Make Marriage Work

It can be said very simply and forcibly that many marriages and maybe even marriage as a societal institution is in trouble. In fact, if things continue along the path of more and more couples deciding that getting married is unnecessary the moral and legal authority that marriage has in society might just disappear. The statistics are alarming and for divorce rates they have been alarming for some time. The fifty percent divorce rate has remained fairly constant for some time and it really doesn’t seem to matter how much money you have, what god you worship, or your social standing. I suspect that if you asked how many couples were happy or content together, that number would be alarmingly low. They either have not yet decided to separate or have decided to stay together for some other reason. We just are not doing a good job as a society and culture with making marriage work.

This is not news. And many people and organizations have tried to turn the tide. There are organizations with names like “Saving Marriage”, or the “Marriage Initiative”, even welfare laws have been structured to try and encourage marriage. And most every religious faith, and certainly the Judeo-Christian heritages celebrate marriage as central to their life of faith and make every effort to keep couples together. And yet most initiatives, including marriage counseling have a dismal record of preventing divorce and improving struggling couple’s chances of staying together.

There is one notable exception, at least in the field of marriage counseling. With over 15 years of research Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) has a 70-75% (and a few have 80-85%) success rate of helping unhappy marriages. It also reports that 90% of couples treated report significant improvement. This is great news and I have seen the results in my own experience of counseling couples with EFT. It is truly amazing how effective it can be. Couples have stated they had very little hope of making their marriage work and have been overwhelmed with gratitude when it did after counseling sessions based on the EFT method.

I have learned how to practice EFT from Dr. Sharon May Morris. She is a follower of Jesus Christ and a master EFT therapist. She has written two books on EFT, the most recent is How to Argue so Your Spouse Will Listen. She has worked with several churches in California, including David Jeremiah’s church Shadow Mountain Community Church helping to implement mentoring and counseling programs based on EFT with great results. I am hoping that a coalition of churches and organizations in the Lexington area will help bring Sharon to Lexington for three days to help our local efforts. Centenary United Methodist and Crossroads Christian Church have committed to help. Please consider joining the effort to make marriage work.

In one of his newsletters Francis Frangipane made this statement: “We believe that the key to healing society is found in restoring marriage to its greatest goal as proclaimed by God in the book of Genesis. What is that goal? The Lord said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness . . . And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Gen 1:26-27).

Man and woman, married, united, in the image of God. If we restore this, we will restore our society one family at a time.”

We can restore our society one family at a time if we make marriage work.

Christmas Gift

One of the great qualities of Christmas is the time it affords family to be together. If you happen to have a family that enjoys being together, it really is a wonderful time of year. Christmas is also about the Christ. It is a comment on our culture that we even have to mention that He is the focus of the season. I remember that my childhood family seemed to focus on the gift giving celebration part of Christmas, not the Christ giving. But then maybe that was just me. I liked the gift giving part and really struggled with the Christmas Eve service candle wax dripping necktie tight pants itchy feet sweating staying in my seat listening to boring service part.

It was really difficult for me to believe anything other than we were just putting in time before the good stuff; me getting my stuff. Christmas was not about Him, it was about Me! Oh what a joy to get what you wanted! And most of my life has been about getting what I want until what I want became incredibly destructive to myself and others. That is when I woke up or more accurately desperately began hoping that there was something else beside satisfying insatiable appetites and desires.

Did my problem begin because Christmas is too secular, too focused on buying and getting and not focused on Jesus? Well, I do not know about you, but my problem with appetite and desire run amuck is a lot more complicated than reminding everyone that “Jesus is the Reason for the Season”! I know there are people who are very disciplined and able to manage their appetites and personal desires in order to achieve larger goals. It does not follow that they are any more satiated, that their desires and hungers have been completely satisfied. It just might mean that their temperament is more suited to delaying gratification.

