No. 01 · The Author Issue
Susan Page: Why Talking Is Not Enough
12 pages · Letter format
DORX CHRONICLE
Magazine · The Author Issue
No. 01
October 2026
The repeat Oprah guest on what lasting love really asks of us
1M+
Copies sold in the U.S. and worldwide
The Cover Story
Susan
Page
Why Talking Is
Not Enough
Eight loving actions that will transform your marriage — and the four decades of work behind them.
Susan Page, among the shelves
In This Issue
Contents
- 03The Long ConversationFour decades of workshops for singles and couples
- 04On AirOprah, Good Morning America, CNN and the national stage
- 05Love, in PracticeWhy Talking Is Not Enough
- 06The Singles ClassicIf I'm So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single?
- 07It Only Takes OneHow One of You Can Bring the Two of You Together
- 08What Thriving Couples KnowThe Eight Essential Traits
- 09The Spirit of TwoIf We're So in Love, Why Aren't We Happy?
- 10For the WritersThe Shortest Distance Between You and a Published Book
- 11A Shelf of Her OwnThe books, the editions, the languages
- 12San MiguelThe writer at home, and where to find her
From the Editor
Some writers explain love. A rare few teach it.
Since 1980, Susan Page has stood in front of rooms full of singles and couples and told them the truth: that lasting love is less a feeling than a practice — something you do, day after day, long after the first rush has faded.
She has said it on the Oprah Winfrey Show and Good Morning America, in workshops across twenty-six states and five countries, and in a shelf of books that has sold more than a million copies and travelled into twenty languages.
This is the first DORX Magazine author issue, and we could not think of a better place to begin. Over the pages that follow we walk through every one of her books — the singles classic that topped the charts in Russia, the marriage guides built from real couples, the spiritual principles behind a happy partnership, and the guide she wrote for writers.
Read it slowly. Better still, read it with someone you love.
— The Editors, DORX Chronicle
Profile
The Long
Conversation
For more than forty years, Susan Page has helped people find love — and keep it. Her classroom has been the workshop, the lecture hall and the television studio.
Speaker, minister, author
Twenty-six states. Canada, Korea, Australia, Singapore and Mexico. One message.
- Education
- Oberlin College; M.Div., San Francisco Theological Seminary
- Since
- 1980 — workshops for singles and couples
- Home
- San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
Susan Page has been conducting workshops for both singles and couples, nationally and internationally, since 1980. Her speaking and media career has taken her to twenty-six states, Canada, Korea, Australia, Singapore and Mexico.
She has keynoted dozens of relationship conventions and was invited to share the platform with John Gray at his Masonic Auditorium event in San Francisco. She is a past chapter president of the National Speakers Association.
Her path to the podium began in ministry. A graduate of Oberlin College, she holds a Master of Divinity degree from San Francisco Theological Seminary, and began her career as a Protestant campus minister at Washington University in St. Louis and at Columbia University in New York.
She went on to serve as Director of Women's Programs at the University of California, Berkeley, where she helped found the nation's first university-based human sexuality program.
Those early years shaped everything that followed. The minister's instinct to listen, and the educator's instinct to make ideas usable, run through every workshop she has led and every book she has written.
Hollywood came calling, too: Page was a consultant to writer and director Gary Goldberg on Must Love Dogs, released by Warner Pictures in August 2005.
Today she is the author of four books about relationships plus a publishing guide for writers — books that have sold more than a million copies in the U.S. and around the world.
On Air
A veteran of national television and radio, and a repeat guest of Oprah Winfrey.
Long before relationship advice became a genre of its own, Susan Page was explaining it — plainly, warmly, and on live television.
Her appearances on the Oprah Winfrey Show made her one of the most recognisable relationship voices in America. Viewers responded to the same thing workshop audiences always had: she did not lecture, she gave people something to do.
Producers kept inviting her back — to Good Morning America, CNN, CNBC and NPR, to Donahue, Geraldo and Montel Williams — because she could take a painful, private question and answer it in a way that felt both honest and hopeful.
Television & Radio
- The Oprah Winfrey Show
- Good Morning America
- CNN
- CNBC
- NPR
- Donahue
- Geraldo
- Leeza
- Montel Williams
- Sonya Live
- The Diane Rehm Show
In Print
Excerpts of her work have appeared or been reviewed in People, USA Today, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Glamour, Self, New Woman, and McCall's — among scores of other publications.
