In this post, I want to provide a path for you to see your partner as someone more wonderful than you’ve experienced before.  I am using wonderful in all its strictest interpretations: excellent; great; marvelous; of a sort that causes or arouses wonder; amazing; astonishing.

For most of us, it’s difficult to imagine a partner of 20, 10, 5, even 2 years as “astonishing.”  How can we be astonished and amazed by someone we’ve known for that long… unless our partner is Oprah, Bill Gates, Bono, Nelson Mandela, someone who is doing amazing things day in and day out?

What those celebrities have is realized potential. You and I and your partner have 99% the same DNA as everybody else. Every one of us has that same potential – not necessarily in the same areas, but just as much.

I have a nephew who has bone cancer. Now, before he had cancer, he was a terrific athlete – the kind that scores more than half the points of his entire team in virtually every sport. But he wasn’t what you would have thought of as a remarkable human being. He was a teenager, with all the annoying, self-centered, hormone-induced trimmings that come with teenagers.

It wasn’t until he got cancer that we were able to see how remarkable he truly is. The way he bucked up about having to have a prosthetic limb, ending his athletic endeavors. The way he took care of other stricken families at St. Jude’s. I could write endlessly on how he’s inspired people, but you’ve already heard this story, from people of all ages.  Someone gets a serious malady and transforms into a super human being. Happens every day. You probably know more than one example personally.

My point is this.  Your partner is an ordinary person and an extraordinary person. At some point, as is the drift, you’ve probably positioned him or her in some pigeon hole.  What will it take before you recognize your partner as wonderful – to be filled with wonder in your partner’s presence? You could wait until he or she gets cancer.  Or, you could be the environment in which your partner’s brilliance occurs. Your partner is already amazing. Being filled with wonder is up to you.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
-George Santayana

There are a number of factors that lead to unhappy relationships. One less discussed reason is dissatisfaction with sex and/or intimacy.

Typically, the wife complains that there isn’t enough intimacy. The husband complains that there isn’t enough sex. Sometimes it’s reversed, but let’s use this case as our example. In either case, there is an obvious connection between sex and intimacy.

Generally, it doesn’t take much to get a man in the mood. With women, you want to be thinking three days. I am not kidding. If you yell at your partner in the morning, or simply ignore her, or don’t allow her to feel attractive, or don’t really get her when she’s communicating something that’s important to her, you probably aren’t getting any tonight.

Don’t get me wrong. On balance, women love sex as much as men. But it needs to be from a state of intimacy. Most women need this. Most men don’t.  Most women need you to show and/or tell them you love them in the morning, a few times during the day, every day, and in the evening. If you want sex, the time to start is three days out. If you do this all the time, chances are you can have sex whenever you want it. Easily two-three times per week. If you don’t, you’ll be lucky to get lucky once a fortnight.

If I appear to be callous or crude, I don’t mean to be. Sex is not a sin. Even the most puritanical of us would have to agree that two key elements of a healthy union are sex and intimacy.

Here is some essential advice for men.

• Make sure your partner has an orgasm virtually every time. If your sexual energy drops dramatically after you orgasm (as it does for most of us), then you better make sure she orgasms before you do.
• If you’ve never been educated on the female anatomy, bone up. You wouldn’t try to drive a car without knowing a few things about how it works. If your woman is having mad orgasms every time you have sex, chances are she’ll be the one initiating it more often than not.
• Not all women like the same thing. If you don’t know what she likes, find a way to communicate. It could be that you ask, and she tells you. Or it could be that you set it up that you’ll explore around, and she’ll give you louder moans the more you’re turning her on.
• Most women expect you to cuddle with them after sex. Hopping out of bed sends the wrong signal.
• How often do you tell your partner you love her? Some may say, “But what if I’m not feeling it – isn’t that somewhat dishonest?” It’s not. Telling someone you love them is a declaration. It’s a creation-based statement meant to pull you into a feeling, not an assertion of fact. If you have integrity, that is, if you honor your words, then, by declaring love, feelings will come automatically.  Try it. It really works.
• Don’t make crude jokes about sex, or your partner, before, during or after sex. That is, ever.
• Never make fun of your partner, or put her down, in front of other people. (Or, ideally, ever.)
• Don’t let a day go by without kissing her – and not as a prelude to sex.
• Practice gratitude – regarding your relationship, every day think of five things for which you are grateful. Ideally you would communicate these to your partner.

The fallout of adopting this behavior may astound you. Besides having a lot more sex, you may actually find yourself falling deeper and deeper in love with your partner. And this, I can tell you, is the one thing I’m aware of which is truly better than sex.

