O'Grady Psychology Associates

Psychotherapy, Marriage Counseling, Neuropsychological Assessment

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Passion and Sex in Long-Term Relationships

 

It is not uncommon to have romantic fantasies about people other than your partner. It’s not just normal; it can even enhance your marriage—that is, unless those fantasies cross the line, which is what I’ll talk about in this post.

In a long-term marriage, romance can depart, and sex can follow. From the outside, couples might seem to have perfect or near-perfect relationships, partnering well in work, raising kids, entertaining with other couples, and just plain building a life together that to everyone on the outside looks like a perfect or near-perfect relationship. But I can tell you that in my nearly 30 years of seeing couples, one of the biggest issues that get them into therapy is when they have not been having sex and one or the other of them feels neglected, rejected, and regret about years wasted in not having a sexual marriage.

The lack of sex often happens insidiously. It may start to decline as early as after the wedding, or after the first child is born. Maybe it begins when personal stressors take over a person’s psyche. Or it may start as late as after a woman goes through menopause and experiences dryness and pain with sex.

Life is difficult and often draining, taking a toll on our energy.

Once we get overwhelmed with responsibilities we try to use control to keep things together. What does that control look like? It can devolve into being snarky, snappy, or stingy. But admitting this to ourselves is threatening, so we compensate for those resentments or hurt feelings by making everything look more perfect on the outside so no one will guess how empty we feel on the inside.

Now we’re ripe for an effective distraction from having to think about these feelings of discouragement. Enter stage left a coworker, friend, or neighbor who listens to our feelings with rapt attention. With each interaction, new confidences are shared — just as we used to do with our partners when first falling in love, one of the best feelings in the world.  We feel our vitality is coming alive again from that dormant state, that deep freeze it had been in because romance and vitality are intimately tied together. Meanwhile, our partner is oblivious —  or, if they do suspect that a flirtation has progressed to a full-fledged emotional affair, we gaslight them, saying they’re crazy and have nothing to worry about.

Most relationships require that couples discuss and come to mutual agreements about fidelity issues, such as flirtation, porn, or time spent with the others that a spouse may find threatening. . When one partner strays, it’s often because these difficult discussions haven’t happened. Whether out of denial, fear, or just plain self-centeredness, the affair ends up coming like a bolt from the blue to the betrayed partner.

Of course, it’s never okay to violate the fundamental trust of your relationship by having an emotional or sexual affair or committing other indiscretions like visiting a sex-worker or getting a happy-ending massage. But it is each partner’s responsibility to check in with one another about where you’re both at with regard to your sex life, or lack of sex life.

When I’ve seen couples who come in for therapy to repair the damage from an affair, the betrayed partner will often say “I had no idea,”  “They never mentioned they were unhappy,” or ”I assumed we were on the same page.” Other times, the problem is right out in the open, with years of fighting about sex.  As with secrecy, that takes a toll too.

It’s important to get into counseling early—before the damage is done. There’s no doubt that affairs create deep pain. Even so, after the crisis has died down, infidelity can reignite the love you once had for each other. We are all multi-layered beings with complex feelings and needs, and we’re especially vulnerable when it comes to our sexuality. To protect yourself and your relationship, don’t neglect to have those difficult conversations.

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Micro-cheating’s Seductive Quick Fix … and why it’s a bad idea

In a committed relationship, cheating comes in many forms. It can be as big as a long-term affair with one’s best friend. It can be as small as texting a co-worker. “Micro-cheating,” as it’s called, can include:

  • Keeping an active dating profile
  • Poring over an ex’s social media
  • Dressing up for someone not your partner
  • Sending flirty texts that your partner doesn’t know about
  • Keeping a secret Facebook account to exchange hot photos with an ex
  • Flirting with a co-worker
  • watching porn via Skype

It’s easy to see how the lines get blurred in a world where we advertise our every move: the airport we just checked into via Facebook, the food we’re eating sent by Instagram, or the random thoughts we tweet without the benefit of thoughtful reflection. When we constantly expose our private selves indiscriminately, we become emotionally desensitized.

