Marriage Advice Emphasis of Book by ASM Regents Professor Emeritus Allen Parkman

Allen M. Parkman, Regents’ Professor Emeritus at the Anderson School of Management, has published a new book titled, Smart Marriage: Using Your (Business) Head as Well as Your Heart to Find Wedded Bliss (Praeger, 2007). This innovative book uses business principles to help people make better decisions about all phases of marriage. It suggests, for example, that people should be evaluating prospective spouses as a business partner as well as a lover and that a successful family is similar to a profitable business as it converts inputs into outputs.

Having a successful marriage is the most important goal in most people’s lives and yet many people fail in their attempt to establish it. Why? Too many people are just concluding that times have changed and marital failure is just one of the changes with which we have to live.

He doesn’t buy that. He sees one of the major problems facing people who want a successful marriage is a lack of guidance about the types of decisions that will accomplish that goal. Most people do not appreciate how much more complicated those decisions have become. During most of the past, people had few choices when considering marriage.

Married couples were better off than single adults in very tangible ways such as better homes and meals, so most people wanted to marry. When considering prospective spouses, adults were often constrained to a limited geographic and socioeconomic pool. Having married, necessity had a strong influence on the roles that they assumed.

Few of these constraints still exist and yet people have to make choices—and they have many more than their ancestors. Where can they look for guidance? Certainly, there is a large marital advice literature usually based on a psychological foundation that exposed people to valuable communication and problem solving skills. But, communication about what?

Smart Marriage addresses that question by exposing people to a framework for determining the “what.” A business perspective helps in identifying the preferred characteristics of a spouse, how to find that person and sell yourself to him or her, the roles within marriage that will increase a family’s welfare, the careers that people should pursue, how they can produce quality children, etc.

Not all marriages—or businesses—are successful, so it helps to identify how to avoid divorce—bankruptcy, but also the conditions under which it may be the best choice. It uses insights from business mergers to assist people considering remarriage.

Media Contacts: Leslie Venzuela, (505) 277-7117; e-mail: venzuela@mgt.unm.edu or Erin Gardner, (505) 306-9575; e-mail: news@mgt.unm.edu