9781573221405

Chapter One

Portrait of a Marriage:

The Birth, Death, and Rebirth of Desire

Love Engulfs You

It begins in innocence. Someone enters your life and unexpectedly awakens you. Suddenly, your life force is galvanized and it burns a little brighter. Love engulfs you, overwhelms every waking moment. He has changed your world. She has restored you to your best self--not only in her eyes but in your own. Miraculously, all your dreams seem possible again. Your very soul alerts you to the fact that he or she, who stands before you, is the source of this new life. So much pessimism dissolves. All those grim statistics about marriage and divorce are forgotten. The rational faculties themselves are put to sleep amidst the vapors of love's intoxication.

Hope in Love Everlasting

It doesn't take long before you are wanting all of him. Soon you are fantasizing about what it would be like to make love to her, to take her into your arms and devour her beauty. Sexual hunger becomes overwhelming and unbearable. There is no middle ground now. You must have this person.

"She's the one I've been looking for," you tell a friend. "She's completely different from the others."

"He's the only man who's ever really understood me," she tells herself. "This time it's going to work."

In fact, you are seeing less the person who is than the partner you long for, the other you need to feel whole. Having him will bring love everlasting. The ancient Greeks recognized this state of intoxication as the blessing of Eros, the god of Love and Desire. The two of you do not know it yet, but you have embarked on a quest that contains the very essence of life. At last comes that magic day when you first make love. Sex is so effortless and exciting for many couples at this stage that they never dream it could be otherwise. Thus, driven by erotic passion, you find yourself racing toward those exciting yet dangerous reefs called commitment and marriage, beyond which lies an uncharted sea where lives are transformed, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

All couples just starting out expect that this time it will be for the better and that they will be able to sustain this level of communication, both intellectual and sexual, for the rest of their lives. No matter how many other relationships have failed in the past, this time both believe they have found the perfect other. And certainly some couples, though in my experience they are the minority, are intuitively equipped to do the work necessary to sustain their desire and appreciation for each other.

The Shock of Leavened Bliss

Early on in the journey you discovered that you could "talk about anything." This was part of the attraction. She understood and appreciated what was important to you. He appreciated how you spoke about and defined your needs, and would be there to fulfill them. This was part of the magic of the relationship. The ability to discuss significant themes in world affairs, in raising a family, in relationships. Early on in the partnership, lovemaking was automatic, rhythmic, and rhapsodic. Little was denied to curiosity and experimentation in the ways of making love. It just happened, and it was blissful. But then something began to change.

The Ritualization of Difference

At first it's the little things you disagree on. Who takes the garbage out? Do you share the cooking? What is a safe speed to drive at? Did you or did you not dominate the other guests at the dinner party? The small doubts which you had smothered during the ecstatic days of courtship and early marriage, the little differences of opinion that were so easy to dismiss then, now loom large.

Suddenly the battle lines are drawn. Now your arguments are about who you are, who your partner is, where you are going together. It is this fundamental disagreement over identity that threatens to transform your original love and passion into doubt. If you are the average couple in this portrait, sex comes to the rescue. "Let's drop this nonsense and make love," one of you says, and if this part of your relationship is relatively secure, you do. This allows you to treat your differences as those "little `scraps' that all couples have, it's the `universal lover's quarrel,'" you say. Still, the fights begin to follow a pattern, with a small number of recognizable themes. This repetition of themes puzzles you, but you ignore or dismiss this. Each time a button-pushing theme comes up you try to warn yourself, but you get drawn in anyway. You even know in advance the position your partner is going to take, what he will say and how she will say it. Even while you are escalating the conversation, you are aware of the position you will take, what you will say, and how you will say it. You end up either in silence, anger, or, in some cases, absolute rage.

At These Times Your Shadows

Enter the Room

Our shadows are the dark side of love. Were it not for the shadow we could love purely, as we intend, and do, most of the time. We wouldn't have so much trouble with love, with expressing it, with taking it in. Were it not for the shadow we could feel the tender touch of love , whenever it was being offered. But alas! When the shadow is present, our skin hardens to the touch, repelling it along with the one who offers love. Were it not for the shadow, we would be able to talk straight, say what we really mean, whether what we mean comes from the mind, or the heart, or the genitals. And we would be able to do this most of the time, not only in those too infrequent moments when we run so scared of losing love entirely that we appeal to our lover to ignore our shadow, to love us in spite of ourselves. Were it not for the shadow, we could accept the bliss which our sexual drives promise as our due, and give sexual pleasure freely and lovingly to those we love.

