Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (38 page)

All animals avoid pain. We usually avoid what makes us nervous as long as we can. When things aren’t so bad, it feels safe to ignore (sexual) problems. As our relationship craters, we stick our heads in the sand and pretend we know nothing. Fortunately, the people-growing machinery of marriage has evolved to take human nature into account. Love relationships prod you to stand up and deal with things that frighten you. They grab hold of everything solid in you, and everything you hold dear, until the essence of your being feels at risk.

What finally makes you take action despite your fears? Ready for a big
answer? The backbone of marriage is the ultimate manifestation of the human self: your integrity.

You usually don’t hear much about integrity in books on sexual desire. Integrity is about having ethical principles and living up to them. It’s the congruity between what we believe and what we do, and the consistency in our behavior over time. It’s about being loyal, truthful, and forthright even when it’s difficult. Living up to your responsibilities. Not being deterred by your fears and anxieties.

Your desire to maintain your integrity goes back to our discussions in
Part One
. Integrity is part of your innate desire to develop and maintain a self. It doesn’t involve your reflected sense of self. Integrity is part of your solid sense of self and comes out of your relationship with yourself. People who lack integrity lack a clearly defined coherent self. They lack the Four Points of Balance.

Integrity is more than an abstract principle, it is a core human experience. Integrity is your sense of internal consistency. When you violate your integrity and you scrutinize yourself, you feel dishonored, ashamed, and diminished. Self-confrontation obviously plays a critical role. To the degree you are dishonest with yourself and you won’t self-confront, you lack integrity because your self is poorly defined. But if you lie to yourself about who you really are, this won’t bother you much. Obviously lots of people do terrible things without feeling bad about themselves.

Integrity involves self-imposed mandates and boundaries that define who you are. The goals and values you pursue, the lines you won’t cross, and what you won’t do, especially when things get hard or difficult. Although it sounds judgmental, scientifically speaking, the lower your differentiation, the more you lack integrity. Your Four Points of Balance control how much integrity you actually have in practice. It’s a function of how much solid flexible self you have and how much you aspire to attain. The “flexible” part isn’t wishy-washy ethics; it’s getting back on track when you’ve gone off. If you can’t quiet your mind or calm your emotions, and you can’t make grounded responses, you will do things that violate your integrity. And you can’t have much integrity without Meaningful Endurance because you’ll abandon your values and take the easy way out.

As I said, you usually don’t think about integrity in sexual desire problems. Fears and anxieties are more common topics. If you’re like some of my clients, you think of sexual desire problems more in terms of issues of safety and security. Many people think they have difficulty allowing themselves to feel desire, because they don’t feel safe with their partner or secure in their relationship.

In this view there’s something lacking, some security not offered, some commitment not given, that makes a partner unable to feel sexual desire. When couples adopt this view, their efforts center around one partner (or both) offering patience, assurance, acceptance, and encouragement to make the other feel more secure. Many marital therapy approaches encourage this whole-heartedly. “Safety and security leads to passion” is a credo among some therapists. Unfortunately, once again our fondest beliefs don’t coincide with the way marriage really works. As we saw in
Part One
, attachment and lust involve different neurobiological systems. And once hormone-driven lust has run its course, keeping sexual desire alive more likely involves developing and maintaining your self.

In Sue and Joe’s house, “safety” was a daily topic of discussion. They had been married fourteen years and had two children, a boy and a girl, ages twelve and ten. Sue had always been extremely insecure, ever since her parents divorced when she was nine. Sue’s mother struggled to feed her family, and she constantly let Sue and her younger brother know it.

Sue grew up in constant fear and insecurity. Sue’s mother took out her many frustrations on the kids, while also leaning on them for support. Mother would withdraw to her bed for days with serious depressions. She often suddenly lost her temper with a frightening fury. It was Sue’s job to keep her calm, happy, and functional.

Mother exploited Sue and her brother. She had enough time and energy to talk with her friends on the phone for hours, but the house was
always in shambles, since keeping the house clean fell to the children. Sue’s brother left home as soon as he could enlist in the army and never returned. Sue lived at home and attended a local college so she could take care of her mother. She dated some in high school, nothing serious, and she had several relationships in college that lasted a few months.

Sue was still living at home when she married Joe. She was twenty-five and he was twenty-six. They met through a mutual friend and married after dating for a year. It was a big adjustment for her mother when Sue left, although Sue and Joe lived in the same town. Sue visited or spoke to her mother by phone several times a week.

By the time they married, Joe was well aware of Sue’s difficult childhood, and he was well trained to accommodate her insecurities. Sue’s two prior love relationships broke up because the men finally refused to live with Sue’s fears and anxieties. By the process of elimination, Sue ended up with a husband who would.

Joe was accommodating to a fault—his first wife told him he had no backbone. With one failed marriage behind him, Joe was generally willing go along with whatever Sue wanted. He was eager to please and pliable as putty. If your childhood had been like Joe’s, you might be too.

Joe’s parents argued constantly. As a child, Joe wondered why they didn’t get divorced. Then they did when he was ten. Apparently, they were as miserable apart as they were together, because they remarried eighteen months later. Joe didn’t know what to feel about this. He was happy, embarrassed, angry, and confused. Before long the fighting resumed, and Joe thought he was going to lose his mind. After two years of remarriage, his parents divorced again when Joe was fourteen. Joe lived with his mother until he left home to go to college. Since that time he had had little contact with his parents.

Sue saw her role in life as a “care-taker.” Her mother still demanded a great deal of time and attention. But Sue carried deep resentments about her childhood. The possibility she was replicating similar dynamics in her own home never occurred to her. People around her had to accommodate to keep her quiet. Sue and Jim’s relationship largely revolved around Sue’s anxieties. Sue hated the thought she was anything like her
mother, but it was true in more ways then she could handle. Any hint of this from Joe triggered an explosion.

