"A Simple Marriage" is filled with simple marital advice. I guess it's written for simple couples. Do you know any simple couples? I don't.
In fact, to me the idea that a marriage can be simple is simply ridiculous.
My own marriage is pretty good. We've had our share of bumps and bruises along the way, but after being together 28 years–23 of them married–we get along well, rarely argue (except during the home remodel–don't ask about the tile floor argument, please), have shared interests, and are about to congratulate ourselves on raising a terrific daughter to adulthood.
Getting here wasn't simple, ever. And following simple advice isn't what got us here, either.
One of the keys to marriage is to forget about the marriage per se, and work on yourself. My husband needed to better understand feelings. I needed to better learn to manage my anger. My husband needed to learn how to communicate what was going on within himself. I needed to learn how to hang back, to turn inward and be more reflective and less reactive. And of course, there are more ways that we each needed to evolve in order to become better people and subsequently better partners.
Those are not simple things. They are difficult, sometimes painful, and slow to change.
Not to knock simple–simple lessons can be profound.
But simple won't work unless you have a handle on the more complex aspects of being in a relationship. Simple has appeal because the world is complex, but just as we'll never simplify the world, we'll never be able to boil human behavior down to a few little nuggets of thought, behavior, and meaning.