Exploring the reasons why people get married, this book discusses how society plays on our fears that without a partner an individual is, in some sense, incomplete; and how the result is a heavy toll of human misery. The author argues that modern marriage is the major source of unhappiness and bad health in modern industrialized societies, and that modern marriage is often a matter of complementing neuroses and sick psyches inextricably intertwined, causing severe prolonged anxiety and depression, guilt, frustration, jealousy, identity crises and mental illness. Hafner's view is that "coupledom" is a way of devaluing, confining and controlling women, and that marriage is an institution designed by men to disguise the fact that women, like men, are naturally polygamous.