I read Doherty's book about family rituals and found it insightful and helpful. I recommend that book to anyone who wants to create meaningful rituals in the family, whether or not children are involved. I thought this book might do the same for marriage, and it does, but it also has quite a few chapters that talk about the prevalence of divorce and how to avoid divorce. We are thankfully not in a crisis stage in our marriage and so this section of the book was not useful to me. I found Doherty's perspective that our consumer culture impacts personal relationships interesting and worthy of consideration. He is local and he keeps going back to an analogy about marriage as a canoe on the Mississippi River and that sort of got annoying but I found quite a few helpful suggestions in the book. The last chapters talk about marriage as a community investment and I don't disagree, but I don't think I would be comfortable sharing details of my marriage in a community setting.