Smart Marriage: Using Your (Business) Head as Well as Your Heart to Find Wedded Bliss

In this eye-opening book, Parkman shows how we can use our heads—in addition to our hearts—to find wedded bliss and avoid a failed marriage. Smart Marriage provides a framework Parkman claims will increase the chance of long-term success in marriage and help couples to weather the storms that come with all marriages. This framework will enable couples to jointly make good decisions, avoid financial stress and the other traps that bring so many into divorce court, and do right by the most important outcome of most marriages: the children.

It might seem too practical, at first, to apply a business strategy to such an intimate and emotional quest as love and marriage. But a front page article in the Wall Street Journal in 2006 summed it up this way: In their rush down the aisle, couples often think love will overcome any disagreements about savings and spending. It doesn't. So even among the most compatible couples, the pre-wedding vow of personal-finance silence leads to frustration, fights, and power struggles. And divorce, adds economist Allen Parkman. So look—and talk—before you leap.

In this eye-opening book, Parkman shows how we can use our heads—in addition to our hearts—to find wedded bliss and avoid a failed marriage. Smart Marriage provides a framework Parkman claims will increase the chance of long-term success in marriage and help couples to weather the storms that come with all marriages. This framework will enable couples to jointly make good decisions, avoid financial stress and the other traps that bring so many into divorce court, and do right by the most important outcome of most marriages: the children.