Ahhh, I love weddings. Big or small, elaborate or simple—they are so full of hope and the promise of love. To find someone and make both a personal and public commitment to join your lives together—what an amazement!
During the early stage of a relationship, you are intoxicated with intimacy. You think about your beloved eagerly. You cannot wait to see if he or she called, e-mailed, or texted. You fantasize about him or her during the day and happily spend nights and weekends together because there’s nowhere else you’d rather be. It’s as if a protective bubble surrounds you in a private loving world. In this “couple bubble,” you dwell effortlessly every day. Focusing on your beloved is so natural and spontaneous that you hardly think about it.
Every couple has a “falling in love” story, a time when the relationship felt fresh and exciting. When a couple comes to see me for counseling, although they are eager to tell me everything that is going wrong in their relationship (or everything that’s wrong with their spouse), I am particularly interested to know about their courtship. What drew them to each other? How did they behave when they were falling in love? Can they tell me the story of their early time together with a twinkle in their eyes?
Daniel and I first met in Emerald City in the land of Oz; it was literally “magical.” I was Glinda the Good Witch and he was on the tech crew in a community theater production of The Wizard of Oz. I’ll never forget when I first laid eyes on him. He was up above the stage, leaning over a gaping hole thirty feet above, looking down. I was sitting in the front row of the theater when I looked up and our eyes locked. He broke into a huge, Cheshire cat grin as he looked down at me. I believe that I blushed. What is he smiling about? I thought. That smile was a foreshadowing of a great love soon to be discovered.
But of course for all couples, the falling-in-love euphoria fueled by a steady dose of feel-good hormones (oxytocin and dopamine) eventually starts to wear off (generally after a period from six months to two years). What happens when love settles down into real life? Are you doomed to a stale, pale version of the initial brightness?
Many people live as if that’s true. In fact, I venture to say that a majority of people in monogamous relationships (whether young, old, childless, with children, remarried, gay, or straight) live in varying degrees of unhappiness.
There’s the angry couple and the sexless couple, the couple leading parallel lives and the couple stuck in quiet desperation. There are couples locked in patterns of dysfunction and others reluctantly resigned to living as roommates.
Perhaps a client of mine summed it up best when, during my first session with her, I asked her to describe her relationship with her husband. “It is what it is,” she stated matter-of-factly.
“Are you happy in your marriage?” I probed.
She said flatly, “Happy marriages are a myth, a fairy tale. I learned that a long time ago.”
That was her experience. But it doesn’t have to be yours. In fact, Daniel and I decided to write this book because we feel so deeply that most couples can be happier than they currently are.
Love doesn’t have to diminish after the dopamine wears off. Love is like a fine red wine: It actually improves—or rather has the potential to improve—over time. This happens because two people have the opportunity to grow together, heal each other, and awaken themselves to life in a new way.
This may sound rather grand—and it is. But two people who love each other create an energy between them that becomes greater than the sum of their parts. The initial “you” and “me” becomes a “we.” This third entity, the loving relationship, if well tended, can lead to a rich happiness.
Happily coupled people are healthier and live longer. They laugh more. They experience life as sweeter, joy as deeper, and their love spills over to the world. We have discovered this rich way of living and we want you to as well.
Love may be hard to define but there are three components that are essential to making love extraordinary: connection, communication, and intimacy.
Each of these three relationship essentials is a building block of your new partnership when you’re falling in love, and they actually can get stronger over time. As the years go by, successful couples make them the rock-solid foundation of a happy marriage.
But let’s say that these qualities have not been deepening for you through the years. Perhaps the threads of connection, communication, and intimacy that you wove during your courtship have come undone. Perhaps the strands are fraying and your carpet is threadbare.
It’s time to take stock and turn things around … reverse direction before it’s too late. Daniel and I both know that sometimes a relationship will come unraveled. Both of us in our first marriages, (each of which lasted seventeen years), had let connection, communication, and intimacy crumble. For myself, I resented the growing distance between me and my first husband, but my attempts to reach out came across as nagging and attacking. I chalked up the growing divide between us to lives that were too busy. One day it will get better, I thought. But one day never came. At some point, I lost the motivation to even attempt a repair.
What causes the stresses and strains that, if not addressed, can tear a marriage apart? Most researchers would agree that there are three big sources of tension among married couples.
In the twenty-first century, there is a heavy pull of life on the couple. Most relationships stand in line behind the demands of a career, children, hobbies, chores, and extended family. It’s as if there’s a conspiracy in modern living that actually de-prioritizes the primary couple relationship. Everywhere are the surface demands of life, the superficialities that comprise your waking hours: Pay your bills, get to work on time, respond to that e-mail, return that phone call, sign the form for the teacher, mow the lawn, clean the house, buy the groceries, service the car, feed the cats, prepare meals, floss your teeth—need I go on?