There is a long held notion in psychology that we all have different temperaments that come with the package, so to speak. Our particular temperament has to do with a prevailing mood, emotional disposition and emotional intensity. While there are different classifications, most agree that there are four basic types. The original typology of temperament was developed by Galen around 200 B.C. I am most likely a choleric, quick to react and hot tempered. My wife, Carolyn is more sanguine, warm and pleasant. A phlegmatic tends toward being slow moving and apathetic and the melancholic struggles with sadness and depression. I think most of us can figure out our basic temperament and what our particular prevailing emotional state is. If you can’t figure it out, ask someone close to you. They will definitely know!

So what does this have to do with Christmas! Well, God sent His only Son that we might have eternal life and He did that because He loves us. God gave us his Son as our gift. That is what we celebrate on His birthday; His gift to us. Our desires and appetites drive us to focus on what we can get, even if we do it in a disciplined or friendly manner. How many of us focus on what we can give? My wife might be more warm and fuzzy and I am definitely pricklier but does that mean she is more likely to give of herself? Maybe she is just more pleasantly selfish.

I still have trouble sitting in church on Christmas Eve. My hot, quick tempered nature will probably not disappear until Jesus returns and I get my new body. My appetites and desires are still there, maybe not as forceful or persistent, but they are still there. One thing that is different is that I know I need to give, like God gave me His Son. It is the only thing that really helps satisfy. By the way, my wife is pleasant, and very giving.

This Christmas give yourself as a gift to someone else.

Merry Christmas!

Love’s Paradox

We do not usually talk about our failure in a public forum. This is especially poignant during a presidential campaign where the only failure talked about is the opponent’s. Failure is understood to mean when something falls short of what is required or expected; it is unsuccessful, the desired goal is not achieved. There is something negative about failure and yet conventional wisdom of successful people is that they often learn more from their failures than their successes. I wish the political process would allow for that but in America it is all about being right and winning. American culture does not tolerate failure very well.

I am in a business where what we do, therapy, often fails; at least in the short term it appears to be a failure. This week I have seen two marriages fall apart, one that is farther down the road of divorce and one that is dangerously tittering on the precipice of divorce. One might be salvaged; one most likely will not be salvaged. So what have I learned from my mistakes, from failure? What can I take away from this that will make therapy more successful next time?

I think I am asking the wrong question and looking at this failure the wrong way. Yes, I expect to help every marriage that walks in my door. I expect success because I am trained and I have seen much success before with couples. I am trained and learning more about EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy) which has a great research track record of significantly improving marriages 75-80% of the time. But what makes the difference? Why do some respond and others do not?

I wrote to one of the spouses who do not want to end their marriage that without vulnerability love does not happen; it cannot thrive. It is choked off in self protective armor that stifles and restricts and bounces back every attempt of love’s embrace. What in the world would make someone reject love? Why would anyone do that!? Because what is offered is not perceived by the receiver as love; the source of love is seen as anything but loving. They are afraid, for whatever reason(s) to be vulnerable.

I am grieved by these couples’ pain. I hate that our efforts ended in a lack of success; that love did not win the day but disappointment and rejection did. I don’t know if there is anything more painful than a failed relationship except that it is tempered by the hope of finding love somewhere down the road. We are usually eternal optimists when it comes to love. In fact, many relationships end precisely because someone decides they can find love with someone else. But in divorce someone has decided that love does not happen for them in this relationship. How sad and painful is that.

I want to be honest about my failure to help and to love. It does no good to pretend we have all the answers or pretend that we will not fail. In fact, if conventional wisdom is true, failure is necessary but this conventional wisdom is only true if we do not quit trying. We are meant to love. It is what we are designed to do. We are lovers, and love is most fully realized in a monogamous relationship. It cannot be found in a series of relationships because serial relationships do not require commitment and thus avoid vulnerability. If I am never safe enough to risk being hurt, that is be open to being misunderstood, not valued, or accepted then I can never know love. This is the paradox of love; it can only happen when we are open to its failure. For us to know love, to experience love in our life we must be willing to suffer the pain of rejection, the disappointment of being misunderstood, and still hold out hope that love, in the long run, will not disappoint.

