Jonathan Ehrich's Reviews > And Baby Makes Three: The Six-Step Plan for Preserving Marital Intimacy and Rekindling Romance After Baby Arrives

I went really back and forth on this throughout the process of reading this. Overall, I think it's good and helpful, but there's a lot of dreck to skim past or wade through depending on your reading style.

The good: the work clearly and concisely summarizes the results of various studies that suggest properties of successful relationships that can withstand the stresses of early parent life, and is full of great exercises designed to help partners reconnect and thrive during one of life's hardest chapters.

The less good: a lot of the book really focuses on things that feel very relationship 101 to me. There's often a portrayal of relationships that are doing less well, which meet the cishet stereotype of partners who secretly hate each other and constantly insult each other (for examples, see any sitcom that aired throughout my entire childhood). Tips aimed at this type of couple rarely seemed particularly useful to me. There's also a fair amount of content that feels casually sexist in 2019, both in the forms of observations of relationships (which often goes unremarked upon) and also occasionally in the text of the book itself.

The actively bad: there's a lot of scenarios portraying various interactions between couples in various contexts - and the dialogue they wrote for it is horrible. Be prepared to encounter couple who call each other slobs, men going off about how fat their wives are, and women insulting their husband's abilities in bed in the crassest possible terms. It's all eye-rollingly florid, and often worth skipping outright.