A marriage counselor will gladly listen to your concerns about your marriage at 7 p.m. on Tuesdays, but she isn’t available between sessions when you may be looking for support. If you hit a snag, you’ll have to wait until your session to talk about it.
Practicing intimacy skills includes surrounding yourself with like-minded women whom you can give and get support from at any time. As part of this process, you’ll be connecting with women who will not only listen but will also share their own challenges and successes. That helps create a fulfilling bond with your girlfriends and with your husband.
“The most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
—Kurt Vonnegut
My husband can’t meet all my emotional needs.
Don’t get me wrong—he’s a wonderful listener. He’s patient and compassionate. But if he were my only support, it just wouldn’t be enough. Sometimes when I get really bent out of shape, it takes three friends, two sisters, and my husband to put me right again.
That’s why girlfriends are so vital. I get to hear myself tell the story of whatever has me fretting four or five times, and each time I get a little closer to that moment where I uncover my desire. Plus my girlfriends and sisters bring something to the table that my husband simply can’t: the perspective and shared experience of being a woman.
Talking to other women is critical for my happiness and sanity, and therefore critical for having a happy marriage. Without my friends, I would be relying on my husband to meet my every need to vent, think out loud, process, and just generally hear my own voice. My self-care wouldn’t be complete without my friends.
One of the things I often find with clients who are not so happy in their relationships is that they’re having a tough time getting the girltalk they need.
Here’s what I commonly see: A client will say she has a great girlfriend who recently moved away, or her girlfriend just had a baby so they don’t talk as much as they used to, or that she just isn’t the type to cultivate those friendships with other women.
Even so, it’s vitally important to either call the faraway friend or make a new one. Without this crucial girltalk, your marriage has little chance to be the connected one you crave.
One way you can get this kind of connection with girlfriends is by becoming part of the worldwide community of women who practice intimacy skills, which you can do at skillsforlove.com under the retreat tab.
When a woman becomes a part of this community, she discovers other women she has a lot in common with. Suddenly she has three new friends she talks to on the phone. She feels heard and understood. Her new friends remind her to do her self-care, so she does and she gets happy. Next, her husband buys her flowers for no special reason and tells her how much he loves seeing her so happy.
She tells her new friends about the flowers and the compliment. They celebrate with her because that’s what good girlfriends do. They say, “You’re doing such a great job creating intimacy in your marriage!”
And they’re right.
Just as girlfriends can help reinforce the habits that lead to feeling cherished, they can also be powerful agents in scaring the stuffing out of you. And a fearful wife is one of the main ingredients in most divorces.
Kelly walked regularly with three girlfriends for exercise and chatting. They had plenty in common, because all four of them were in various stages of getting divorced. Kelly had told her husband Pete to leave months ago, and she had been to see an attorney. But when she discovered the Six Intimacy Skills, she got a sense of her own contribution to the problems in her marriage in a way that she never had before. Her intuition told her she had to give the relationship another try, if only for the sake of their three children.
A short time later, Pete had moved back in, the kids were excited to be a family again, and Kelly was feeling fortunate that the attorney she’d visited had been too busy to take her case.
But Kelly’s divorcing girlfriends were questioning her every step of the way, reminding her of what a jerk she had said Pete was. They were using her own words to discourage her from making what they saw as a terrible mistake: opening herself up to heartbreak again, as well as more years of putting up with a man she said she didn’t love or respect.
Kelly regretted all those months of complaining about Pete and tried to convince her pals that her husband of sixteen years was actually a sweet, decent guy and that they’d only been hearing one side of the story. She even shared with them some of the things she’d learned in my coaching program that were working well for her and Pete and encouraged them to try some experiments in their own marriage before filing for divorce themselves.
But none of it was going over well with her walking club.
“I felt like a traitor,” she told me. “We had an unspoken pact that we were all going to get divorced. When I strayed from that pact, I wasn’t welcome anymore. Nobody kicked me out of the group, or told me not to come back, or was mean. I just no longer belonged.”
We all belong to groups with cultural rules. We subtly enforce the rules with each other because that’s how community works. The upside is we get to feel like we belong, which is a basic human need. The downside is that it can be hard to change your habits when people around you are encouraging you to stay the same. Kelly managed to buck the trend in her group, although it wasn’t easy. But now that she’s laughing with her husband again and getting sweet love letters about how beautiful she is, she doesn’t regret learning the skills that saved her marriage and parting ways with the newly single women.
If you can bring the women in your circle along with you on the great adventure of creating a passionate relationship by showing them what you’re learning, that’s ideal. The more you support each other in treating your men respectfully and practicing good self-care, the better, right? It’s good for you and good for them.
But what if they don’t want to learn new skills that will lead to having a gratifying relationship?
If some of your friends or family are in the habit of complaining about their husbands or they say things that are disrespectful of yours, consider keeping conversations with them to other topics: work, the weather, politics, anything but marriage, men, and relationships. Or you can do what Penny did for her friend Leah, when she heard Leah start to complain about her husband for the umpteenth time.
Penny didn’t enjoy hearing Leah complain, and since it had been going on for years with no improvement, it clearly wasn’t helping Leah either. So Penny bravely said, “Leah, either divorce him or stop complaining about him.”
Leah was shocked and hurt, but it made her realize she was sick of hearing herself complain too. She made a decision to stop then and there, and to focus instead on what she could improve in her marriage. Shortly thereafter she learned about the Six Intimacy Skills, and now she has a marriage that any woman would envy, including a husband who plans surprise romantic getaways for their anniversary. Leah has since thanked Penny for her strong words that day. Complaining about her marriage is the furthest thing from her mind now that things are so happy at home.
Even if you don’t know them yet, you can always find women who will cheer you on when you say, “My husband is wearing a shirt with holes in it and I haven’t said a word about it” or match you when you say, “I’m taking a nap, eating chocolate, and going to dance class today for my self-care. How about you?”
You might find them in your mom’s group, your place of worship, or your Zumba class or at my “Cherished for Life” retreat. The way you will be able to spot them is that when they talk about their husbands, they have only good things to say. That’s how you can identify a woman with a good marriage: She speaks highly of her husband.