- Relationships" section, it is important to be aware that it is not a self help book. It is a sociological study of how relationships break down. It is quite academic but extremely readable. More importantly, it is quite brilliant. Diane Vaughan is so insightful that you will wish she was less so. That's because, whether you are "the initiator" or "the partner" -- the book's idealized protagonists -- you will find out some very uncomfortable things about yourself. For instance, suppose you're the initiator and you've pumped yourself all up to leave with some standard self-help fare about "responsibility to yourself" and "personal development" and all that stuff. This book will rip the carpet right out from under your feet, as you realize that your carefully crafted justifications are just that -- justifications. The initiator wants out of the relationship, and constructs an ideology which will facilitate this. This book is a masterpiece, and so it has flaws. The most obvious is a relentless pessimism which has been commented on by several other reviewers. This is clearly an artifact of the methodology: the author conducted interviews with people whose relationships had ended, thus we don't get even a glimpse of people whose relationships somehow escaped the seemingly inexorable patterns described. Do such relationships exist? I hope so. I don't know whether or not Vaughan comments on this limitation, because not being a sociologist, I skipped the methodology chapter. Although this is not a self help book, I feel that it did benefit me in understanding my own troubled relationship. Trust me, when you see "the initiator" and "the partner", you are going to work to make yourself less like them! I highly recommend this book to anyone who is curious and wants to understand their situation better. But, if you want self-validation, keep well clear!
