Another couple came to me last week struggling with intimacy issues. I’m talking about the kind where there’s barely been any physical intimacy for months.
“I just can’t desire someone who’s undesirable,” the wife said.
There’s a good reason for that, I thought.
It’s because you’ve built a wall between the two of you.
While she was stacking her wall higher with bricks of resentment, he was helping her with his bricks of rejection.
What they didn’t understand was that the wall was manmade.
They built it. And since they built it together, they needed to understand that the only way they could tear it down is together.
But they won’t do that if they’re asking the wrong questions.
“Why doesn’t she try anymore?”
“Why should I desire someone when I don’t feel connected to them?”
These aren’t unreasonable questions. And in fact, they’re probably the exact questions most of us ask when we’re hurting.
But they’re the kind of questions that don’t give you a North Star and they definitely don’t tell you where to go next.
I told this couple that another therapist would probably spend the next four weeks asking them to tell us more about the resentment, blame, and rejection. And I’m not saying that’s a bad approach.
I just don’t know that it gets them where they want to go as quickly as they’d like to get there.
So I told them they had to do something different. Something that sounds completely unrelated to the question at hand.
For five minutes, I wanted them to imagine writing the words resentment, blame, pain, and disconnection on a piece of paper and putting it on the coffee table.
I wasn’t asking them to throw those feelings away. Or pretend they don’t exist. And I promised them, if they really wanted to, they could pick them right back up five minutes later.
But for those five minutes, I wanted them to stop asking how to get rid of what they didn’t want and ask:
“How can we cultivate more of what we do want?”
“How could we create more connection… physical and non-physical?”
You see, it’s a very different conversation when you trade: “I don’t want to resent you anymore” with “I want to feel close to you again.”
That second statement gives you somewhere to point your nose.
I have to add, I didn’t tell them to answer those questions. I didn’t even want them to ask them of each other.
I wanted them to just let the questions cook in their minds. Percolate long enough that they could be adopted as a mindset.
In the very same way I asked myself, “How do I build a business of teaching couples how to have a Chosen & Cherished Marriage?”
I didn’t have the answer to that question 12 years ago when I started my journey of becoming a couples therapist.
I adopted that as a mindset that resulted in me looking for the breadcrumbs that would lead me to where I am today.
That’s step one: adopt connection as a mindset.
Then I asked them an entirely different question:
“What did you guys do when you first fell in love?”
They thought about it.
They used to take walks on the beach. They went out for sushi. They bonded over musicals.
And I remember laughing and saying:
“So basically, you needed sand, raw fish, and trips to NYC.”
In the span of about a minute, we’d double-clicked on three things they could do to start getting more of what they want.
I asked them:
“When was the last time you went to the beach?”
“When was the last time you went out for sushi?”
“When was the last time you put Hamilton on while you were cooking dinner?”
Silence. Just as I’d suspected.
Now, don’t confuse what I’m doing here by simplifying my approach into telling you to do more.
That’s not what I’m attempting to do.
I’m trying to illustrate that couples know how to fall in love with each other.
They’d done it before.
They’d simply stopped doing many of the things that created closeness in the first place.
This is what so many people stop doing years into marriage. After things become “familiar.”
Then, when pain and conflict arrive on the scene, we become so focused on eliminating what hurts that we stop thinking about cultivating what we want.
We want less fighting. Less resentment. Less rejection. Less distance.
Okay.
But what do you want more of?
And what are you doing together to create more of what you want?
Do you want more affection? More sex? More laughing? More dates? More flirting?
Yes? Then you have to make the effort to create more of it.
This brings me to one of the reasons Meredith and I have instituted what I call the Intimacy Dashboard in our marriage.
It’s incredibly unsophisticated.
We want hugs every day. At least two – one in the morning and one before bed.
We want two kisses, too. One in the morning and one before bed.
Then, it’s date nights. At least once a month.
And finally sex. We follow the 72-hour rule, never going more than three days without it – unless the world is melting down because someone in our family is sick or something else throws our routine for a loop.
That’s it.
I’m not suggesting those numbers have to be your numbers.
The point is that we don’t leave intimacy in our marriage to chance. We prioritize it.
We monitor that dashboard like a hawk because we know that it gives us an exact snapshot of where our connection is just like a balance sheet will tell you how solvent a company is.
One thing I can say though: if the hugs, kisses, and sex start lacking, we don’t wait six months to find out why.
We course-correct.
We go back to doing the exact things that made us fall in love with each other in the first place.