Meanwhile, our actual relationships have to compete with smartphones,  addictive video games, and online pornography to suit every taste. Social media’s quick boredom fix is always within reach; micro-cheating is another such fix, and secrecy is part of the thrill. And kissy faces and hearts, or playful comments, can give way to romantic fantasies.

That’s the problem with flirting via text message. Some may justify it as just one screen talking to another, but secret flirting is an unhealthy way of growing our fantasies about someone outside of our committed relationship. And those musings sometimes don’t feel unhealthy; in fact, these fantasy relationships can actually feel closer to our authentic selves (or the selves we think we should be). New love makes us come alive again; it’s risky and exciting, pushing our established boundaries.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with some fantasy and flirtation. You don’t have to tell your partner every romantic idea that crosses your mind. That would stifle fun and creativity—qualities that we can take back to our partner because we feel good about ourselves and our desirability. But with micro-cheating, the fantasy is based on something other than the trust, commitment, and intimacy of a real relationship. It’s easier to exchange sweet talk and confidences with someone we barely know (or more likely, think we know) than it is, for example, to have an intimate and difficult discussion with a spouse of 10 years about unhappiness in the bedroom. But it’s in just such ways that real love is made.

Even new relationships are not immune to the need for self-disclosure and uncomfortable discussions; most people get on each other’s nerves after two weeks of being alone together. Maintaining romance is tough when we become acutely aware of our partner’s belches and farts and annoying habits we didn’t notice when we were dating. It’s easy to see why the new, mysterious other person is alluring and fascinating, and why we can more easily present a self-flattering front, especially when nothing much is required of us but sending a sexy text when and as we please. It’s a low-cost endeavor because it exists in fantasy—but no real person can compete with a fantasy.

Originally published on WebMD

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Sex and Romance in Long Term Relationships

Harboring fantasies about someone else while happily coupled isn’t unusual. In most relationships, whether of two years, 20, or more, one or both partners will likely experience fleeting moments of imagining how exciting life would be with a different person. This could begin innocently while flirting in the break room, or having coffee with a co-worker, or reconnecting with an old lover. Such moments provide a sweet, brief ego boost. But when short-lived fantasies take hold, moving from transient to obsessive, we should take heed.

When Erotic Fantasies Cross the Line

Fantasies are significant as a precursor to affairs because imagination is a precondition of desire, which awakens our senses. Though we’re pretending, a fantasy can actually feel closer to our authentic selves, or the selves we think we should be. That is why we come alive again when we encounter new love. Risky and exciting, it pushes the boundaries we have established in ourselves.

In such reveries, we imagine how much more fun, sexier, and passionate we would be in this other relationship. The key here is how different we would be. For although partners play a role, it’s usually not the marriage that has grown stale, but how we see ourselves. Although we cherish marriage’s safety, permanence, and predictability, these qualities can also be deadening. In my psychotherapy practice, I have seen time and time again how couples lose their connection by trying to live as a perfect couple, then a perfect family. The struggle to earn a good living, make a good home, and raise a strong family takes priority. Children claim much time, space, and emotion. Sports, band, scouting; daily squabbles about homework, screen time, and chores—all these issues squeeze yet more time from romance.

Because we do long for the continuity and safety of togetherness, the lack of romance feels okay–until one day, we realize it doesn’t. But it’s this gradual erosion of intimacy that can lay the groundwork for fantasies of another partner that then play out in meetings, confidences, and intimate details of mutual marital disenchantment. Soothing support from an attractive other can be intoxicating. In an emotional or physical affair, we feel young. Our old boredom falls away to reveal a passionate, sexy person. We blame the spouse for our dull lives. The new love gives us the illusion that we are different, and we don’t need to look at our well-constructed fortification against insecurity.

If you’ve lost your Self through trying to be a perfect couple or family, addressing this problem is a worthy goal. But running to the novelty of a new partner is a feeble way to do it. It’s true that marriage requires surrendering parts of our Self  in the service of the relationship, and many people feel regret about their choices, often triggered by a crisis or major life shift (such as aging or retirement, giving up their career to raise a family, or the loss of possible adventures in favor of marriage’s security.) But we should remember that surrendering the Self can be tremendously valuable to growth as long as we don’t give up too much– and also that disowning responsibility and projecting our unhappiness onto a partner is a set-up for an emotional or physical affair.

