Ryan brings the perspective of someone whose experience differs from the way marriage is often portrayed --- she’s happy! Yet happiness was hard-won, she admits. As Ryan searched for advice for her second attempt at marriage, she found much talk centered on failure. “Happy people are apparently too polite to write books about how well things are going,” she observes. “Perhaps they should. Because what I realized is that I’d absorbed some bad advice over the years: Communication is the most important thing. Sex matters less once you’re married. Get in touch with your feelings --- they’ll never lie. It took Steve and me approximately three days to realize that talking endlessly about our disagreements didn’t solve them, sex mattered way more than we’d thought, and my feelings lied all the time about what was really going on.” Ryan found the “happily-ever-after” with an unexpected bonus --- in addition to a husband, she gained a newfound faith. Now she offers an “applied spirituality,” testing her beliefs to see if they really work. She also writes of her struggles with infertility, depression, and universal questions about body image and what makes good sex. She offers a refreshing, countercultural take on a range of issues.