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"  In the fall of 2008, filmmaker Dana Adam Shapiro&amp;#039;s friends began splitting up in droves (four in one month alone), and the bachelor wondered: Can I glean anything useful from their heartbreak? &amp;quot;In driver&amp;#039;s ed, they show films that end in car wrecks, and you learn what not to do because you don&amp;#039;t want to wind up like that,&amp;quot; says Shapiro. &amp;quot;I figured knowing the things that destroy a marriage would give me a better chance of having a successful one someday. But I couldn&amp;#039;t interview my friends--they needed support, not a voyeur.&amp;quot; So he spent four years questioning hundreds of divorced strangers, and compiled their insights in the new book You Can Be Right (Or You Can Be Married). His top five lessons: #1. It&amp;#039;s about small-scale romance. &amp;quot;One woman told me that keeping a marriage sexy isn&amp;#039;t about big gestures like expensive gifts or trips--it&amp;#039;s daily romance. That means eating a pizza together on the couch, or sitting on the couch stroking your wife&amp;#039;s hair. Couch love, basically.&amp;quot; #2. The wooing never stops. &amp;quot;One thing I could trace throughout all the failed marriages was complacency. The eternity that&amp;#039;s implied when you wed can lead you to feel like you don&amp;#039;t have to try anymore. One guy said you have to re-earn your partner&amp;#039;s love every year. Unconditional love is for your children.&amp;quot; #3. You&amp;#039;re not fighting about what you think you&amp;#039;re fighting about. &amp;quot;Those little issues we gripe over--the toilet seat being up or hair clogging the shower drain--are just things we use to go after each other. No one really cares that much about the toilet seat. It&amp;#039;s that they ask repeatedly and are ignored.&amp;quot; #4. Sex is more than sex to him. &amp;quot;A startling number of men never received oral sex from their wives. For men, oral sex can be very intimate, and not having it genuinely makes them feel rejected. It creates a cycle of withholding where they say, &amp;#039;If you&amp;#039;re not going to do that, then I&amp;#039;m not going to do this&amp;#039; that affects other areas of the relationship.&amp;quot; #5. You can handle the truth. &amp;quot;One man&amp;#039;s first wife didn&amp;#039;t know for years that he was a cross-dresser. When he started dating his new wife, he said if she couldn&amp;#039;t accept it, they wouldn&amp;#039;t work. I remembered that when I was on a date with a vegetarian and almost didn&amp;#039;t order a steak. But I thought, If eating meat is going to be a problem, we should know now. Being honest up front makes it easier in the long term.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/love-sex/relationships/advice/a14318/relationship-advice-from-divorced-people/?click=rbk_more>