Understanding Your  Role When Romance Leaves the Marriage

If excitement has disappeared from the bedroom, leading to fantasies about someone else, the best next step is to understand our own role in the situation rather than giving up on the marriage in search of novelty.  When we marry, we make vow, implicit or explicit, that issues are to be faced together and worked through, not evaded. James Hollis writes in The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other (1998) that the greatest gift to others is our own best selves. Our marriage may have met our need for grounding—to be known, and to know our partner, with a comfortable predictability. But this devotion to security and familiarity eventually collides with our need for breaking established patterns so that we can encounter something unpredictable and awe-inspiring. Romantic passion can indeed be the chariot to take us there, but not if it is the creation of an affair, no matter how compelling.

And the irony is that if we do take up a new relationship, we are still ourselves, and over time, that relationship will lose its allure. I have seen countless clients on their second or third serious relationship who privately admit that they made a mistake. They realized too late that they, too, had a role to play in what was missing in the relationship. Often, the same issues come up with the new partner. They feel deep regret for breaking up a good thing in favor of an illusion, however intoxicating it is. There are exceptions: sometimes an affair is a stepping stone out of a bad, unfixable marriage and that new relationship can bring happiness and healing.

Averting an Affair

Averting an affair is doable, but it takes work from both partners, because talking about dissatisfaction with our love life is scary. It requires partners to look, unflinchingly and together, at just where we’re most vulnerable—our sexuality.

Couples therapy is often about helping partners understand that what they think are impediments to their sensual pleasure and satisfaction, and out of their control, are in fact, their constructions. Through all the travails of marriage, when we can still embrace and encourage individual growth, and not have to sacrifice the security and safety our relationship provides, our love deepens. And that makes room for romance.

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Remaking Love: When did you stop dancing?

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Amor and Psyche

Taking Down the Walls to Intimacy

Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

Sometime during the first episode of BBC’s Pride and Prejudice, I fell in love with Mr. Darcy. So much so that my husband began to suffer in comparison. And why not? Darcy is handsome, rich, and unobtainable, not to mention the British accent and dark brooding eyes. But it was his radical transformation from an arrogant snob to a thoughtful, considerate gentleman who fiercely protects his beloved his sister that sealed the deal. I was smitten.

It’s easy to idealize the other when we fall in love, and it can feel like now, everything will be perfect. In The Symposium, Socrates explains that “Zeus resolved to cut [people] in half to humble them. He declared that they shall walk upright on two legs, but each forever desiring his other half. . . . Each of us when separated is always looking for his other half.” This metaphor describes the compelling nature of romance, where we see—and fall in love with—unacknowledged or unconscious parts of ourselves in another. By reflecting back to us our ideal selves (generous, sensual, strong) lovers seem to complete us. We all contain seeds of our potential selves within, but it’s hard to develop them fully on our own, without that loving reflection.

People spend lifetimes searching for this lost self, even if the longing is barely conscious.

When relationships are new, we’re intoxicated by the experience of being admired and desired. It’s enlivening, surprising, and immensely gratifying when another person helps you discover unexpected or forgotten qualities: confidence, spontaneity, sexiness, fun.

But should you expect the same thrill if you’ve been married for 10, 20, or 30 years? As George Bernard Shaw wrote in the play Getting Married, “When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”

Romances convey a warped view of love because they show only the highlights, from the infatuation to the happy ending. We’re not seeing the in-between—the reality of loss, hurt, and work. As Le Guin writes, love has to be made and remade all the time. The happy ending is only the beginning. No matter how romantic or meant-to-be a relationship seems, couples must endure lots of challenges to stay together in a maturing relationship.

