Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (20 page)

Sharon demanded reciprocal acceptance from Thomas before she revealed her sexual self. But she couldn’t get acceptance
before
revealing herself. The feeling she wanted required Thomas’s
knowledgeable
acceptance. Countless couples hit this inherent paradox, and the weaker your Four Points of Balance (Solid Flexible Self, Quiet Mind–Calm Heart, Grounded Responding, Meaningful Endurance) the sooner it happens. The real question is, do you keep insisting on the impossible
or do you grow up? By “grow up” I mean relinquishing unrealistic expectations and having the guts to show your erotic persona. That’s easier said than done, but by exercising your Four Points of Balance you can do it. It’s hard to keep your mind from spinning off when putting your ass on the line (literally). But taking those risks provoked your ancestors to evolve a more sophisticated brain. If you handle it right, it can do the same for you.

At first, Sharon felt entitled to what she expected and expected no less. “What’s so wrong with wanting acceptance? Doctor, I don’t know what kind of screwed up marriage
you
have, but I want Thomas to accept me! Who wants to live with someone who rejects you?”

I waited a second, softened my voice, and spoke slowly. “You’re more interested in being accepted and validated than being truly known. You demand acceptance before you reveal yourself. You think the problem is with Thomas. But the problem is, you’re creating a logical conundrum and driving both of you nuts.

“No matter how much Thomas accepts and validates you, you’re never going to feel secure and accepted until you lay the whole picture out, warts and all. No spin on the delivery, and nothing held back. I don’t know if he’s going to applaud or run screaming out the door. But you’re both keeping your self from being seen and known. Guaranteed upfront unconditional acceptance from Thomas isn’t possible. If you want profound intimacy, it’s right in front of you. All you have to do is step up and show yourself.”

In the time it took to say this, Sharon pulled herself together. She was settled enough to see she couldn’t beat the system. She mapped out my commitment to really work with her. Sharon nodded and said, “I hear what you’re saying.” Her eyes said,
I see what you are doing. Thank you
.

It’s just a matter of time before you are gridlocked over intimacy. Nature has developed redundant mechanisms to insure this. If your Four Points of Balance are weak, it happens quickly. Here are other ways this gridlock occurs:

1. You and your partner lay the groundwork for later intimacy problems
by
first creating other-validated intimacy. Success increases your emotional dependence on each other, and reinforces expectations.

2. When your disclosure makes your partner nervous or angry (even when you’re right), acceptance and validation will not be offered. Your partner won’t be encouraging and accepting when you broach a topic she wants to dodge. She can’t accommodate you without confronting her own limitations.

3. Because of the process of elimination you’ve reached a sensitive issue. Gridlock in intimacy arises when you demand validation from your partner in areas where you are emotionally blind, and have a distorted or incomplete picture of who you really are.

Partners who initially accept and validate everything eventually stop when they feel like they’ve compromised themselves, sold themselves out, and violated their integrity. The way we blunder through love relationships seeking other-validated intimacy unerringly creates emotional gridlock.

Problems with intimacy cause sexual desire problems, and sexual desire problems cause problems with intimacy. Once intimacy problems arise, regardless of their cause, poorly differentiated people handle them in ways that kill desire. If you depend on your partner for empathy, understanding, acceptance, and validation, you can count on desire problems in your marriage.

In some couples, the LDP for intimacy is also the LDP for sex. (Next chapter’s couple is like this.) When this happens, the low desire partners wield tremendous control. They have a stranglehold on physical
and
emotional intimacy and can play havoc on the high desire partner’s reflected sense of self.

However, things line up differently for couples like Sharon and Thomas, where they both have the LDP role. Sharon controlled Thomas’s
adequacy when it came to sex. Thomas controlled Sharon’s self-worth when it came to intimacy. Both felt rejected, controlled, and emotionally insignificant. Each angrily and resentfully withheld what the other wanted. But even when they stopped withholding from each other, they were still gridlocked over intimacy and desire.

Thomas wouldn’t talk with Sharon in ways that reflected that she had special status in his life. He couldn’t give Sharon that acknowledgement because he felt as though she already had too much control. Subjectively, he felt he was being asked to pay for sex with conversation and opening up.

Sharon was jealous of Thomas’s best friend, Phil. She wanted to be Thomas’s closest confidant. She believed Thomas talked to Phil about her, and she worried what Phil thought of her. Thomas knew she overestimated his openness with Phil, but he liked her distortion and the fact that it upset her. She was withholding sex from him, and he was retaliating by not opening up with her. People who depend on a reflected sense feel the need to get even.

There was another deep and profound reason for Sharon and Thomas’s desire problems: People don’t desire partners they constantly have to validate—at least not as long-term partners. Reciprocal validation is a big part of dating but not long-term marriage: You lose desire and respect for each other if the other’s need for acceptance and validation dominates the relationship.

Your response to the pressure is to comply or defy. Either move intensifies gridlock. The pressure to validate and accept your partner triggers your refusal to submit to tyranny. The demand to “be there for each other” feels suffocating. Sexual desire fades as your urge to escape grows.

The rule that we don’t desire partners we continually have to validate fit Sharon and Thomas. Thomas’s neediness turned Sharon off. It’s harder to see how Thomas fit the rule. He was pressing for sex but had no desire for Sharon. Obviously, he didn’t want to talk with her. He didn’t find her emotionally attractive or desirable, and in truth, many times she
wasn’t. Thomas was the high sexual desire partner in their marriage because he wasn’t willing to give up having sex altogether. It wasn’t because Thomas really wanted her. This deepened their gridlock because Sharon was an excellent mind-mapper.