And that’s really the point of this article. Great sex is a product of having a great relationship, not the other way around. These really aren’t meant to be “tricks” to get your partner to have sex with you; they are foundational principles to having a great relationship. And great sex is simply one of the byproducts of having a great relationship.

In the conclusion, the author says the following, and my experience has shown it to be valid:

All the many temptations that beckon you to follow paths which imply that it is possible to find the spiritual reality of yourself without going through these gateways are wishful thinking. There is no way around what has accumulated in you and has poisoned your whole system — your spiritual, your psychological, and often also your physical system. This poison can be eliminated only by feeling what you hoped you could avoid feeling.

To summarize and simplify:

1. Take any emotion – one that you think you’re feeling (usually it’s fear, could be frustration, anger, etc.).
2. Under that is the fear of that emotion.
3. Under that is shame (we counteract shame with pride).
4. Under that is inadequacy (as every child feels that they are the cause of whatever is happening in their world -  as in: whatever is happening is because “I’m inadequate”).
5. Under that is the thing you really need to get to – which is “the brokenhearted child” (the bottom line is that the child is bereft, alone and shattered).
6. Then you can get to your true “light,” your true beauty of what you really are.
7. With that comes a release of stagnation, energy, and a sense of peace and well being.

Recommended Actions

1. Take anything you’re experiencing and write and write about it (journal) and meditate on it.
2. Start at the top layer.  (You could have pages on each layer.)
3. Get to the brokenheartedness.
4. On the other side of that is relief and energy.

P.S. You cannot do this alone.

Example 1

Setting: Oprah show

Situation: Two 15-year-olds talking about planning on having sex together

Celebrity Relationship Coach: How long do you plan on being together?

Boy: Um, we’re in high school, so, like, maybe, six months?

Girl: (frowning) Ummm. Really? Because I was thinking, like, forever? Six months? No way I’m having sex with you if that’s what you’re thinking!

Example 2

I was coaching two clients who make a great couple. They both do things that hurt the relationship, but it’s all stuff that’s easily handled, and in a few weeks of my coaching them, they’ve already made the better part of that journey. But she has an issue about his level of commitment. According to her, if they’ve been together for four years, they should stay together forever. But if they really were committed, they would get married (I’m not saying I would or they should, that’s what they expressed to me). So, until they are married, I won’t believe the full commitment is there. He’s waiting for her to be more balanced and for there to be less regularly occurring big upsets before he’s willing to propose. And indeed, if you ask her, she’ll say she’s totally committed… but then the slightest provocation that taps into her primal pain has her questioning whether she wants to be in the relationship at all!

So, with the help of some lawyer friends (some of whom are trained in Collaborative Divorce, I drafted this Commitment Manifesto which you are free to download and use. Of course, one commitment size does not fit all, but at least here is a template from which you can craft your own.

My wise friend, Lou, distinguished that this document is more a way of saying to what kind of relationship are you committed. Many of us might not even make that distinction, but just collapse the two, and I think that’s fine.

Some may prefer to think of the Commitment Manifesto as the “doing” of commitment. Perhaps the “being” of commitment is having a very high level of integrity, and being committed to doing whatever it takes to take care of your relationship. The following short form nicely collapses the being and doing parts:

“I’m committed to staying with you (indefinitely), being faithful (no romance with other partners) and honoring you and our relationship. If I do anything that is apparently outside this commitment, I’m committed to cleaning it up, restoring your trust and doing whatever I have to do to return myself to my commitment.”

I’m anxious to know your thoughts about what constitutes commitment in a relationship.

I don’t think I mean to talk about “control” – although I do believe that true control is the giving up of control. I love stories of prisoners who while in prison finally became free – because they accepted their surroundings for the first time in their lives. And yes, it’s worth another reiteration that I’m not talking about bad, controlling behavior.

When JoAnn says “You’re not allowed to yell at me” what she’s really saying is something along the spectrum of “It’s hard for me to handle your disapproval” to “I can’t handle expressions of anger pointed at me from the person I love the most.” And if I do it enough, she won’t stick around for it. And, to be very clear, my “yelling” at JoAnn is raising my voice from a 3-out-of-10 to maybe a 5, and still communicating fairly responsibly.

On to mutuality.