Then there are the gadgets that, more often than not, draw you away from your beloved: smartphones, laptops, notebooks, netbooks, tablets, iPods. Every year more devices of distraction reveal themselves.
Meanwhile, individuals are richly supported for being workaholics. There is after-school care to accommodate longer work hours, carpool support from neighbors, and year-end bonuses for dedication to work. But how many friends, bosses, or colleagues say, “Stop everything. I’ll watch your kids. Go focus on your relationship!” Not many.
Our relentless career focus, extended families, children, hobbies, and the uncompromising pace of modern life erode the essential fabric of intimacy in the primary couple. The “couple bubble” has no sanctuary.
While in the beginning of a relationship the couple bubble is prized and protected, for many couples, the bubble bursts somewhere along the way. The essential “we” becomes vulnerable to the layers of busy lives.
As if modern living weren’t enough to challenge the romantic relationship, as time passes, couples seem to forget how to bring out the best in each other. The once-doting lovers start to take each other for granted, and eventually, they simply ignore each other. Less time together combines with poor quality time together to create a feeling of disconnect.
Couples long to feel intimately connected, yet when individuals are starved for true intimacy they feel frustrated. As a result, they lash out with criticism, blame, and insults. They shut down with awkward, grumpy silences and stop listening to each other. When couples get caught in these patterns of negative interaction and benign neglect, it only increases their despair.
Eventually one or both partners look outside the marriage to have their intimacy needs fulfilled. Typical outlets for this are an extramarital affair, obsessive ambition, hyper-involved parenting, or consuming obsession with a hobby.
Being unhappy and lonely within a relationship is extremely painful. Feeling as if you don’t matter to your partner has a way of activating a primal panic. Whether suffering from being ignored or hurting from a verbal assault, the pain of rejection cuts to the core.
I have an interesting perspective in my work. As a couples therapist, I see highly distressed couples who are unhappy with their relationships and are longing for love. Meanwhile, as a grief counselor, I see highly distressed mourners who were extremely happy with their relationships and are longing for that lost love.
Working with grievers for more than twenty-five years has given me a unique vantage point. I have heard so many heartbreaking stories of loss: the stunned widow whose thirty-six-year-old husband dropped dead at work, leaving her to raise three children under the age of five; the bereft widow whose husband passed away in his sleep just two weeks shy of their much-anticipated mutual retirement; the inconsolable widower who couldn’t imagine living after his sweetheart of forty-five years lost her battle with cancer.
It is never easy to lose your beloved, whether you have been together for two years or twenty. When you do find yourself at his or her funeral, all you can think is that you wished you had a little bit more time together. All you want is one more hug, one more kiss, one more night beside your dear one.
The lesson from loss is clear: You must dedicate yourself to loving habits each day because each day may be the last that you have together.
Of course it’s one thing to know the preciousness of life in your head and it’s another to know its value deep in your heart—to feel it all the way to your gut. Brushing up close against mortality has a way of highlighting what is most important.
A few years into our marriage, Daniel was diagnosed with colon cancer. I remember hearing the words “the biopsy is cancerous.” Dan was in his training as a mental-health counselor. We were in the midst of rehearsals for a community theater production of Fiddler on the Roof. We were starting to work on this book together. We were in the middle of life; how could this happen?
Everything on the to-do list got shelved as we dealt with a new world of doctor visits, medical tests, surgery, recovery, and eventually chemotherapy. I watched my stunningly handsome husband fight for his life, becoming increasingly frail and wan.
Before his diagnosis, he was a strapping man at 6' 5", weighing a hefty 230 pounds. By his ninth round of chemo, he was a shadow of himself, having lost nearly 50 pounds. And on the bad days (of which there were many), he could hardly lift his head off the pillow. My superman, my boundlessly energetic “go to” guy, was gone.
I felt a kinship with the thousands of men and women who watch their beloved mates decline in body and mind through the ravages of cancer, assorted illnesses, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. And I’m one of the lucky ones because he has since recovered.
Still, I got a preview, a reminder that our lives will end, one way or another, sooner or later. There is no time to waste.
Of all the billions of people on this planet, you and your beloved crossed paths at a single moment in time. The stars aligned in the universe, and you found each other. You met, fell in love, and made a decision to be together. For some reason, for some purpose, your lives are linked.
Extraordinary love doesn’t mean that every day is a honeymoon. Certainly there will be ebbs of closeness and even flows of distance in your many marriages within your marriage. Each stage in your life together—having a new baby, burying a parent, illness, empty nest, retirement—will be cause for you to re-evaluate your relationship and regroup as a couple.
But if you make the deep current of your relationship about soul-to-soul growth and intoxicating union, then your life will be unbelievably rich. Consider it a gift to each other to make your relationship as vibrant as it can possibly be … this day and every day.