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"Three distinctive themes have guided our efforts in writing this book, and they are woven throughout the text. The first is intimacy, and our focus is on how to develop and maintain close relationships. Most people seek connectedness and want to be involved in intimate relationships, the most intimate being marriage and family. This book is full of ideas, principles, and suggestions for building and keeping intimate relationships in your life. As a result, we hope this will be a book that you will want to keep and refer to throughout your life. The second key theme is marital and family strengths. The family strengths perspective is based on the premise that if you approach relationships from a "problem-oriented" perspective, you will find problems. If you look for strengths, you will find strengths. Growing numbers of family educators and family therapists are using this approach today, helping families recognize their own strengths and use them as a foundation for positive growth. In Chapter 1, we identify a number of strengths that have been found to be present in healthy marriages and families all over the world. Throughout the book, we show how these strengths help families provide healthy and nurturing settings that promote the growth and well-being of individual family members, better enabling them to face the challenges and solve the problems they encounter"--