Erica Manfred

What happens when a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a Jungian analyst get together to write a book for partners facing a crisis in their marriage? You get a fascinating mix of insights that draw on attachment theory, Freudian analysis, Jungian dream and shadow work, neurobiology, and good-old self-help strategies.

After my husband left I was desperate for family. I'm an only child, my daughter was spending Thanksgiving with her father, and I no place to go on Thanksgiving. I searched the Internet for my long lost family on my father's side. My father never liked his brothers and due...

Why are we so fascinated by the love lives of the stars? I think it's because it's reassuring to see glamorous, rich, and famous people behaving badly. That makes it just a tiny bit less shameful when you or I behave badly. After all, if Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt...

I am shivering in the chilly fall night air, sitting on a tiny plastic folding chair that doesn't support my entire rear end, under a huge tent at the Woodstock Jewish Congregation's High Holy Days Services. I look around and notice that everyone is wearing white, which is what you're...

In June 2001 my husband left me for a co-worker after fifteen years of marriage.

On September 11, 2001, I was home in the house we had shared, in Woodstock, New York, watching the TV alone, with no one to talk to about what was happening. My husband and...

Terry Hekker, a divorcee who is now in her sixties, was a traditional housewife during the '70s and '80s. She wrote a book, "Ever Since Adam and Eve" at the end of the 1970s extolling the virtues of staying home and raising the kids.

Her book countered the rising feminist...

Some experts assert that it takes a year for every five years of marriage to recover. That was about right in my case, and I've heard from many women that it took that long for them as well. This doesn't mean you are going to be miserable for the entire...

I spoke at a divorce support group recently and heard some interesting stories about adult children of divorce. One woman's ex told her 19-year-old son that he was about to divorce her before he told her. Actually he asked his son whether he thought it was a good idea. I...

While reading this weekend's New York Times Magazine's cover story about infidelity, I thought about the cases of my two girlfriends, Sarah and Kim, who were having affairs while my marriage was on the rocks. Ironically, I was the betrayed wife, while they were "other women."

Sarah had...

My name is Erica and I am the daughter of an adulterer. I discovered the adulterous streak in my own family when my mother told me my father was having affairs. I was in my thirties at the time and, although I had no idea what was going on when...

Staying together for the sake of the kids has become one of those discredited, old-fashioned notions that are easily dismissed when couples consider divorce. Somehow we've managed to rationalize to ourselves that divorce is OK for kids; that they would be hurt more if we stayed together and were unhappy,...

The worst thing you can do when you tell your grown kids about your divorce is to expect them not to feel strong emotions, not to feel grief and pain just as you do. Adult children struggle with divorce the same way young children do. Parents expect them to shrug...

You may have heard the old joke about a couple in their 90s filing for divorce. When the judge asks them, "Why did you wait so long?" they respond, "We wanted to wait until the kids were dead."

In fact the only time divorce is not going to hurt your...

Most couples go for marriage counseling when it's way too late to save their marriages, and most marriage counselors are the kiss of death for marriages. By the time couples get to a counselor it's usually to receive last rites for the marriage.

There's a good reason most marriage...

Have you ever wondered why it's always women who bring the tribe together for holiday dinners? Why we're the ones who keep in touch with the in-laws? Would you have guessed that it's related to the reasons why it's easy for men to leave their children to go off to...

A year ago, Cynthia Shackelford, a 62-year-old North Carolina wife won an "alienation of affection" case against her husband's mistress. The case is ironic on so many levels, it's hard to know where to start. The facts: Shackelford charged that the other woman, Anne Lundquist, 49, broke up her marriage...

Marriage is our last, best, chance to grow up
----John Barth

If you don't understand why your marriage failed, you will be doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Why bother digging up the past, you might ask? Isn't it better to just move on? Well, no, it isn't....

If you've been left by your husband for another woman, you may have wondered why the pain is so excruciating. Women tend describe the experience in extreme terms. A sixty two year old woman I interviewed for my book, whose husband left her for someone else after thirty-three years of...

I've stopped dating. I'm sixty-eight and I feel like I've aged out of the dating market. My ex and I split when I was fifty-nine, which doesn't seem like that much of a difference age-wise, but it is. I got into Internet dating heavy duty at sixty, but I lied...

Maybe what goes around really does came around. I have not only been the betrayed wife but the other woman. I know how it feels to be in both positions. No matter what they say, being the other woman was a hell of a lot easier. Or maybe I was...