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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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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The Effect of Having Kids on a Marriage

Marriage is Strained After Having Children

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Sugar & Spice

Being a parent is hard. But being a parent is really hard on a marriage. New parents report eight times more arguments than non-parents. Studies show that relationship quality plummets by nearly 70% after the birth of the first child, when couples experience more conflict, less intimacy, and growing disappointment. The demands of parenting mean less time for individual and couple recreational activities such as social time, workouts, and sex, putting more stress on both partners. Arguments over household chores can devolve into tit-for-tat, quid-pro-quo bickering. This hurtful cycle can easily end with a negative perspective about your partner and your marriage.

Adding to all that is the financial toll of having a family. Raising a child is expensive. Based on housing costs, food, education through high school, healthcare, childcare, clothing, and other expenses (such as grooming, technology, and recreational activities—but not, say, birthday parties), the average cost is to raise a child born in 2013 in the United States until the age of 18 is $245,000. (The range is $455,000 for high- income families and $145,500 for low-income rural families. That doesn’t include college expenses: The National Center for Educational Statistics estimates that the annual current price per year of undergraduate tuition, room, and board ranges from $14,300 at public institutions to $37,800 at private nonprofit schools.

Couples report that the best years of their marriage are before they have kids, then as the kids enter their late teens, with satisfaction rising upward when the kids are launched. Marriages have several pivotal points when they are more vulnerable to divorce. The first is about six years into the marriage, and the second is when the kids leave home—reflecting many couples’ desire to stay together for the kids.

Why Stay Together When Things are So Hard?

Couples stay together until the kids are launched for many reasons. Those that often come up in my work with couples are:

  • Fear of failure. Couples don’t want to fail in the eyes of their families and community. ”What would people think?” is a bad reason but a powerful motivator for staying together.
  • The drive to provide a stable family life for children is almost hard-wired. We want our kids to be happy, not go through the trauma of divorce and kids shuffling between two homes. Parents don’t want to live half the week without their kids and divide up holidays. Many parents are children of divorce themselves and don’t want to visit the unhappy times they remember upon their own kids.
  • Divorce is expensive. California, for example, is a community property, no-fault divorce state—so divorce means losing half your equity, half your savings, half your retirement. And in most cases, the wage earner (or higher wage earner) will pay spousal support for years, depending on the length of the marriage and the age of the kids. (California courts do require a spouse in this situation to make efforts to become self-supporting, no matter how long the marriage lasted.)
  • Anticipatory pain. Whether it be fears of sexual jealousy, loss of love, loss of the life unlived—for example, being grandparents together—couples set up disaster scenarios in their minds that serve as glue to keep even unhealthy relationships stuck in place.

With or without divorce, parental unhappiness disturbs children, which is why “keeping together for the sake of the kids” serves neither parents nor children. Luckily, there are several ways to keep your marriage healthy and protect it from divorce after having kids. In my next post, I will describe ways to build and keep your relationship strong after kids.

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Relationships and Vacations

 

A weekend away can bring back romance and intimacy

For many couples, a vacation brings a return to romance. But you can set yourself up for disappointment if your expectations are too high or unrealistic.

 Usually, at some point in couples’ therapy, a weekend away is scheduled to help build romance and passion back into a strained relationship. For many, this is seen as an opportunity to take a break from the day-to-day grind of kids, chores, and work. One partner eagerly anticipates a day of whirlwind sex– —morning sex, afternoon delight, and after after-dinner sex–—that will recreate the relationship’s early months. The other partner looks forward to time to relax with a book or strolls on the beach.

But whatever your plans—and however closely you agree on them—travel entails some stress. Disappointed expectations can overshadow the romance you expect. Rather than saving a marriage, a vacation can break it.

During our first trip to Italy several years ago, I came down with the flu. A runny nose soon progressed to a sore throat and lethargy. By the time we disembarked in Venice and boarded a crowded ferry bound for our hotel, I was miserable and cranky. Venice, with a reputation as one of the world’s most romantic cities, looked to me as crowded and fake as Disneyland. I wondered how I could survive three days.

Pulling our suitcases over the cobbled streets, my snarkiness only increased. Our (tiny) room with a view looked onto a postage-stamp sized courtyard where men were working on a scaffold right outside our window. With saws and hammers pounding, I tried to sleep. We moved to a different hotel the next day.

But as I began to feel better, Venice came alive. The city’s turns and twists, I found, ended in delightful surprises. Canals and bridges no longer looked like Disneyland. Instead, Venice worked its charm on me and my mood changed. During our stay, I read Henry James’s journal about his life in Venice. This description personifies the city, giving it life:

It is by living there from day to day that you feel the fullness of her charm; that you invite her exquisite influence to sink into your spirit. The creature varies like a nervous woman, whom you know only when you know all aspects of her beauty. She has high spirits or low, she is pale or red, grey or pink, cold or warm, fresh or wan, according to the weather and the hour. She is always interesting and almost always sad, but she has a thousand occasional graces and is always liable to happy accidents. You become extraordinarily fond of these things; you count upon them; they make part of your life. Tenderly fond you become; there is something indefinable in those depths of personal acquaintance that gradually establish themselves. The place seems to personify itself, to become human and sentient and conscious of your affection. You desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess it; and finally, a soft sense of possession grows up and your visit becomes a perpetual love affair. (Italian Hours, Henry James)

Disappointed expectations can overshadow  the romance you expect

Travel requires adaption and flexibility. Knowing that before you embark can prevent disappointment when things go awry.

Whether it be delayed trains or planes, or illness, or other setbacks, it helps to remember that the inevitable challenges inherent in travel will test your relationship even as it provides the opportunity for more intimate contact with your partner. If you haven’t managed conflicts well at home, they tend to resurface when you are together away from those responsibilities.

So, to avoid being disappointed when you finally get that weekend or long-anticipated vacation away, keep in mind the following suggestions:

  1. Discuss expectations. Assuming that your partner will want exactly what you do will set you up for disappointment. Preferences and energy levels differ. Do you want to eat out every meal? Or grab a quick bite at a mini-store several times each day? How much time do you each want for shopping or museums?  One partner might want to go for a run in the morning, while the other might want to sleep in. Talk it through before you go so you can know each other’s preferences. Remember: compromise is the key to harmony.
  2. Respect your differences and give them space. It’s okay to split up and do different things part of the day. Just make sure you agree beforehand on how much time you need for this.
  3. Relax and let yourselves rediscover being together.  Leaving room for fun, adventure, and just chill time allows intimacy to emerge naturally.