"Marriage or companionship is perhaps the only relationship where one can live out deep emotional and often childlike needs. Such as the need for love, tenderness, to be babied, to let go, to depend. All these things we cannot do out in life because it is not possible. Adult life and society are structured differently. So, all these deep, childlike, intense needs that we all have, some more, some less, are satisfied in 'marriage'. But are they really satisfied?"

This book is based on the author's experience as a psychiatrist, child psychiatrist, psychoanalyst-psychotherapist, and mainly on his personal experience of short or longer-term interactions with more than six thousand couples, whom he observed either in Greece over the past thirty years, or in London, where he worked for fifteen years as Director of the Finchley Child and Family Psychiatric Clinic, and previously as Deputy Director of the Tavistock Centre, one of the most important psychoanalytic clinics in the world.