Sharon didn’t want sex because she felt taken for granted. She was tired of propping up Thomas’s feelings of adequacy. She felt controlled—and, in truth, she often was controlled—by her dependence on Thomas. She felt restricted, constrained, and obligated to go along.

Early in their relationship Thomas’s desire for sex
increased
Sharon’s desire because she felt valued and necessary. Sometimes they had sex three or four times a week. After the first year, Sharon’s ardor cooled. Thomas started trying to make her feel guilty and responsible for his satisfaction. Sharon started “giving in.” After fifteen years of giving in to his neediness, Sharon no longer respected Thomas.

Thomas’s reactions were similar. Initially, he liked Sharon because she was so self-disclosing. She drew him out, and he shared more about himself than he had with anyone. He liked Sharon thinking he was interesting. She was a good listener. She caused him to think more about himself and his life. He liked that Sharon was getting more adventurous in bed. Thomas thought she’d show more eroticism if he could just make her feel more secure. He sensed that could be very interesting.

However, with each step towards becoming a couple, Thomas felt increasingly suffocated. It started with their engagement. Thomas didn’t want to get engaged, and this hurt her. This was repeated when they got married. Both times he felt obligated to swallow his doubts and reassure Sharon that he wanted her. Thomas saw Sharon as incredibly emotionally dependent. He didn’t want to talk because she expected him to “dump his guts out on the table.” And he didn’t like Sharon saying he had a problem showing emotions.

It’s hard to imagine something productive at work in the midst of this. But Nature has created a human brain capable of coping with life’s traumas. Brain research documents the neurobiological damage done by
trauma. But a million years ago, things were
far more
traumatic than they are now. Without our resilience, our brain would have
devolved
rather than evolved. For the human race to get where we are now, we had to evolve naturally occurring systems by which our brains could self-repair. Maybe there’s more to gridlock than Nature pushing your self to grow.

Scientists know your brain sloughs off old dominant (“grooved”) neural pathways and creates new ones all through life. This changes how your mind works, down to the thoughts you think, the emotions you feel, and the behaviors you do (and don’t do). It changes your perceptions of yourself and the people and world around you. I’ve come to believe resolving gridlock plays a key role in this process. I think gridlock is the way Nature spontaneously creates “neural plasticity.” Gridlock heats up your situation and your brain with acute meaning and anxiety, especially when it involves desire. These conditions may displease you, but they probably facilitate brain rewiring if you use them wisely.

We are not simply expressions of our biological heritage. We have become co-creators of our own brains and minds. We increasingly control our biology rather than the other way around.
¹⁰²
Seeing love relationships as simple expressions of our genes, or our childhoods, truly misses what we are about.

Until they came to see me, Sharon and Thomas were sure they knew the problem in their relationship: They thought they were completely out of sync, on two different wavelengths. Sharon complained they weren’t connecting and she wasn’t getting the “mirroring” she needed. This was a term she read in a book that expressed what she wanted: she and Thomas interacting as though they were one person.

But Sharon’s notion of “mirroring” really meant having her reflected sense of self inflated and her image of herself (distorted as it was) fed back to her. What she got back instead was an accurate picture of herself as a controlling person—which she didn’t perceive herself to be.

Actually, Sharon and Thomas were
too much
in sync. Perhaps you’ve already picked this up. Interlocking layers of gridlock, withholding wars, reflected sense of self, and dependence on other-validated intimacy create an undesirable
synchrony
. Contrary to Sharon and Thomas’s subjective experience, they were like two Siamese twins, joined through their reflected sense of self, dependence on other-validated intimacy, difficulty regulating their emotions, overreactions to each other, and unwillingness to venture into the unknown. They
felt
out of sync because they were so thoroughly emotionally
fused
.

Other-validated intimacy is synchrony personified, the Holy Grail in our never-ending quest to find our perfect soul mate. Synchrony means one partner discloses and the other accepts and validates and/or discloses in kind. The importance of emotional synchrony is well known: Potential partners court through synchronized behaviors, mirroring each other deliberately or unconsciously. In dating situations, when one partner crosses his legs, the other crosses hers. When one leans inward, the other does too. When one tells a joke, the other laughs. Research indicates dating couples are less likely to have sex if they don’t establish high levels of synchrony.
¹⁰³

Seventy years ago, mother-infant synchrony was the dominant focus of child psychology. Did Mother feed her baby when he cried in hunger? Did she look at him when he tried to engage her attention? Did she comfort him when he became upset or irritable? Professional wisdom has long held that the greater the synchrony, the better the attachment bonding and the better the baby.

However, in the last several decades child development experts have studied what happens when infants and mothers get out of sync. Scientists no longer view “time out of sync” as lost time for attachment and bonding. “Time out of sync” is just as important as “time in sync.” They are two different halves of a whole relationship.

Babies are wired from birth to cope with getting out of sync with caregivers.
Babies deliberately break synchrony several times each minute
.
They do it to regulate their heart rate and their relationship when they become over-stimulated. Time out of sync prepares the baby for positive re-engagement with his caregiver.
¹⁰⁴

Sharon and Thomas often got stuck in downward spirals, sending each other “disqualifying messages.” Eventually they learned that getting out of sync when things were bad was just as crucial as getting in sync in positive ways. They needed to function more independently, break out of their pattern, and send a different message. This was the path to a new synchrony involving deeper, more resilient, and more pleasant intimacy. They had to use their Four Points of Balance to get there.

So getting out of sync isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it’s
important
: To resolve gridlock, you have to deliberately get out of step and dampen negative reverberations in you relationship. You have to stop responding in kind and author new behaviors. That’s “all” you need to do to resolve gridlock over intimacy and sexual desire. This can be exceedingly hard to do. That’s where your Four Points of Balance come in.