Love Baggage

“Adult love inevitably reconnects us to the earliest experience of infantile dependence on our parents or caretakers. And no parent is perfect, and no one’s earliest experiences of love are consistently and absolutely positive. These and later disappointments sometimes surface when we are faced with love as adults. As a result, some people find themselves unable to let go; they seem to prefer the familiarity of their fears to the potential danger of the unknown.” (David Benner, Surrender to Love) This statement, in one form or another, has been made by any number of respected psychologists, therapists, or pastors. It has become an understood facet of married life that we all bring baggage our marriage. We know that some baggage is heavier and more numerous than others, but we all have baggage when it comes to relationships.

So what? What is the big deal and why does it matter so much? Why can’t we just put our baggage in storage and move on? Damn the baggage anyway! The bottom line answer is because it is a part of who we are, a part of our identity. Our identity is largely shaped by how those significant persons in our life treated us. We see ourselves reflected in our lover’s (not sexual lovers but soul lovers) responses. Whenever we enter into a love relationship we are faced with reflected ghosts of our past love relationships. They are stored in our brain. The baggage cannot be ignored, denied, or deleted; it must be emptied out, examined, and replaced with something different. We need to see a new reflection of our self in the eyes of our lover.

How often do we ask ourselves “What does she think of me?” or “How does he see me?” We are very concerned and conscious of “our image” in the “eyes” of our lover. How we answer these questions is at the heart of our baggage. Our baggage is the fear that we will receive the same negative answers: “I keep getting the same disappointing results no matter how hard I try.”

Research from the neuroscience of interpersonal relationships suggests that our brain becomes hard wired to respond in the “same old way” especially when we perceive something or someone to be a threat. All the stored memory of our past disappointments is activated and our “baggage” comes rushing out. Something in the way our loved one looks, smells, acts, feels, or responds to us is registered as sensory input in our brain and rapidly processed and assessed. (Read my blog on “Emotionally Hijacked”) Anything that smells, looks, acts, or feels like previous threatening occurrences puts us on the defensive: “Danger! Danger! This is not safe. I must be careful here. I am not sure this person really loves me.” Like a freight train wreck our baggage spills out all over the place.

What are we to do? How can we stop the madness of rapid, almost instinctive reactions that push away the very thing we desire? How can we possibly get around our baggage in order to receive the love we so desperately need? How can we stop the self destruction? The short answer: Rewire your brain.

This is the good news. We can create new neural connections that reprogram our sensory processing so that we respond in a different way. And the way we do that is with the one you love. We literally learn to let go of our fear and experience loving interactions that heal us. Especially in a committed relationship like marriage, or in a community like AA, or a stable church community, or in counseling sessions, we can learn how to love one another. And it is in the learning how to love that healing happens. Our baggage of fear of rejection is replaced with the certainty of acceptance: “I really am lovable!”

Depending on your baggage, this is not easy process but it happens all the time. People do learn what love is and how to give love in return. Do not give up on love; it is what we are created to do. We are our most truly our self when we love.

 

The Scaffold of Relationship

Preparing for a seminar on “How to Connect in the Middle of a Fight”, I have been considering a couple of movies that might have good examples of Attachment issues. I am looking for brief segments that capture the essence of the movement of our attachment dance. Sometimes it is much easier to see the dance of relationship than it is to listen to someone describe it. Two movies came to mind, The Story of Us and Kramer vs. Kramer, both movies about a couple struggling with their marriage and the effect it has on their family. In Kramer vs. Kramer there is a wonderful presentation of a father and son bonding after the wife and mother leave. You can see the movement of an unattached and emotionally clueless husband and father learning to connect with his son who has been abandoned by his mother, and come to terms with his role in losing his wife. (If you are offended by a few expletives or nudity do not watch either movie but I hope you do watch them.)

Sue Johnson, in her book Hold Me Tight makes a compelling point that attachment needs are “absolute”, meaning fundamental to who we are and how we are designed. That is, our hardware won’t operate to its full potential, and is often damaged, without the software system of human bonding. “Attachment is the bottom line, the scaffold on which other elements (of a relationship like sex, caretaking, play, work, etc.) are built. Without secure, safe and bonded relationships, especially during childhood, but also in adulthood, we will not have fully satisfying personal relationships or develop into fully functioning human beings.