Being someone’s other half—being responsible for them to feel complete—is a lot for a relationship to hold. We find a person who makes a good screen for our projections and feel profound connectedness, hope, enlivened energy, and a feeling of coming home. But these projections are based on ideals, not reality. Real people who are living together on a daily basis are bound to disappoint the fantasy’s huge expectations.  The loss can feel catastrophic if you’re not emotionally pretty healthy. But at the same time, a good marriage is a path to wholeness if we respond well. When we withdraw our projections, and stop seeking unrealistic fantasy partners, we begin to see ourselves.

Recapturing the initial breathless excitement of romance is a fantasy too. It’s a little bit sad—but a long-term relationship does not have to be stale. Like bread, relationships will rise and fall, but by working at it, we will continue to nurture ourselves as individuals and as a couple. Committed relationships may not offer intoxication, but they do provide deeper satisfactions. But we have to take those opportunities when they arise.

I recall the poignancy with which a 50-year-old client—recently separated from her husband—told me that she regretted not continuing dance lessons when her husband asked. At the time she quit dancing, she felt old, unattractive, and preoccupied with things that seemed in hindsight, unimportant. She longed to go back in time and rekindle the fun and creativity she had ignored for too long.

The Importance of Vulnerability

In any long-term marriage, successful interactions over time build a sense of trust and allow for safety and dependency. Just as infants mold their bodies to their mothers, couples surrender to each other’s embrace, allowing them to be vulnerable, supported, and cared for. With many repeated experiences, these habits of trust and intimacy become ingrained.

But in committed relationships, we must acknowledge the reality of imperfection. Some interactions fail—the longed-for empathy and understanding is absent, and we get hurt. Failed interactions that get repeated become habitual. These failures of attachment can take all sorts of shapes: repeated criticisms, loss of sexual intimacy, years of feeling blamed or judged, or difficulty working with conflict. And over time, defenses are erected to protect our soft parts. We become distant, angry, and disengaged. When couples eventually seek therapy, the wall separating them is usually very high and very strong.

There is often a moment in therapy when couples realize, if only barely, that they want to save their relationship. They can acknowledge what they bring to the table and how each has a role to play in constructing their particular wall. In that moment of vulnerability, they ask, ”How do we take down a wall that has been standing for so many years?”

A wrecking ball is not the answer. And it can’t be solved by some simplistic listicle of “10 things to build back intimacy.” It has to be done brick by brick. Almost all of us are naturally oriented toward growth, with healthy needs and desires, but it’s hard to see our own defenses. After years of reinforcing rigidity, it takes an empathic and skilled therapist to help foster a new sense of agency and reprocess experiences to make new meanings. Success lies in compartmentalizing those aspects of the relationship that involve empathic failures while savoring and tending those habits of intimacy that allow for deep experiences of trust and safety.

Knowing the Ruts that Comfort and Confine

Thinking of a relationship in terms of intimacy rather than passionate romance can be helpful. Knowing a partner thoroughly and being known ourselves can be deeply joyful.

When we lower walls that were raised over years of earning a living and raising a family, we gain receptivity to surprise. We become more engaged in living in a way that allows for discovery and growth and brings excitement back into our relationship. We don’t blame our partner for our boredom. We open up to their creativity as well as our own. Relying on our partner to be the source of our excitement when we are unable to generate our own is unfair.

While some of the realities of long-term relationships are painful to face, giving up the fantasy of having something better with a new person is fiction. In contrast, knowing that you can capture and remake some of what drew you together, and hold onto your shared history (good or difficult) will bring depth and intimacy. Facing problems and challenges honestly, realistically, and together, even if there is no immediate or easy fix, is more sustaining than fantasy, just as bread is more sustaining—and to grownups, tastes better—than cotton candy.

 

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Passion and Romance in Marriage: How it Goes Sour

Would you choose gelato over non-fat frozen yogurt? Most of us would say gelato, even knowing that it is an unhealthy choice. Long-term marriage versus an affair? Most would choose a good, healthy marriage over a fleeting affair. But that choice depends on many variables. Is your marriage healthy? Do you still have passion, romance, and intimacy? If your relationship has lost its passion and romance, there are ways to bring it back so that it can have the richness of gelato, yet be nourishing and fresh.