Paths Diverge

At this time, couples may take different routes on the journey of love, but all will run into roadblocks, detours, storms. They will get stalled, start up again, gain ground, and stall again. In most cases, those who are determined to succeed, will. For some, the journey will simply be easier than it is for the vast majority. The difficult "work" that all marriages require, these couples manage without, or with just a little professional help. But work they must. For communication breakdowns and the interruption of lovemaking are typical of any pursuit of the elusive grail we call sustained sexual intimacy. Or so I believe. I also believe that those couples who "make it" with relative ease are a smaller minority than is assumed, not only by the public but by most experts. Like the rest, these lucky couples will go through stages, from bliss, to lost innocence, to the dark side of love, which drags each partner down into the pits of their own psyches, where they encounter their own demons. But these lucky ones ascend again, more whole as individuals, more in love, and better able to deal with whatever they encounter on the rest of the journey. Sex, if it is affected by temporary detours, will prevail.

A much larger number of couples are not so fortunate. They may simply lack the fortitude to press on in the journey, they may get frightened by their own or their partner's demons, or they may have no adequate models for what is possible in love. In this quite common scenario there is a gradual diminution of sexual desire and intimacy, an acceptance of less than what could be. These couples often appear firmly committed to one another, and may indeed function very well together at family, professional, and social gatherings, but they have settled for less than what they started out with. At best, they live side by side in a cozy world, directing their attention outward toward their children, their careers, or the needs of others.

They have an "adequate" sex life and "enough" intimacy, they say. In fact, many may all but give up sex, but do not talk about it. Characteristically, they do not seek therapy until another crisis occurs later in their lives. The fact that they have not made love for months or even years is only discovered accidentally.

Two of the couples featured in this book fall into the first category, the "fortunate ones." The second group is not dealt with here. Our focus, instead, is on a third, very large group who do not settle for less than they believe they can have. They struggle on their own, speak with doctors and ministers, read self-help books ravenously, attend workshops, and come for therapy. All, in their fashion, are trying to "work" on their relationships. All want to sustain, salvage, or restore desire. This book may help them.

Disappointment, Broken Contracts,

and the Threat to Desire

Most of your disagreements run off your hide without consequence--when the stakes are low, that is. Men act and fix; women emote and talk, says the common wisdom. But when the stakes are high--in matters of identity, or when buttons are pushed--this can become a matter of psychological life or death. At the end of each of these failed conversations, you feel abandoned, betrayed, not understood, and above all, disappointed in the business of love. Despair and melancholy (which can even be mistaken for clinical depression) set in. The unspoken agreements you made to one another during courtship, your mythic contracts, are being battered. Your relationship can sustain itself this way for a long time, but ultimately the difficulties will deepen. What I am about to describe may not happen to you, but if you have started down the road I have described so far, this is where many of you may end up. If you recognize even a little of your relationship in this scenario, take it as an early warning sign that trouble lies ahead--trouble that can become the greatest opportunity for growth and happiness you will ever have.

The Withdrawal or Loss of Desire

You can't identify a particular incident, a moment where it all changed. It is almost unbelievable that you two, who once seemed to complete each other, who once were each other's best friends, now live in a state of roiling daily discontent. Where once the evenings were a time for the pleasurable sharing of the day's stories, the airing of opinions, and curiosity about each other, now communication falters.

You learn to stick to neutral topics lest dinnertime conversation degenerate either into arguments, often with the same theme, or into the painful silence of two people living in separate worlds. Where once a trip together in the car was an occasion for happy intimacy, now each of you stares straight ahead, perhaps even plotting a better future in which you won't make the same mistake again.

The two of you no longer bother to make your accustomed efforts at reconciliation. At the same time, you can't ignore the conflict. It surfaces periodically, nagging at you. Time does not restore your relationship to its former buoyancy. Talking it over doesn't help the way it once did. As the pressure builds intolerably inside you, you find yourself criticizing your spouse to a friend. You realize that this is a betrayal. You're even a little shocked that you've done such a thing, but the tension and the emptiness inside you are too much to bear alone.

When you are no longer excited by who your partner is, you are no longer impassioned about sex. Sex is the most delicate part of your relationship and its most sensitive barometer. Your lovemaking becomes less frequent. You may realize that it has been weeks or months since you've even approached one another. Or, lovemaking is reduced to a sexual exercise from which you withdraw your soul. Eyes shut, each in your separate worlds, you go through the movements to relieve tension, perhaps to foster the illusion that things are still all right between you.

The death of desire is the cruelest death of all, in part because desire succumbs in a series of painful disappointments. With each one, you expect a little less from your partner, from yourself, and even from life. You and your spouse are diminished in each other's eyes. You physically withdraw to your respective corners of life and stay there. With the loss of desire and lovemaking comes the loss of intimacy. He is a stranger now. He speaks only of unimportant things, and is reticent about his inner life. He always seems impatient. She has withdrawn and become unreachable. She is possessed by a cold, brittle tension or seems always on the verge of tears. You assume defensive postures against each other, your arsenal of angry accusations always at the ready.