The Book · Featured
Love, in Practice
Jossey-Bass · 2006
Relationships · Marriage
Read it if
- You keep having the same argument
- You've talked it through — and nothing changed
- You want closeness, not just agreement
Why Talking Is Not Enough: Eight Loving Actions That Will Transform Your Marriage
Couples are told, again and again, to talk it through. Communicate more. Use “I” statements. Schedule the hard conversation. Susan Page has heard every version of that advice — and watched thousands of couples follow it and still feel stuck.
Her answer is this book. A successful marriage, she argues, needs more than talking through problems. In Why Talking Is Not Enough, she sets out eight loving actions that couples can take to show care, strengthen their connection, and work through difficulties — not by saying more, but by doing.
The shift is simple and radical at once. Instead of waiting for the perfect conversation to fix things, partners begin with small, deliberate acts of goodwill. Those actions change the climate of the relationship, and the conversations that follow become easier, kinder and far more productive.
It is the distillation of a career spent in the room with real couples: practical, warm, and grounded in what partners can actually do for one another — starting today, and starting with just one of you.
Loving actions · One marriage
A marriage is built not only on what partners say to each other, but on what they do for each other.
The Books · The Debut
The Singles Classic
Her first book asked the question millions of people were quietly asking themselves — and answered it with unusual honesty.
RosettaBooks edition
Original hardcover
Turkish edition
If I'm So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single?
Ten strategies · Twenty languages · 25+ years in print
The title was a question, and readers recognised themselves in it immediately. Bright, warm, accomplished people — with full lives and good friends — who could not understand why lasting love kept slipping past them.
Susan Page's answer was neither a list of dating tricks nor a promise of luck. Drawing on years of workshops with singles, she invited readers to look honestly at the patterns and the hidden ambivalence that can keep a relationship at arm's length — and then gave them clear, practical strategies to change course.
The book struck a nerve far beyond America. It has been translated into twenty foreign languages, was the number one bestseller in Russia in 1994, and has now passed its twenty-fifth year in print — a rare run for any advice book, and a sign of how universal its question remains.
Decades on, its message still feels fresh: finding a partner is not about becoming someone else. It is about becoming clear about what you want, and willing to say yes to it.
Key Ideas
- 01Be honest about your own ambivalence
- 02Replace waiting with clear, deliberate action
- 03Know the difference between preferences and essentials
It was the number one bestseller in Russia in 1994 — and it is still in print today.
The Books · Conflict & Connection
It Only Takes One
What if your partner will not come to counselling, will not read the book, will not change? Susan Page wrote this one for you.
Breakthrough strategies
How One of You Can Bring the Two of You Together
Breakthrough strategies to resolve conflict and reignite love
Most relationship advice quietly assumes two willing participants. Real life is rarely so tidy. Often one partner is ready to work on the marriage while the other is tired, sceptical, or simply not interested.
In How One of You Can Bring the Two of You Together, Susan Page turns that imbalance into a starting point rather than a dead end. Her central, hopeful idea is that a relationship is a system — and when one person changes the way they show up, the whole system begins to shift.
She shows readers how to step out of the blame cycle, how to stop waiting for the other person to go first, and how to offer the kind of goodwill that makes it easier for a partner to respond in kind. The strategies are concrete and immediate; none require a partner's permission.
The result is a book that hands power back to the reader. You cannot control the person you love — but you can change the climate between you, and that is often where the breakthrough begins.
Key Ideas
- 01One partner can begin the change alone
- 02Step out of the blame cycle
- 03Lead with goodwill, not demands
You cannot control the person you love — but you can change the climate between you.
The Books · The Research
What Thriving Couples Know
Instead of studying marriages in trouble, Susan Page went looking for the ones that work — and asked what they have in common.
The original hardcover
Happily Married
The Eight Essential Traits of Couples Who Thrive
Published as Now That I'm Married, Why Isn't Everything Perfect? and Happily Married
Most marriage books begin with what goes wrong. This one begins with what goes right. Susan Page sat down with couples who were genuinely thriving — not merely surviving — and listened closely to how they lived, argued, laughed and made decisions together.
From those conversations she distilled eight essential traits that thriving couples share. None of them depend on luck, perfect compatibility or never fighting. They are habits of mind and heart that any couple can recognise, practise and strengthen over time.
First published in hardcover as Now That I'm Married, Why Isn't Everything Perfect?, the book has since found new readers under the titles The Eight Essential Traits of Couples Who Thrive and Happily Married.
