Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (15 page)

Carol and Randall had all the classic signs of emotional gridlock:

• Constant, repetitive arguments.

• You can’t agree to disagree about the issue.

• Increased communication provides no solution, and often makes things worse.

• You feel like you have no room for compromise or negotiation because your integrity is on the line.

• Apologies or “repair attempts” cease or are unsuccessful.

• You and your partner frequently have angry hurt feelings.

• You feel alienated and cut off from each other.

Conflict in love relationships is inevitable. You can’t avoid it with pre-marital education, communication skills training, psychotherapy, or this book. (I’ll explain this in a moment.) Mind-mapping limits the utility of communication skills and empathy training, because no matter how nicely you say something, your partner is tracking your thoughts, emotions, and motivations. Gridlock comes from
good
communication: successful mind-mapping. Your partner usually knows what you really want (or don’t want).

Conflict is inevitable because of inherent dynamics in love relationships: You can agree to disagree about intangibles like emotions, perceptions, and values. You can debate political issues throughout your marriage without a problem. But this doesn’t work when it comes to
behavior
that dramatically impacts your partner as well as yourself. Try agreeing to disagree about whether your partner has an affair. This is why the four most common areas of emotional gridlock are sex, money,
kids, and in-laws. You can’t agree to disagree about these things and go along your merry way.

Gridlock is not an inherent weakness in love relationships. Gridlock is testimony to their elegant design. Emotional gridlock is a normal and natural development in the evolution of a relationship and the people within it. Going through emotional gridlock creates anxiety, anger, frustration, feelings of rejection, and emotional pressure. This is difficult but it isn’t a flaw: it enhances human resilience. Gridlock is Nature’s survival boot-camp for adult-wanabees.

When misunderstood and mishandled, gridlock leads to divorce. Given that gridlock
is
usually misunderstood and mishandled, it is arguably the greatest single cause of divorce around the world. It is commonly misunderstood as irreconcilable differences, or communication problems, or falling out of love. But gridlock isn’t caused by a lack of communication, so more communication won’t resolve it. When people are unable to resolve gridlock with a communication-based approach, they wrongly convince themselves their problems are irreconcilable. If they depend on a reflected sense of self, they feel unloved and become unloving.

There are better ways to resolve gridlock than by talking about your feelings and emotions. There’s a science of love relationships that revolves around emotional gridlock and the Four Points of Balance. Although I didn’t use the term “gridlock” in
Part One
, we talked about how the low desire partner always controls sex, and often controls the high desire partner’s feelings of adequacy. This is a quintessential gridlock of love relationships.

Many other things cause emotional gridlock, and they’re as shockingly simple and powerful as the fact that the LDP always controls sex. That’s why gridlock is unavoidable. For instance, another primary cause of gridlock is the
process of elimination
. This means each time an event
occurs it removes subsequent options, and the pool of remaining possibilities grows smaller.

Emotional gridlock comes from you and your partner doing what everyone does to build a good relationship: You regulate each other’s anxieties by accommodating and bolstering each other’s reflected sense of self. You give in to your partner on one issue, and then your partner gives in to you on another. This keeps everyone’s anxiety down and makes you feel loved and wanted.

However, each adaptation brings you one step closer to the critical point where you can’t or won’t adapt any longer. In theory you can compromise and negotiate forever, but in practice you won’t. That’s not human nature. Moreover, love relationships offer a finite set of options. And if your Four Points of Balance are weak, this further limits your adaptability and increases your need for accommodation.

Emotional gridlock happens in six neat steps:

1. During the lust, infatuation, and attachment phases occurring in your brain, you and your partner are validating, reassuring, and accommodating each other in whatever ways you can.

2. Difficult, contentious interactions arise between you. You both are frustrated about not getting the validation, accommodation, and soothing you want. You’re also frustrated about being unable to satisfy your partner’s complaints.

3. Your limited ability to hold on to your self (limited Four Points of Balance), plus your unresolved personal issues, create an upper limit to how much you can accommodate, validate, and regulate your partner before your
own
functioning deteriorates. The same holds true for your partner. Even the most patient and giving people can only go so far.

4. Your unwillingness to violate what remains of your integrity shows up. Your drive to preserve your tenuous sense of self becomes tenacious. You can’t accommodate your partner without violating your integrity, and you refuse to adapt.

5. Eventually you
don’t
want to adapt to your partner. Your battered reflected sense of self ushers in willful refusal, stubbornness, and defiance.

6. Your partner accommodates you as much as she can or wants to, and eventually stops. You do the same. You both have no room to back up or go forward. At that point, you’re gridlocked. You have no good solution in sight and no prospect of resolution. Things look pretty bleak.

The areas of gridlock in your relationship are those where you and your partner have the least flexibility. Gridlock occurs when and where your and your partner’s limitations collide, leaving you no further room to accommodate each other. You cannot give your partner what she wants.
Through the process of elimination you have stretched yourself as far as you can go without (a) experiencing more anxiety or (b) violating your integrity
. You stop accommodating when your anxiety reaches unacceptable levels—especially if you have difficulty calming and soothing yourself.

Emotional gridlock sounds
simple
but usually involves unimaginably
complex
entanglements. Gridlock is
universal
, occurring all around the world. But gridlock is always
custom tailored
because you and your partner co-construct it. Your pattern of gridlock says a lot about who you and your partner really are.