If you have reached this point, you are alone and lonely. You don't know how to reach your partner, and perhaps you aren't willing to try. At some point in your isolation, you realize that all the disappointments have piled up to form a single heartbreaking revelation: you are no longer special in your partner's eyes and neither is your partner heroic in yours. For the first time, you are shocked to realize that you are considering leaving or having an affair. Worse, you fear that your partner too may be having these once-unthinkable thoughts.

A terrible paradox traps so many relationships today. We enter into monogamy in the hope that we will experience love, intimacy, and sexual fulfillment until death parts us. Yet as time goes by, we discover that just the opposite has occurred. To add to our pain, the media bombards us with fantasies and explicit sexual images. The average couple, we are told, has sex three times per week. Love, intimacy, and ecstatic sex are available to all, we are made to believe. They just didn't happen for us.

The Rebirth of Desire

In more than thirty years as a clinical psychologist and family therapist, I have treated hundreds of couples. Over this career, I have taught undergraduates, graduates, and medical students at Harvard, Tufts, and Northeastern universities. At the Boston, Cambridge, and Kantor Family Institutes, I have trained more than a thousand professionals who specialize in couple and family therapy. I can tell you with assurance that contrary to what we read in popular surveys, a great many couples--far more than is commonly reported--have undergone exactly the journey described above and are not making love as much as they used to or have stopped altogether. In fact, one of the most consistent refrains with which couples confront me in my office is that they no longer make love.

This tragedy need not befall you. Let this book serve as a blueprint for maintaining the vitality and excitement of those early days and at the same time going deeper into each other, learning each other's mysteries, and respecting, not fearing, your differences.

If you have lost your desire for each other, there is a way back. Couples can experience again the joys for which they long. They can restore love, intimacy, and sex to their partnerships. The capacity for lasting love, intimacy, and fulfilling sex lives lies within all of us. But in order to retrieve it we must understand the true meaning and nature of love and relationships. Ironically, our culture leads us away from the very abilities that would return these gifts to us.

The memory of that perfect early love may lead you to ask why it all went even a little bit wrong. Was it because you made the wrong choice and now must struggle to live with your choice, to right the sinking ship and get by with a fraction of the former bliss?

Nearly every couple reaches an impasse. The high-stakes argument in which you find yourself unwilling to give an inch is your way of saying, "Here's who I am; my identity, my very being is at stake. Back off or I will fall into a black hole." When you are pushed more, your partner is saying, "There is darkness in you that you haven't a clue to, things I can help you see." These important issues lie beneath your ritualized disagreements and fuel its fires. As long as they remain subconscious, they will bring disappointment. This too is unavoidable; it may even be necessary: no adult can continue to mature without dealing with disappointment.

If you and your lover have ever had high-stakes arguments, if you have ever gone to bed withholding intimacy, if the polish has worn off a committed relationship, if you see any of yourself or your relationship in what I have described, this book can help you rediscover the promise of love, growth, and happiness you felt when you first set eyes on each other.

The only way to lasting love and desire is through a guided exploration of the stories you bring into the intimate relationship: stories about what defines love, about how to express your heroic identity in the name of love, and about how to achieve sexual ecstasy. When two people have the courage to undertake this sometimes frightening and often painful journey, each becomes exciting and fresh to the other: joint exploration and growth is the ultimate aphrodisiac. But the inner search requires courage, honesty, and commitment, for in the end it is a confrontation with all that is most frightening in each of us. Yet each of us knows in his deepest soul that this struggle to evolve is the essence of life.

As you will come to understand, it is for this very reason that you and your lover came together in the first place, the reason that you chose this person above all others. On an unconscious level you and your partner agreed--as a prerequisite for commitment--to play a heroic role in each other's personal story. "I will be all that you need," you and your partner unspokenly said to each other. "You will be all that I need," each of you replied. That promise made to each other during courtship inspired great excitement and deep feelings of safety and security, and was the basis for your courageous leap into the unknowns of long-term commitment and marriage. It is when this agreement breaks down--as inevitably it must between two separate beings--that intimacy and sexual desire is threatened. The original agreement inevitably breaks down because neither partner has fully seen the other. Instead, they have unconsciously empowered each other, indeed demanded of each other, to play a starring role in a drama with an incomplete script.

Inside each of us is a tangle of long-repressed secrets, dark desires, inner wounds, and heroic aspirations. These hidden parts of you shape your personality and your needs, including your sexual desires. It is for this reason that you must dare to become an adventurer who enters the world of the psyche, the world of the unknown, and brings back discoveries to share with your lover.