Dustin Hoffman, the father in Kramer vs. Kramer makes the journey with his son that Dr. Sue Johnson describes as necessary for creating such relationships: “To achieve a lasting loving bond, we have to be able to tune in to our deepest needs and longings and translate them into clear signals that help our lovers respond to us. We have to be able to accept love and to reciprocate. Above all, we have to recognize and accept the primal code of attachment rather than attempting to dismiss and bypass it. In many love relationships, attachment needs and fears are hidden agendas, directing the action but never being acknowledged. It is time to acknowledge these agendas so that we can actively shape the love we so badly need. ”

Like many of us, Dustin Hoffman’s character has very little idea of his significant longings and needs but when thrust into caring for his son he chooses to care. He accepts “the primal code of attachment” and does not dismiss or run from it. Refusing to abandon his son, he learns what love is and how to love. There is a remarkable scene where his son falls off a jungle gym and busts his face. His father was attuned to the danger, tried to prevent it and then runs with his son in his arms to the emergency room, refusing to leave him during his treatment. Contrast these scenes with earlier ones of his hapless attempts to care for his son. He becomes a likable, compassionate human being who is there for his son. It is a journey and transformation we all must make to become fully human.

Many of us, particularly men, might question Mr. Kramer’s manhood or challenge how important all this really is. His boss certainly does. He is an example of dismissing the basic need of relationship; he is attached to his career. Learning to acknowledge our attachment needs and fears in an open and responsive manner is not emotional sentimentalism. It is rather recognizing that we need the basic scaffold in place in order to build an enduring structure. Without the basic structure of knowing ourselves and facing our fears, being able to communicate and ask for what we need, and being vulnerable enough to receive what we need, we will continue to experience disappointment and failure in our intimate and meaningful relationships. In other words, we will continue to experience disappointment and dissatisfaction with life.

There are many examples that I can give of when I “dismissed and bypassed” my basic need for close, safe, and bonded relationship. I put many other things first, like success, career, sensual enjoyment, demanding my own way, or preferring to be alone. Like Mr. Kramer, my children have taught me to pay attention to building the scaffold of relationship for enduring and rewarding attachments. There is nothing more enduring, more powerful, than an attached relationship. It is something that we all hunger for and what we commonly name love. Do you know your hunger or do you dismiss or deny it?

Naked and Unashamed

David Benner in Surrender to Love makes a profoundly simple and true assertion: “Genuine transformation requires vulnerability”. This captures the challenge of my daily work with individuals, especially couples. Those individuals who struggle with being vulnerable are very difficult to help. Being vulnerable means “to be without adequate protection and open to physical or emotional harm” and most of us do not like that particular state of being.

There are obviously situations where we should not be vulnerable because we are around unsafe people. We need to have our guard up and be careful about what we reveal because there are manipulative and abusive individuals. And sometimes it is a spouse or parent. There is probably nothing more negative and destructive to our being than the betrayal of our source of trust and affection using and abusing us.

The context for Dr. Benner’s comment is the healing power of love. As a marriage therapist anything to do with love catches my attention. As a human being it should catch everyone’s attention. For some the thought that love heals is foreign; for others it is ridiculous and for most of us it is a pleasant platitude that we believe but don’t really understand. Love heals? Of course it does! And in the hidden comments of our self talk we wonder how that really works.

The reason vulnerability is so critical to transformation is that without it we cannot receive love. If we are busy protecting ourselves then when love comes we miss it. Dr Benner says that it is not “the fact of being loved unconditionally that is life changing….It is the risky experience of allowing myself to be loved unconditionally.”

I cannot count the number of times I have heard “he/she does not love me unconditionally” and yet most people have had someone love them unconditionally. They might not be parents or lovers but most have experienced mercy and compassion from someone who was not looking for anything in return. Most parents and lovers know that love needs to be unconditional and make their best effort to give it. Why is it so difficult for us to receive love when it is offered? What makes us refuse it when love is standing right next to us?

