A HALF-WILLING GROOM Brett Sinclair didn't want the ancestral home his grandfather had left him. Problem was, he couldn't just forfeit it, either. The only solution was marriage—to Gayla Matthews. So Brett said "I do," never expecting his bride would soon have him thinking about happily-ever-afters. AN UNWILLING BRIDE Gayla couldn't believe she had married Brett—even if it was only temporarily. To her, love should last a lifetime, and she'd known her groom only three days! But when Brett swept her into his arms, she wanted to be more than a wife-for-a-while. A WILLFUL MARRIAGE Soon Brett and Gayla's marriage was more than either expected. And just what their hearts needed.
"Without intention, we find ourselves being tossed from one crisis to another without any plan to correct our course...Love is a choice and so our greatest joy comes from intentionally loving another person. The misconception is that when we bring two people together under the umbrella of marriage, it becomes a beautiful thing all by itself. There is no such thing as an auto pilot for a relationship. The truth is: two people, from two different backgrounds, with baggage from other relationships or from dysfunctional families, are suddenly faced with life together under the same roof. Sounds a little scarier than the fairy tale picture of most wedding plans."Dennis and Susan have walked this journey through the difficult years and have seen the benefit of being intentional in their own marriage."This book was born out of our own personal journey and has been "field tested" in our own relationship. Most of the material in this book has been presented in our "Intentional Marriage" seminars. This is a very practical approach to living out a committed and loving relationship. It's about being more than haphazard in our every interaction. It's about choosing to be intentional.
Victorian England: a Jesuit priest writes of wrestling with God at night, limbs entangled; an Anglican sister begs Jesus, her divine lover, to end her aching anticipation of their union; a clergyman exhorts nuns to study the example of medieval women who suffered on the rack in order to become "brides" of Christ. Alongside the march of nineteenth-century progress ran a seemingly paradoxical fascination with a dark, erotically suggestive side of religious devotion: the figuration of the Christian God as a heavenly bridegroom who doles out punishment to his bride, the individual soul. Through innovative case studies of Victorian religious poetry, Amanda Paxton reveals that while the punitive model proved a convenient rhetorical tool with which to deflate burgeoning nineteenth-century campaigns for women’s rights and challenges to Church authority, in the hands of several writers it also provided a means of resisting patriarchal institutions and interrogating distinctions between science and religion. Willful Submission is the first full-length volume to examine the interplay of sex, suffering, and religion as a touchstone in Victorian culture and verse.
How To Tame A Willful Wife: 1. Forbid her from riding astride 2. Hide her dueling sword 3. Burn all her breeches and buy her silk drawers 4. Frisk her for hidden daggers 5. Don't get distracted while frisking her for hidden daggers... Anthony Carrington, Earl of Ravensbrook, expects a biddable bride. A man of fiery passion tempted by the rigors of war into steely self-control, he demands obedience from his troops and his future wife. Regardless of how fetching she looks in breeches. Promised to the Earl of Plump Pockets by her impoverished father, Caroline Montague is no simpering miss. She rides a war stallion named Hercules, fights with a blade, and can best most men with both bow and rifle. She finds Anthony autocratic, domineering, and...ridiculously handsome. It's a duel of wit and wills in this charming retelling of The Taming of the Shrew. But the question is...who's taming whom?
Sasha had loved Dante with everything she had in her. But a year ago, he pushed her away with accusations of cheating. She couldn’t believe he would even think something like that and had run away, too hurt by his accusations. Now his grandmother’s dying wish is to see Sasha once more and Dante will do everything within his power to grant her wish, even if he still considers her a black widow who had betrayed him more deeply than anyone else. He could ignore her though, as long as it took to bring her to his grandmother. What he hadn’t counted on was Sasha’s soulful eyes coming back to haunt him, or her previously slender body now gaunt with her weight loss. If she’d cheated on him, why did she look like she was the one that had been betrayed? And then, in the moonlit darkness, the past didn’t matter any longer. It was just her soft scent, her tender touch and her longing looks that drew him in. From the first moment they’d met they hadn’t been able to deny their attraction to each other and the hurt each thought the other had caused couldn’t stop that attraction from taking over and overwhelming both of them once more.
