ABSTRACT
There are times in most marriages when a crisis, and sometimes an absence of crisis, forces the partners into a reappraisal of their relationship. The couple described in the Prologue understood their problem to lie in the marriage. From the author standpoints as a marital therapist, the interconnections between inner and outer realities are the stuff of marriage. In England and Wales, folk ritual competed with formal procedures even after the Hardwicke Marriage Act gave the Established Church a monopoly over weddings in 1753. The formal institution of marriage can therefore be seen as the product of a relatively recent historical cycle. Historians are not the only ones to dampen assertions that the present predicament of marriage is unique. Evidence of companionate values in marriage is not hard to find. Ironically, those working primarily in the private domain have been as active as any in constructing images of marriage.
