How many times have you noticed empty nesters, be they divorced or widowed, falling in love and marrying and thinking to yourself, "how wonderful and how perfect?" After raising a family, it's now their chance to experience the dream relationship, where they can focus exclusively on each other and nurture their marriage without having to worry about raising each other's kids.

Younger single parents who remarry face the common blended family issues of co-parenting responsibilities, transitioning kids, dual household budgets, step-sibling rivalry, and ex-spouse issues, all of which dilute the energy of the adult relationship, and leave little opportunity for the couple to nurture each other.

In fact, most step family literature is concentrated on younger blended families because it's assumed older second families escape the usual blended family issues and are in the perfect position to focus on each other and bask in healthy extended blended family relationships that only add to their combined happiness. It sounds too good to be true, and in many cases, it is.

In their break-through book, Step Wars, Grace Gabe, M.D. and Jean Lipman-Blumen, Ph.D. describe the surprising and unique dynamics of the adult step family. After gathering data from in-depth interviews and focus groups among a representative cross section of remarried parents and their adult children, the authors have written a seminal book about the real story of step families and adult children.

Gabe and Lipman-Blumen have identified five common anger issues, described as the Five Furies, that surprisingly, both the parental couple and adult children share. Although these widespread fears and concerns are crucial factors in stepparent relationships, there are differing viewpoints about who causes them.

1. Fear of Abandonment and Isolation. The fear of losing a relationship that depends on for emotional and/or monetary support.

2. Fidelity to Family. Concern about changes in loyalty, especially when members of the original family worry that the parent will lose his or her old loyalty after remarriage, when stepchildren feel the new spouse's children have too much influence, or when either spouse feels there is too much loyalty to the old family.

3. Favoritism. Concern about who is number one in each family and whose wishes are given top priority.

4. Finances. Fear among adult children that they may lose money or property that they were hoping to receive, and for parents, the suspicion that their adult children are more concerned about their inheritance than about the parent.

5. Focus on Self to the Exclusion of Others. Anger that a parent or an adult child is concerned only about her or himself and no longer cares about others.

Step Wars contains a multitude of actual relationship examples that illustrate the major problems between adult stepchildren, their parents and stepparents, and provides practical and encouraging advice and strategies for parents and adult children both.