All couples walk to the altar dreaming of happily-ever-after, but many forces in our society work against healthy lifelong commitment. Renowned family therapist William J. Doherty reveals how cracks can develop in even a rock-solid marriage, and what steps you can take to keep your love strong. Learn ways to break free of common traps like confusing desires with needs, comparing your spouse to your fantasies of other relationships, or becoming overtime parents instead of full-time partners. You'll get suggestions for creating relationship rituals--from mundane to celebratory, sexy to silly--that build closeness and connection every day. The updated second edition incorporates Dr. Doherty's ongoing experience counseling couples, plus the latest information on marriage and health, how divorce affects kids, the impact of new technologies on family life, and more. Winner--Best Self-Help Book, ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards
As a young wife, Nicole Worth didn't know how to fight her mother-in-law's attempts to destroy her marriage to Jordan. So she ran away, taking the secret of her mysterious ability to see the future with her. Now, nearly seven years later, Jordan is ready to marry again--when Nicole reappears, determined to uncover all the secrets that are standing between them and to give their love one more chance.
Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture examines the role of Christian history in nineteenth-century definitions of homosexual identity. Roden charts the emergence of the modern homosexual in relation to religious, not exclusively sociological discourses. Positing Catholicism as complementary to classical Greece, he challenges the separatism of sexuality and religion in critical practice. Moving from Newman and Rossetti, to Hopkins, Wilde, and Michael Field amongst others, Same-Sex Desire claims a new literary history, bringing together gay studies and theology in Victorian literature.
Like diving into the mind of a brilliant, infuriating friend, this novel dissects the experience of "the other woman" with tremendous wit and insight. When Ester Nilsson meets the actor Olof Sten, she falls madly in love. Olof makes no secret of being married, but he and Ester nevertheless start to meet regularly and begin a strange dance of courtship. Olof insists he doesn't plan to leave his wife, but he doesn't object to this new situation either...it's far too much fun. Ester, on the other hand, is convinced that things might change. But as their relationship continues over repeated summers apart, and winters full of heated meetings in bars, she is forced to realize the truth: Ester Nilsson has become a mistress. Ester's and Olof's entanglements and arguments are the stuff of relationship nightmares. Cutting, often cruel, and written with piercing humor, Acts of Infidelity is clever, painful, maddening, but most of all perfectly, precisely true.
A Willful Child A story of Betrayals and Beginnings Janet Steele Holloway's debut is as dazzling as the West Virginia countryside she describes. Her father a hardworking coalminer, her granny an unrepentant bootlegger, Holloway remembers a childhood grasping at the shards of a shattering family. She emerges as a young woman ready for anything. This memoir is poignant, brutal, funny, inspired. Neil Chethik, author of FatherLoss Painful, warm and wise, Janet Steele Holloways debut memoir, A Willful Child, vividly portrays a remarkable yet ordinary family whose life is more typical of post-war America than wed like to think. At the mercy of an unstable, beautiful mother and a coal miner father in the boom-and-bust mountain economy, Holloways childhood is spent on the move from coal camp, to her grannys beer garden, to a farm in southwest Virginia, to both coasts of Florida, and back to the mountains. Billie Brown, her pragmatic bootlegging granny, supplies rootedness, but cannot assuage her own daughters restless discontent or shore up the headstrong streak that will become her granddaughters greatest strength. A Willful Child shows us how a girl-becoming-a-woman gathers courage, confidence, and wisdom to weave a self from the pieces and places of a fragmented life. Leatha Kendrick, author of Second Opinion This gripping story speaks for many Appalachian women and children who broke away from mountain culture to live a life of promise and success and never forgot their mountain heritage. Janet Holloway tells an engaging story of a bright child caught in the ruins of her parents marriage and her determination to create a productive, creative life for herself. Jane Stephenson, founder of New Opportunity School for Women; Author, Courageous Paths: Stories of Nine Appalachian Women