One critical factor is the lack of self acceptance; we don’t like ourselves. How can anyone else like us or love us? We are conditioned to believe that we will only get what we need if we are good enough. This critical piece is difficult to grasp. We are often unaware of our lack of self acceptance and this makes it very difficult to accept. Even if we realize or lack of self acceptance how to we get over it?

We get over it by risking rejection, the very thing that most likely caused us not to accept ourselves in the first place. We need to be like the cartoon character Popeye: “I am what I am, I’m Popeye the Sailorman.” Most likely you will find that the people in your life are struggling with the same struggle. It is by making ourselves vulnerable, “naked and unashamed” that allow us to receive what we need. Are you willing to risk it?

If you have experienced the healing power of love how has it changed you? Are you able to find the words to describe your experience? If so, please do and tell someone else about it. You are a witness to the power of love and your witness can change lives. You will be a bearer of good news!

Dark Knight Dialogues

In the book, Hold Me Tight, one that I highly recommend for couples that are struggling with maintaining a loving relationship, Sue Johnson, the founder of EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy) describes couples’ “Demon Dialogues”. They are Find the Bad Guy or the blame game where couples place fault for problems on each other rather than owning their respective responsibility. The second one she names Protest Polka or pursue-withdraw where one partner is feeling an unsafe disconnection from their mate and is noisily pursuing reassurance while the other feels just as unsafe but is pulling away. The final demon dialogue is the most debilitating and the one that couples are most often stuck in when seeking marriage counseling. It is Freeze and Flee or withdraw-withdraw where both partners have put their emotions in a self protective deep freeze. John Gottman, an eminent marital researcher refers to this as “stonewalling”, where the other partner is emotionally “walled out”.

Almost all couples experience episodes of demon dialogues. Ever since Adam blamed God and Eve for his eating of the apple, deflecting personal responsibility and blaming someone else is a reliable ploy. Protesting, even angrily, is a normal response to feeling disconnected from the one you love. We need emotional security and it comes in the form of our intimate other. The “protest” in Protest Polka is also referred to as “anger of hope” because we hope someone will hear us and respond. When we are hurt and feel misunderstood it is not unusual to pull away and lick our wounds. It becomes critical when we stay emotionally closed and sealed believing our partner is like an enemy. Most couples are able to recognize what is going on and pull back from totally disconnecting, especially when it begins to threaten the marital bond. If the Freeze and Flee pattern continues, divorce is usually not far away.

How safe and responsive is your mate or loved one? Maybe you do not even think about your relationship is these terms but you should. When we make ourselves vulnerable to someone in the name of love we expose our being or heart to the pain of rejection. Every one of us asks the fundamental human question “Am I loved”. The answer determines much of the course of our life, especially our relationships.

There are two basic responses to threats to our emotional vulnerable selves. One is to avoid emotional engagement; the other is to anxiously demand safe attachment. We have either made a decision to stay away from emotional connection or we are critically demanding it. These “Demon Dialogues” are born out of threats to our emotional well being and once that threat is communicated, we need to drop the demon in dialogue. And it is amazing what happens when we learn to recognize our “demons” and let them go. Which demon are you most likely to participate in?

We all long for connection and safe place where love is real. Do you believe that? If you are asking the basic question “Am I loved?” don’t you think your partner is too? We all need the same thing when it comes to relationships and the power of believing that and acting as if it is true is amazing. A friend of mine that has great wisdom once said to someone who was complaining about how unwilling people in her life were to be vulnerable and close, that if she became safe for others they will be safe with her. How true this is.

Face of Love

It matters how well you have been loved. It also matters how well you love. I listened to a sermon recently that quoted John Eldridge from the Sacred Romance. He wrote something to the effect that it is a rare person who has been unconditionally loved, or “loved for who she is…” The implication is that we are often loved for who someone else wants us to be and that this is a primary source of our sense that something is wrong with us. We sense that we are not accepted so there must be something wrong with us; otherwise the important people in our life would not want us to be something other than who we are. Even writing this makes me feel confused!