Three Stories That Must Be Told

We are all storytellers. You make sense out of your life by organizing the raw facts into stories that give shape to your experience. By telling and retelling your stories, you define yourself to yourself and to others. It follows that the best way to gain insight is to understand your inner stories. In short, you must elucidate your own mythology.

Among the many stories that are inside all of us, three are crucial to the territory I am mapping here.

The Personal Myth is our single most compelling story of love. It is "written" in childhood, at a time when we realize that the pure, unconditional love that seems to be our birthright may not be ours. Indeed, it is The Story of Imperfect Love. In the child's mind it contains villains, conspirators, betrayals, melancholic disappointment, and wished-for heroes who will make the love story come out right. In this story we form the dim outlines of our future "heroic self"--the hero-lover we will be when we grow up--and the hero for whom we search.

The Gender Myth is the story of our adult heroic self. In this story we assert who we are or want to be as we make our mark in work and in society. In particular, it is the heroic persona we will present to the ideal lover. Our Gender Myths tell the stories of three prototypical heroic figures. These are you as the Survivor, the person who is capable of enduring, adapting, showing tolerance of extreme hardship, and able to await the moment of victory at some future point; the Fixer, the person who is capable of overcoming obstacles that block the path to goals and causes worthy of support; and the Protector, the person who is driven to shield anything or anyone who is vulnerable to powerful external or internal forces .

The Sexual Fantasy Myth is your sexual story. It contains the rich storehouse of all your sensual yearnings and lustful fantasies. In this myth lies your desire; it describes how you wish to express yourself sexually, the ways you prefer to make love. It also contains your secret yearnings for sexual adventure, ways of making love which you keep hidden, sometimes from yourself.

If love and sexuality are to be sustained, you must get to know your own and your partner's myths, along with their shadows.

Many people refuse to do this work. Instead they search for a secure niche and fight with all their might to stay there. By not daring to look within themselves and grow, they become stale and predictable. They become stuck in their own sameness and therefore no longer have the power to inspire excitement or even respect. A superficial understanding of oneself is, in the end, boring, and boredom is at the bottom of countless failed relationships.

No one can take up this work without a map of the inner world and some knowledge of what he or she is looking for. In my work as a family and couples therapist, I have developed an approach to the psyche that allows couples to explore and understand themselves on a deep, intimate level. The key that will unlock these secrets lies in understanding the nature of your own mythology. These myths are compelling stories that we use as models and guidelines for living and loving. What makes them different from other memories we have stored is their larger-than-life character. The myths I will introduce you to have the character of all myths, but they are more personal than cultural, because we have created them ourselves and internalized them as parts of our identities. The three myths we will explore in this book all contribute to our sexual lives and to desire. They draw us to love, sustain us in love even when all else seems to be failing, and, when violated, they lead to the loss of desire and threaten the meaning of love.

Should you take up the call to look within yourself, examine your own mythology, and grow, my approach will provide you with a safe means to communicate your discoveries to your spouse so that intimacy and sexual fulfillment can be sustained, reinspired or reborn.

This book is intended as a new psychology of committed relationships. The theory it describes has evolved from decades of learning from the hundreds of couples I have seen in therapy, the nearly one thousand therapists whom I have trained, from public workshops, and from a perhaps too closely examined study of my own two marriages. In a career devoted to research, teaching, clinical practice, organizational consulting, and writing, nothing has commanded more of my serious attention and study than the couple in an intimate relationship. No institution created by humans comes close to this one for the effort required to assure its survival.

I am attempting to do something here that I have been, to put it mildly, reluctant to do: prepare a guiding text for couples who wish to do this work on their own. How to justify joining the ranks of those who've promised easy solutions? Two reasons, perhaps. First, I am careful to state at the outset how hard it can be to manage intimacy through its inevitable vicissitudes. Many how-to books gloss over this point. If users of the guidelines offered in these pages wobble, they would have done so anyway. Indeed what I write here anticipates that you will--and should--wobble. I predict the kinds of trouble you may expect and offer remedies for very specific ailments.

My Lover, Myself can be used in several ways. It is my belief that many--though not all--couples are capable of doing the necessary work on their own so long as they understand its nature. For them, this book will serve as a guide to help them along the way. Clearly, there are situations which will require the protection of couples therapy for all, or part, of the process. For couples and individuals already in therapy, I believe that this book will provide a useful framework upon which to base their self-explorations. Many of the insights which are here applied to couples also have proved useful to individuals seeking meaningful ways to organize and analyze their experiences.

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My Lover, Myself : Self-Discovery Through Relationship

1573221406

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