Knowing and Not Knowing in Intimate Relationships

In the extensive literature on couples and intimacy, little has been written about knowing and not knowing as people experience and understand them. Based on intensive interviews with thirty-seven adults, this book shows that knowing and not knowing are central to couple relationships. They are entangled in love, sexual attraction, trust, commitment, caring, empathy, decision making, conflict, and many other aspects of couple life. Often the entanglement is paradoxical. For example, many interviewees revealed that they hungered to be known and yet kept secrets from their partner. Many described working hard at knowing their partner well, and yet there were also things about their partner and their partner's past that they wanted not to know. This book's qualitative, phenomenological approach builds on and adds to the largely quantitative social psychological, communications and family field literature to offer a new and accessible insight into the experience of intimacy.

Table of Contents:
1. Knowing and not knowing are central to intimacy; 2. How couples build knowledge of one another; 3. How well do you know each other? About 90%; 4. Concerns about the other's potential reaction to something not yet revealed; 5. What people cannot or would rather not know; 6. Processes in being a judicious nondiscloser; 7. Discovery of lies and secrets; 8. Gender differences in intimate knowing; 9. Family of origin; 10. Is it good to know and be known extremely well?; 11. Phenomenology of knowing and being known.

About the Author :
Paul C. Rosenblatt is Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota. He has published eleven other books, most recently Shared Obliviousness in Family Systems (2009), Two in a Bed: The Social System of Couple Bed Sharing (2006) and African American Grief (with Beverly R. Wallace, 2005). Two in a Bed has brought him 180 media interviews from roughly two dozen countries, including substantial coverage in major media outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Company and The Times of India. He has won college, university and national awards for his teaching, and several of his previous books have received awards. He has taught primarily in the family field but also in psychology, sociology and anthropology. Elizabeth Wieling is Associate Professor in the Department of Family Social Sciences at the University of Minnesota. Her early research has evolved into investigations of preventive and clinical interventions with at-risk and trauma-affected families in the US and abroad, and from 2003 to 2008 she was the recipient of a K01 Research Scientist Career Development Award called 'Implementing the Parenting Through Change Model with Latina Single Mothers'. She is currently pursuing a research agenda that involves integrating her previous cross-cultural work and prevention background to develop ecological and culturally relevant multi-component systems interventions for populations affected by mass trauma - particularly related to organized violence, war and disaster. Her program of research is being implemented across several international contexts. She publishes in family science and clinical journals and is co-editor of a book entitled Voices of Color: First-Person Accounts of Ethnic Minority Therapists (2004).

Review :
'Rosenblatt and Wieling have produced the consummate book on how couples' processes of learning about and knowing one another, and revealing or not revealing knowledge affect their relationship. The book involves an extraordinary interweaving of conceptual ideas and respondents' narratives about the intimate details of their lives. In their insightful analyses of the too-little-explored terrain of phenomena such as knowing, understanding, having secrets, disclosing or not disclosing, the authors have provided a work that should be of vital importance to practitioners and scholars alike interested in the intellectual and emotional glue that holds together close relationships.' John Harvey, University of Iowa