It is often stated that a primal or basic human fear is the fear of abandonment, the fear of rejection and isolation, a fear of being left alone. If you saw the movie Castaway with Tom Hanks you have a sense of what isolation does to someone and the extreme measures it takes to survive living only within your own thoughts. How often do we need someone to talk to simply to help us get out of our own thoughts? Tom Hank’s character Chuck Noland ended up creating a relationship with “Wilson”, a soccer ball, in order to survive. He had to have a conversation with “someone.” It is a commonly held understanding that we are hard wired for connection to one another. It is how we are designed.

This should be obvious to all of us how important we are to one another. But like the air we breathe we take it for granted; until something goes wrong and we can no longer breathe in the air we need. If you have ever experienced even a hint of suffocating you know the panicked helplessness. The same is true for the emotional air we breathe. How good is the air of your important relationships? How do you love those most important to you and how do they love you? What kind of emotional climate do you live in? Are you confident that you will get what you need or are you afraid (even unconsciously) that they really are not there for you. Or maybe you just deny that you need anyone.

One of the “thoughts” that kept Chuck Noland going in his drive to survive was the remembering of his relationship with his wife to be Kelly. The memory of the love they had and the hope of loving her in the future helped keep Chuck alive and more importantly motivated to get home. He had what is called “emotional resiliency”, the capacity to soothe oneself in the face of disconnection. Those who have been loved well have a basic sense of security that their needs will be met, if not now, soon, if not soon, later. They have a living hope that love is real and present for them. Is love real for you? Are you emotionally resilient? Do you believe that even in its felt absence love exists? And what form does love take? What kind of face does love have for you?

These are profoundly important questions that we all need to answer. Questions about love are spiritual questions and all spiritual questions are ultimately questions about what it is to be human. We are the presence of love that makes love real and we are most human, most truly our self, when we believe in and live in love. We are the form that love takes. We are the face of love to one another. What kind of face do you make?

 

 

Waiting on Love

One of the most poignant and powerful illustrations of the rhythm of significant relationships is the stages of separation that John Bowlby observed in young children experiencing separation from parents. While they are more obvious in children who generally have little difficulty expressing their emotional and physical reactions to things they don’t like, the same stages are evident in older children and adults. When people we love do things that threaten us we express our displeasure (protest), if the threatening behavior continues, we become sad and experience a sense of loss (despair), and finally if the sense of separation (you are not there for me) continues long enough we emotionally disconnect (detach) in order to protect ourselves from further emotional pain. We conclude that it is better to be alone than to be rejected.

This rhythm of attachment tells us a great deal about who we are. It is a running commentary of how well we love. Do we listen, hear and respond to the protests of our loved ones? Are we sensitive to their displeasure and their pain? Do we adjust our behavior to reassure them or do we just keep on doing our thing? How well do we know what they need and what is important to them or is it just what is important or significant to us that matters? And perhaps most importantly, are we able to suffer through their insensitivity and even rejection of us while still being open to receive them?

An important quality of how well we love may be seen in our capacity to suffer. Growing in love, becoming more loving, is growing in our willingness to give of ourselves. Many pastors and teachers of religious faith frequently talk about this. Most often, it is expressed in behavioral terms of serving by doing more for someone else and doing less for you. So they focus on our behavior, what we do. Do we go on a mission trip or a golf trip? Do we perform a service project for somebody else or focus on our own projects? Unless we look in our hearts and examine our motives for giving of ourselves we might not really be growing in loving others.

I think we need to consider what suffering consists of to help us know what love is. What does it look like to suffer and what does suffering do in us? How does our capacity to suffer for another develop? What affects it? Who are the most loving people you know? Reflect on what they are like. How do you feel around them? What is it about them that tell you they love? Is it what they do or who they are? Do you know about their life or just their behavior? I would suggest that you know someone loves not just by how they behave but by experiencing a presence that welcomes and invites connection.

Henri Nouwen says we are to become like the father of the prodigal son (a metaphor of God’s love) who was shaped by waiting for his sons to deal with their stuff. Nouwen says: “A large part of the father’s life has been waiting. He could not force his younger son to come home or his older son to let go of his resentments. Only they themselves could take the initiative to return. During these long years of waiting the father cried many tears and died many deaths. He was emptied out by suffering. But that emptiness had created a place of welcome for his sons when the time of their return came. We are called to become like that father.”