Sue’s fears and insecurities limited her own life and the lives of the people around her. When her children were younger, they couldn’t play at their friends’ houses because Sue was afraid something might happen to them while they were there. Family vacations always involved driving because Sue was afraid to fly. The trips were often unhappy ones filled with Sue’s complaints about Joe’s driving and her yelling at the kids to stop bickering.

Sue’s insecurities reigned supreme in bed, too. They had sex about every other month, and both agreed sex was good when they had it. Joe wanted to have sex once a week, but Sue would let months go by without it. Over time, Joe learned he wasn’t supposed to make sexual overtures because they made Sue feel like a bad wife and an inadequate woman. Sue said Joe’s initiations made it harder for her to get turned on to begin with.

When they had sex, it was always in the missionary position with the lights off. Joe was dying of sexual boredom. He was tired of having to cajole Sue into sex. Getting her to try something new wasn’t worth all the coaxing, promising, and reassuring this required. But Joe couldn’t wash his hands of the whole thing because he didn’t want to have affairs, and he didn’t want to go without sex for the rest of his life. As far as Sue was concerned, she was expressing legitimate feelings and concerns, and a good husband would be understanding if he was interested in more than just getting off.

For instance, Sue and Joe played out their dynamics the few times they experimented with rear-entry vaginal intercourse. Joe brought up the topic while they were having missionary-position sex in the dark. Sue acted like he hadn’t said anything, hoping he’d drop the topic. When Joe persevered, Sue reluctantly agreed. But before she moved into position, she started talking about how embarrassed and insecure this made her feel. She wanted assurances from Joe that he would be thinking about her, and not just going off in his head or fantasizing about someone else. Sue said she felt degraded to be on her knees, and worried that Joe might secretly like that. She made it clear she was only
doing it for Joe, and that he owed her for going out of her way for him like this.

Fifteen minutes later, they still hadn’t started having intercourse in this position. Joe lost his erection and his patience. Sue castigated him for not being interested in her feelings and only wanting sex. She covered her own feelings of inadequacy by pointing out that Joe lost his erection, so he couldn’t have been very interested in rear-entry intercourse anyway. Perhaps, Sue suggested, he had his own issues about doggie-style sex.

Sue felt entitled to talk about her fears and insecurities, whenever and wherever. She demanded that Joe put her feelings first and “support” her. Earlier we said people who can’t regulate their own anxiety squeeze the lives out of the people around them. Sue was good at it. This is what her mother had done to her for decades.

Like many people, Sue felt entitled to demand safety, security, and reduced anxiety before she took a risk. She kept telling Joe, “You have to make me feel secure so I can feel safe enough to have sex or want you.” This was more than just her narcissism talking. People like Sue who grow up with chronic anxiety hope and pray that in a
good
marriage they finally won’t feel anxious, or insecure, or vulnerable.

Unfortunately, trying to get your security from your spouse leads to perpetual insecurity. The more you try, the more vulnerable and insecure you become. The ensuing clutching and grabbing for your partner encourages him to move away, creating a downward spiral that destroys many marriages. Ultimately, the only security you can really count on is your relationship with yourself. Your security lies in developing your Four Points of Balance.

When we first discussed co-evolution, you may have envisioned partners nurturing, accepting, and parenting each other. As we’ve seen,
however, people with weak Four Points of Balance (Solid Flexible Self, Quiet Mind–Calm Heart, Grounded Responding, Meaningful Endurance) don’t have much nurturance or acceptance to offer others. Co-evolution happens differently.

Partners “help” each other grow in more ways than their deliberate efforts to support each other’s growth. Your limitations and refusal to grow, your reflected sense of self, and your difficulty regulating your own anxiety continually
encourage
your partner to grow. He is stretched by his attempts to accept and accommodate you. But eventually he reaches his limits, and his
refusal
, in turn, stretches
you and him
. It forces him to define a “self” and take a stand. You are stretched by having to face his refusal to accommodate or validate you. Marriage attempts to bring out the best in you, but it doesn’t count on you operating out of the best in yourself.

Conflict in love relationships is essential to human development. Arguments, confrontations, and refusals to compromise often result from the healthy processes of differentiation. The process of holding on to your sense of self in an intense emotional relationship develops your Four Points of Balance. Increasing your Four Points of Balance leads to stable long-term love relationships and preserves your sexual desire.

Conflict, in itself, doesn’t automatically create instability, any more than it always reflects growth. High-conflict couples maintain stable forms of instability designed to forestall the need to change. Constant efforts to keep things safe and secure lead to long-term marital instability. But when instability is actually the result of battles of self-development, conflict and upheaval can lead to stability and peace. Conflicts arising from sexual desire problems are often a godsend if you focus on becoming more emotionally balanced within yourself.

Anxiety drives people into attachments. That is a basic way mammals respond to anxiety. Inability to regulate our own anxiety and maintain
our own sense of self drives people into—and out of—relationships. That’s because the anxiety-regulating mechanisms driving their attachments require keeping things stable at all times and accommodating each other’s insecurities. Relationships invariably become stale, brittle, and gridlocked. Among other things, this makes partners unable to tolerate intense intimacy (
Chapter 5
) or to create sexual novelty (
Chapter 7
).

Poorly balanced people love when therapy emphasizes attachment needs. Their insecurities take precedence over their (or their partner’s) self-exploration and self-development. According to this approach, secure attachment comes first. This sequence
is
true for infants, but is
not
true for adults. Often it’s the other way around: Self-scrutiny and self-development provide the basis for stable attachments. The Four Points of Balance say, “First and foremost, hold on to your self!”