Whatever the cover, the promise is the same: a happy marriage is not a mystery reserved for the fortunate few. It has a shape, and that shape can be learned.
Key Ideas
- 01Study the marriages that work
- 02Happiness is a set of shared habits
- 03Every trait can be practised and grown
A happy marriage is not a mystery reserved for the fortunate few. It can be learned.
The Books · Spiritual Partnership
The Spirit of Two
The former campus minister returns to her roots — not with doctrine, but with the deeper principles that let two people flourish together.
Spiritual principles for couples
If We're So in Love, Why Aren't We Happy?
Spiritual principles for couples
Plenty of couples love each other deeply and still feel unhappy. The affection is real; the day-to-day life together is not working. Susan Page has spent decades listening to that particular ache — and this book is her response to it.
If We're So in Love, Why Aren't We Happy? draws on her training in ministry and her long experience with couples to offer a set of spiritual principles for partnership. They belong to no single faith. Instead, they speak to the qualities that make a relationship feel generous, safe and alive — the inner attitudes that sit beneath every argument and every reconciliation.
The book is gentle but direct. It asks readers to look less at what their partner is doing wrong, and more at the spirit in which they themselves are showing up.
For couples who have tried techniques and still feel something is missing, it offers a different starting point: love as a practice of the heart, lived out in ordinary days.
Key Ideas
- 01Love and happiness are not the same thing
- 02Principles for every faith, or none
- 03Change the spirit in which you show up
Love as a practice of the heart, lived out in ordinary days.
The Books · The Craft
For the Writers
Having published with major houses herself, Susan Page wrote down everything she wished someone had told her at the start.
The writers’ guide
International edition
The Shortest Distance Between You and a Published Book
A step-by-step guide from idea to finished book
Every would-be author eventually meets the same wall: the book is in your head, or half on the page, and the world of agents, proposals and publishers seems deliberately closed. Susan Page set out to take that wall down, one step at a time.
The Shortest Distance Between You and a Published Book is exactly what its title promises — a clear, encouraging, step-by-step route from first idea to finished book. It demystifies the process, explains how the industry actually works, and keeps the writer moving forward.
The guide has also travelled abroad, appearing in an international edition as How to Get Published, and it remains a favourite with first-time authors.
It is also the clearest window onto her second great passion. The same generosity that drives her relationship work led her to found the San Miguel Writers' Conference and Literary Festival, where she now helps new writers take the very steps this book describes.
Key Ideas
- 01Treat publishing as a series of steps
- 02Understand how the industry really works
- 03Keep the writer moving forward
A clear, encouraging route from first idea to finished book.
The Library
A Shelf of Her Own
Four books about relationships, plus a publishing guide for writers — in editions around the world.
Why Talking Is Not Enough
Eight loving actions for marriage
If I'm So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single?
RosettaBooks edition
If I'm So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single?
The original hardcover
10 Strateji
Turkish edition
How One of You Can Bring the Two of You Together
Breakthrough strategies
Happily Married
The 8 Essential Traits of Couples Who Thrive
Now That I'm Married, Why Isn't Everything Perfect?
The 8 Essential Traits, hardcover
If We're So in Love, Why Aren't We Happy?
Spiritual principles for couples
The Shortest Distance Between You and a Published Book
A guide for writers
How to Get Published
International edition
1M+
Copies sold
20
Foreign languages
No. 1
Bestseller in Russia, 1994
25
Years in print
One career, one conviction: love is something we can learn.
Read together, the books trace a single arc. She begins with the single reader searching for a partner, moves to the couple learning to live well together, and arrives at the deeper principles and daily actions that keep love alive.
Alongside them sits her guide for writers — proof that her real gift is the same in every field: taking something that feels mysterious and making it something you can actually do.
At Home
San Miguel
When she is not conducting workshops in the United States, Susan Page lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with her husband of thirty-two years.
There she founded, and directs, the legendary San Miguel Writers' Conference and Literary Festival — bringing writers and readers together from around the world for talks, workshops and conversations in one of Mexico's most beautiful colonial towns.
It is a fitting second act. The woman who spent a career helping couples connect now spends much of her time helping writers find their voices — and their readers.
Her first book, If I'm So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single?, has been translated into twenty foreign languages, was the number one bestseller in Russia in 1994, and has now passed its twenty-fifth year in print.
From the archive
Read Susan Page
Scan to find her books on Amazon
DORX CHRONICLE
DORX Magazine · No. 01
News. Insight. Impact.