I love this statement “emptied out by suffering” that creates “a place of welcome”, a place of love and joyful connection. Suffering creates a space in us to love each other, and it involves the helplessness of waiting.

The next time your relationship is threatened, and you notice the rhythm of attachment that tells your loved one you’re feeling threatened, consider working on learning how to wait and suffer in order to create a space of connection. You will feel the distress of separation but resist expecting a change in their behavior. Empty yourself by letting go of your demands. Create a safe space for them to come home.

Marathon Sex, Love and Happiness

Last week I opened my local paper and in the Health and Family an article caught my attention: “…sexual marathon helped rebuild their marriage.” The article reviewed a couple of books about consecutive nights of sex with their spouse and the positive effect it had on their marital relationship. One of the books is by self professed evangelical Christians from North Carolina, my home state. The wife, Charla Muller gave her husband a gift of sex every night for one year for his fortieth birthday. The title of the book is appropriately 365 Nights A Memoir of Intimacy.

My immediate response to this was bordering on disdain. I have counseled too many couples who have tried to improve and/or save their marriage by having sex in every way and place imaginable. While it probably improved their sex life, I could not think of a single incident where having sex more frequently and creatively saved a marriage. Fortunately the article was well balanced and covered reasonable issues like sexual frequency in marriage is different among couples and individual couples experience of a satisfied sex life is varied. What is good for the goose is not always good for the gander.

Most married couples understand this about sex and have found ways to adjust to a frequency and schedule that works for them. I know my goose has certainly influenced this gander to adjust and, well, learning to do without is a growing experience is it not? Of course, be willing to give when you don’t feel like it defines mature self sacrifice. These competing arguments for good will often create some interesting discussions! “Honey, are you sure it is not your turn to be self sacrificing tonight?”

On the thing the article did not mention that is relevant to increased sexual activity and an improved marital relationship is the role of the so called “love” hormone oxytocin. It is released during orgasm in both men and women and is thought to be associated with emotional connection: “This is one of the first looks into the biological basis for human attachment and bonding,” said Rebecca Turner, PhD, UCSF adjunct assistant professor of psychiatry and lead author of the study. “Our study indicates that oxytocin may be mediating emotional experiences in close relationships.”(Oxytocin: the hormone of love)

Since the late nineties researchers have been trying to understand the role this hormone plays in emotional connection and human attachment and the results have been very interesting. Of course some have been quick to latch on to the thought that we can manufacture emotional connection with a nose spray and you can find web sites selling the concoctions. The scientific results are more complicated and interesting than snorting a quick fix of “a tight connection to my heart” (Bob Dylan song) or having sex as often as you can in hope that something connects.

What is apparent from the research and human experience is that the presence of oxytocin is associated with human attachment. This “tend and befriend” hormone is associated with feelings of pleasure and well being and the more attached and positive your past and current relationships are with significant others the more likely you are to have these positive and pleasurable states from being with them. In other words, the more we have positive and rewarding interactions with our spouse, children or parents the more oxytocin is released in our system. We literally are biologically designed to experience pleasure in taking care of and being close to one another and the more we do it the more we experience it. Sadly, what is also apparent is that those with a history of emotional deprivation have less oxytocin released in their system when interacting with significant persons in their lives suggesting that being with others does not create feelings of pleasure and well being( Monitor on Psychology – The two faces of oxytocin). In other words, they likely do not receive the same comfort and pleasure from intimate relationships.

Our marathon sex couples would not have had such positive results on their relationship from all their sexual encounters if they did not already have a connective relationship. Their increased sexual activity no doubt enhanced their attachment and feeling of well being but it did not cause it. Those that do not have a history of connective and rewarding relationships cannot create connection by having more sex or snorting oxytocin. They have to do it the old fashioned way by risking entering into relationship and experiencing the power of a loving presence. It is what everyone desires and needs so who ever you are with and however disconnected they may feel, trust and believe that you both are seeking the same thing.