I’m pretty clear that mutuality is a red herring at its best, and one of the most relationship-undermining concepts at its worst. First of all, there’s no way to tally what each partner in a relationship is doing for the other, or to keep track of it over time. Secondly, it maybe misses the point entirely. If I love the thrill I get when I bring JoAnn flowers and she squeals with delight… who is getting the gift here? If I bring her flowers every week and she never gives me flowers, does that mean we’re out of mutuality balance?*

If I love to hold the door for her, hold her chair, etc., and do all those gentlemanly things that can be fun for a person who likes to think of himself as a gentleman, am I to expect her to occasionally hold my chair? **

To each her own, of course. For example, there are people who love to be dominated (sexually and otherwise) and people who enjoy dominating. To them, mutuality is the dominator making demands and the submissive one filling them.

Of course, I believe in fairness. I just think we need to be careful where we look for that fairness. I mostly judge by my emotional bank account. If JoAnn’s making more deposits than withdrawals (and vice versa), we’re generally in great shape.

Contrast this with a prior, painful relationship. My (then) partner and I sapped each others energy; we were not loving, kind and generous with each other. With each of us constantly feeling emotionally overdrawn, things like who is doing more housework, bill paying, yard work, etc. became the only currency we had. And when we got to that low state of existence, “mutuality” (really, tit for tat) took center stage. And, from that state of mind, the other one always felt like s/he was getting the short end of the stick.

* The truth is that I don’t buy her cut flowers – hardly ever, but I would if she liked them!
** I wish I was more like the gentlemanly guy I’m describing. I’ll work on it.

Embracing Double Standards
(The most popular post to date, and my personal favorite)

The Argument that Just Won’t Die
(How to untangle yourself from recurring arguments with your partner)

I once heard Werner Erhard, the personal transformation guru of the 70’s and 80’s say something like “relationships are like mountain climbing – they’re not for most people.”  That floored me.  How can relationships not be for everybody, or at least “most people?”

My ex-wife and I were convinced we had an awesome, a forever, relationship.  We wrote beautiful, deeply moving marriage vows and had a fabulous ceremony with hundreds of family members and friends present, all telling us what a wonderful couple we made.

We did have a wonderful relationship, and we knew it.  What we didn’t know is that even the best relationships are full of potholes and landmines.

We thought that since our relationship started out great, we had the “magic.”  Things would automatically stay great.  Boy, were we wrong!  We made the same mistake that countless other couples who start out with fabulous relationships make, and our relationship was tragically derailed in the first year. After 11 difficult years of trying to make it work, we divorced.

Perhaps you’ve been with the same person for a relatively short time.  Perhaps things are great.  Add some more years, kids, a mortgage, some pressures with your job, etc., temptations from other, more attractive people, and see where you are then.  I’m not saying that yours isn’t the best relationship in the world.  I’m just asking if you think you are immune to the realities that impact every couple around you.  The fact is that if you think you have a better than one-in-ten shot, you are probably kidding yourself.

People in fresh, young relationships tend to be unrealistic at best, arrogant at worst.  What are the odds that their level of happiness will last?  Ten percent? Five percent? One in a hundred?  With the divorce rate at 50% in the US, the odds just aren’t good.  And remember that the 50% who stay together aren’t necessarily passionately, ecstatically in love.  We all know people who stay together in dysfunctional, abusive, or dependent cycles and others who think any marriage is better than being alone.  A small percentage of couples who stay together are in deeply loving and passionate marriages.

It’s common for people who have been in a happy relationship for less than a year or two to think they have it figured out. Typically they do not. Instead of watering the tree that is their relationship, they are picking the fruit.  The tragedy is that at the very time when they might be developing skills to help them keep love and passion alive for the long haul, young couples are unconscious to what is, and is not, working.  When the love finally dies, they figure it was either a) inevitable, b) the other person’s fault, c) that they just grew apart, or some other explanation.  What they are left with is an explanation of why it did not work out.  This will not serve them at all in their next relationship(s).

If you are happy now, now is the time to build the skills and tools for a long-term, loving, passionate, mutually-fulfilling relationship.  If you are less than happy, then now is the time to begin to repair things.

Falling in love is one thing.  To stay in love for the long haul you have to learn how to constantly and consciously “create” your love for one another.  Sure it’s easy when you are first in love, but when that wears off, when the little things start to become big things, when you least expect it, that’s when you need a powerful habit of excellent communication to get things back on track.

The purpose of this blog, then, is to act as a kind of community to support couples in staying conscious, in helping to provide tools to enable couples to “create” their love for each other, and to be honest and open about what is and is not working.

Questions
What challenges have you overcome in your relationship?  How did you do it?  If you’ve found the secret to a many-year relationship, how do you keep love and passion alive?