But I do think that when you see what is being done around monogamy you wonder if it doesn’t behoove people to at least think that maybe in the course of a long-term relationship their relationship will have more than one structure. That’s all. And that sometimes very good marriages end that didn’t necessarily need to end.
I don’t mean to sound dense here, but are good relationships the ones that last, or the ones that end?
When I start a couple’s workshop I ask people to show with their hands a model of what they consider is a good relationship. Without words, just with hand motions. And we all have a certain model in our head. We come with a certain template. I have them as a person and as a therapist. And that template will probably influence how I evaluate certain relationships. What I think is a good relationship or a good couple, one that I admire or that inspires me. But that’s totally personal. As a therapist I don’t need to be inspired by people, I need them to connect with their own inspiration. So what inspires me is their desire to change.
And change doesn’t mean they stay together. I respect people’s quest for passion, I respect people’s quest for meaning, and I respect their quest to not suffer in vain. I respect people’s generosity, desire to care for others, need to connect with others. And I think sometimes you connect well with someone for a period in your life and then sometimes you move on.
I used to think you move on because what you had wasn’t good. Now I think of it more in terms of life stages. Some people will accompany you through certain stages and not necessarily into the next one. That doesn’t mean you have to trample everything that you had. What you had was probably good for the time you had it. And there’s going to be a lot of relationships where couples raise kids together and may not necessarily stay together afterwards. We tend to look at that as empty nesters who are unable to reconnect. But maybe they actually were couples who knew that a long time ago but they decided they were good as a family and that this was the thing they would do together for the next twenty years.
And that is what I think is going to happen more and more, that people will have more than one marriage in their lifetime. And they will have periods in their life where they feel passionate or erotic or sexual and periods in their life where that can be very dormant.
So while we’ve been busy trying to increase intimacy in our relationships, intimacy may be one of the things leading to their demise. Does this mean we should stop making intimacy the measure of a good relationship?
First of all, it’s a very western, romantic idea of measuring relationships. And it looks at intimacy as if there’s a thing called an “intimate relationship” or a “non-intimate relationship.” I think there are relationships, and there are moments that are deeply intimate and moments that are not.
Intimacy is not a quality or an attribute, it’s an experience that you have with other people. And you can have it sometimes with people that you aren’t close with for that matter. You can have deep intimate moments with strangers. But I don’t use it as a sole measurement. I think what you want to know is do you have moments where you are intimate. Do you connect? Do you feel seen by each other? Do you feel respected by your partner? Do you feel admired, appreciated by your partner? Do you feel your partner cares about you in a special way? Do you raise your children well with your partner? Do you play well with your partner? Do you work well with your partner?
We have to let people define the state of their union and what they long for. And the fact is that they may long for something now, but what they had before may have worked very well before. In partnerships that split, they often had a good relationship for the time that they were together, there’s no need to erase everything.
What do you think about the notion of sexual compatibility? How does it play into keeping desire alive in a long term committed relationship?
Yes, I think that people find partners that have greater or lesser compatibility with and that may happen in the sexual arena. Of course the person you have greater sexual compatibility with may not be the same person you have emotional compatibility with. The two sometimes exist separately.
I liken it a lot with musicians who can enter a groove together. You may have people who play music together and just click, they have a similar way of playing, they are attuned to each other, they appreciate each others style, they respond to the sensitivity of the other. They like each others fingers and touch, they have a good sense of how the other person moves that speaks to them and moves them.
But it’s not something that is static. You can start off playing with somebody and after a while you can realize, we have really gotten to know each other and anticipate the other better and have a sense of where the other one likes to go, and that becomes a further compatibility. It’s always something that grows, so it can grow from a lot to more, or from less to more. But I do think there are people who don’t have it. I have worked with couples who are wonderful, and great together, but not sexually. They really do not have a good fit. They want very different things, they’re drawn to very different things, and the choice that they made to be together was not a sexual choice, it was a relational or emotional choice, a life partner choice. And they find themselves in a complicated predicament because they realize that they are with the person with whom they can really make a life together but it’s not necessarily the person with whom they are going to have a good erotic connection with. And they have often had much better partners with whom they’ve had a great erotic connection, but they didn’t see themselves making a life with that person.
