Wives, in retaliation, go on strike sexually. Husbands grieve their father wound in silence. Wives grieve the end of child-bearing years through many words that must be spoken. Husbands live with the painful realization that they will now never fulfill their financial and vocational dreams.
Wives wrestle with a renewed quest for individuation as they search for a purpose beyond mothering.
Parents die and the new burden of widowhood rearranges all rules of normalcy. Children leave home and their mother, feeling that her role in life is now obsolete, wonders who this man is who still sleeps in her bed even though he has long ago slipped away from her emotionally. Couples who find themselves with an empty nest fearfully face the fact that they have become strangers, only to then pull the plug on their marriage after 25 years of inner loneliness. It's no surprise their relationship has grown stale and strained. Building healthy, growing and intimate marriages at the dawn of the third millennium is a monumental but essential task.