Relationships begin with infatuation. A crush is mistaken for love because it is so powerful and ineffable, even though it is fleeting in the end. Romantic love leaves an imprint on the heart and psyche that is hard to shake. When love matures and the romantic sentiment fades over years of managing kids, chores, jobs, money, and family commitments, the memory of that imprint can cause misery as couples feel loss. This is a pivotal point when marriage begins to unravel.

Most relationships begin with gelato and then evolve into true intimacy and love. With infatuation, you’re projecting your ideal lover onto someone who seems like the right fit, but once the real life intrudes, that projection fades. In a long-term relationship, intimacy develops as you see your partner’s flaws—and he sees yours. And by overcoming hardships together, intimacy deepens. Romantic weekends may be fun, but don’t lead to long-lasting romance and passion unless they are part of a real relationship.

Negative Sentiment Override

Though every partner sometimes has negative feelings about the other, in a deteriorating marriage one or both partners can develop what Dr. John Gottman calls negative sentiment override: “where your bad thoughts about your partner and relationship overwhelm and override any positive thoughts about them. You may start to stockpile your grievances, keeping track of each offense your partner commits. In the meantime, your bad feelings fester and grow.” (Gottman, John, Ph.D., Gottman, Julie Schwartz, Ph.D. 10 Lessons to Transform Your Marriage, 2006.)

With negative sentiment override, disappointment seeps in as a husband or wife increasingly believes their partner is not their ideal mate. This is the time when a relationship is most vulnerable to infidelity. Thoughts of “what could have been” begin to dominate one’s private thoughts; the partner is viewed more and more with disappointment and criticism. The unhappy spouse often keeps these thoughts from the partner. Or, attempts to discuss the loss of intimacy are seen as a threat to both partners, and conversations are avoided.

When bottled-up feelings seek a release, people might seek support from a co-worker or a friend who will listen compassionately. Sometimes when friends get together, the conversation turns to the ways their partner goofed up, let them down, or was clueless, and camaraderie begins—a kind of misery-loves-company partner-bashing. By verbalizing the big and small ways their husband or wife is clueless, inept, thoughtless, inattentive, and dull, wives exaggerate and reinforce these very traits. Rather than relationship-enhancing thoughts, negative thinking dominates, squeezing out all traces of what drew a couple together and the good they created together in the marriage.

Laying the Ground for an Affair

If feelings of self-pity take hold and there is a convenient, attractive co-worker who is also feeling unhappy in their relationship, the friendship can become sexualized as they confide in each other over coffee, lunches, and eventually drinks after work. As meetings become more clandestine, the secrecy provides a dual purpose: it keeps the threat to the marriage from their spouses and it perpetuates excitement, intrigue, and illicit fantasies. This dynamic mimics the excitement they felt with their spouse at the beginning of their courtship when life was simpler.

Couples Counseling

At this juncture, some partners come to couples counseling because either the emotional affair has been revealed or because mutual unhappiness leads one partner to suggest counseling. If the emotional affair has not been revealed and in fact is continuing, then counseling will most likely be doomed. No marriage, with all of its history of squabbles, bickering, and life stresses, will compare with a sexualized companion who listens with consoling, uncomplaining, unquestioning patient attention. Trying to work on a marriage when only one partner is involved (even nonsexually) with someone outside the marriage is like choosing gelato. The healthier choice of marriage, like non-fat yogurt versus full-fat gelato, will lose in most cases. Our impulses to recapture the imprint of passionate love strongly pulls us from what is healthy—an impulse rather than a conscious choice.

Truth and Honesty: Rebuilding Intimacy

As difficult as it is, every relationship must be based on trust. Affairs, whether emotional or full-on sexual, do not have to spell the end of a marriage. I have worked with many couples that, once the affair is disclosed, use it as a wake-up call to begin to rebuild intimacy. But first, they must have the conversations that have been avoided or ignored. In the safety of counseling, many couples will develop the tools to resurrect their love, and while they may not return to the delirium of pounding hearts and fantasy, they will remember that still-present imprint of the love that brought them together.