Gridlock shows up differently in different relationships, depending with whom you’re paired. If you married a neat-freak and you’re cleaning style is “relaxed,” you’ll be gridlocked over household chores (and this will affect your sexual desire). If you’re both either neat-freaks or slobs, you’ll be gridlocked about something else (and you’ll still have sexual desire problems). Even if initially you have sex three times a day, eventually you’ll struggle over when to have sex and how often to have it. If you both like sex at the same time of day, but one of you doesn’t feel appreciated, sexual desire issues will still come up.

Understanding emotional gridlock allows you to handle sexual desire problems in a completely new way, even if you’ve been gridlocked for decades. It’s hard to appreciate the elegance at first—particularly when you’re in the thick of it. It’s hard to see past your fears and insecurities. You can’t see that the things that threaten your relationship and your
sense of self will actually strengthen both—if you can endure the pain of growth.

Resolving gridlock (especially around sexual desire problems) is how you and your partner co-evolve. This is part of the people-growing machinery of love relationships. Of this I have no doubt. Moreover, some experts believe your brain is made flexible by stressful and highly meaningful events, facilitating brain rewiring. Nature depends on something far more reliable than your unconscious to drive the evolution of the human race. Is gridlock Nature’s way of creating neural plasticity and opportunities for brain repair?

Here’s more good news: Partners play “leap-frog” with their personal development. Each partner’s growth in the Four Points of Balance (Solid Flexible Self, Quiet Mind–Calm Heart, Grounded Responding, Meaningful Endurance) provokes the other’s growth. One partner’s increased functioning greatly impacts the other when you’re gridlocked and emotionally fused. That’s a good thing, because resolving gridlock requires (at least) one of you to increase your Four Points of Balance.

Unfortunately, this is not what you usually want to do. You usually want your partner to make you feel better. This response is so instinctive it’s difficult to see how this could be problematic. We all want someone else to comfort us, ever since we were children.

In
Part One
I encouraged you to jettison the idea that “sex is a natural function.” Now I’m encouraging something similar: Stop picturing interactions between infants and mothers as the appropriate model for adult love relationships. Forget the idea that unmet “attachment needs” are the primary source of your problems. This distortion intensifies emotional gridlock, makes sexual desire problems harder to deal with, and makes you more likely to get divorced.

The process I described for developing your Four Points of Balance is called
differentiation
. Although we didn’t label it, we actually discussed two forms of differentiation in
Part One
: One form was
species
differentiation—an evolutionary process spread across generations of a life form. The other form was your
personal
differentiation—your need to develop and preserve a solid sense of self that will help you get closer to others.
Think of differentiation as your ability to keep your emotional balance while interacting in important relationships. In practice, this is using your Four Points of Balance. The stronger your Four Points of Balance, the more differentiated you are (and vice versa)
.

Differentiation is about how life forms evolve and gain new abilities, sometimes giving rise to whole new species. When we discussed humans taking a different evolutionary path from chimpanzees and gorillas, we were talking about differentiation. When we explored how our changing brain evolved complex selfhood and mind-mapping, we were seeing the results of (brain cell) differentiation. When I described three different couples reacting differently to the low desire partner always controlling sex, I was highlighting their personal differentiation (their lack of it). You saw how they struggled with (a) reflected sense of self, (b) difficulty controlling their anxiety and soothing their emotional bruises, (c) overreacting to each other’s anxieties and tension by withdrawing or attacking, and (d) avoiding what needed to be done to grow in the relationship. Having well developed Four Points of Balance is synonymous with a high level of differentiation. Your level of differentiation shows how far you’ve evolved as a human being.

Differentiation is a more powerful force than you can imagine: Differentiation
is
evolution. When I say differentiation is your ability to hold on to your self and maintain your emotional balance in a relationship, I’m talking about your evolution as a person. Multiply that by millions of people over millions of years and you have human evolution.

Differentiation affects all living things, in every moment, and has done so since life began on Earth. Species differentiation is about how life forms get along: How members of a species (e.g., plants, insects, and animals) interact with others of their kind and with other species.

Differentiation occurs when members of a species stay in contact
with each other. Your great ancestors formed relationships and stayed together long enough for our species to evolve. It changed our physiology and psychology. The end result was a human self with the ability to map other minds and achieve the Four Points of Balance. We developed the brain we have today from your forebears interacting in increasingly sophisticated ways.

Developing and maintaining your Four Points of Balance in relationships with others raises your personal level of differentiation. Human differentiation takes a tiny step forward through your relationships with other people. Your interactions with others make you
more unique
rather than just like everyone else. (Isn’t that amazing?!) Interacting and facing new challenges produces more evolved members of a species, and eventually, a more evolved species. This cycle of being heir to our past and creator of our future goes round and round without end.

Dating, mating, and marriage largely revolve around dramas of personal evolution (differentiation). Your Four Points of Balance greatly determine when, where, and with whom you copulate. Your genes are along for the ride. Your sexual desire is more determined by your self-development (differentiation) than your urge to spread your genes.

Millions of years of human differentiation drive today’s love relationships. It surfaces through you and your partner co-constructing emotional gridlock, and co-evolving by resolving it. Emotional gridlock is Nature’s attempt to trigger differentiation in you, your partner, and your relationship. Failure to differentiate (reduce emotional fusion, get rid of borrowed functioning, and undo gridlock) is a major cause of divorce.