is all about, try  Toward Commitment:  A Dialogue About Marriage by Diane Rehm and John B. Rehm (Knopf, 2002).  

In it you’ll find none of the wedding hysteria, but rather a frank, thoughtful, and thought-provoking, discussion of married life.  42 years of married life, to be exact. 

This Washington, DC, couple – a successful government attorney and radio talk-show host – share the nittier, grittier and very real side of marriage, honestly and openly.  Everyone entering into marriage can learn about what’s ahead by reading it.

Toward Commitment is half his-and-hers essays on marriage, exploring their experiences of love, sex, assumptions and expectations, dependence and independence, raising children, dealing with anger, differences in social needs, religious and spiritual differences – in other words, the works.  

In Toward Commitment, the authors ask and answer the toughest of questions, and they show us how they learned to live together as two separate and very different people.  For example, John Rehm is a loner.  Diane is gregarious, and she writes about the role solitude and differing social needs plays out between them:

How Brides

Really Feel

Mothers & Daughters & Weddings

“We had such extraordinarily different outlooks on solitude, and neither of us talked openly about it – what it meant to us, why it was important, or what the experience felt like.  John viewed his solitude as “a draft of water.”  I associated solitude with punishment.  How was it that two people married to each other wouldn’t have discussed that idea, that need, before marriage, rather than after? And why has it take nearly 40 years for us to adjust to, accept, and even relish our differences?”  (p. 62)

The other half of Toward Commitment is transcripts of conversations between the couple, honest and frank.  They grapple, before the reader’s eyes, with the differences in backgrounds, personalities, temperaments, attitudes, and expectations.  In other words, they’re having the conversations we all need to have with our mates-to-be. 

One constant theme of Toward Commitment:  the regretful line, “I wish we had talked about this before we got married.” 

Here’s your chance to do it differently.  Take Toward Commitment to the beach, and read a 5-page dialogue about solitude or sex, or vacations or sleep, all the while keeping your own relationship in mind.  Then bring up these topics with your fiancé. 

The Private Lives of

Engaged Couples

HELP!  I Have Cold Feet!