GOOD-BYE, RITUALS; HELLO, INTIMACY
I HATE TO TELL you this, but there’s just about a 100 percent guarantee that you’re going to die before your time. Me too. We have very little chance of living to a ripe old age. Why? Because of all the normal, everyday things that are killing us! Every couple of weeks, another newspaper article or television news report warns us of the fatal effects of some new and hideous health hazard.
High cholesterol kills. Too much salt kills. Too much sugar kills. Too much fat in our diet kills. Not enough fat in our diet kills. Red meat kills. Mercury in fish kills. Killer bees from South America are coming to kill us all. (They’ve been coming for twenty years. They’re slow bees, but they’ll eventually make it.)
My own mother played a role in killing me. She fed me margarine throughout my childhood. Turns out it’s a killer! It turns into plastic in our arteries.
Pollution of the air and water kills. Disease-carrying mosquitoes kill. Secondhand smoke kills. Nonstick coating on cookware kills. Even vegetables aren’t safe, because they’re sprayed with deadly pesticides.
I was dealing pretty well with all these killers until just recently. Then I saw a television story that said the wrappers for fast food are also killers. That was it. That sent me over the edge.
The truth is, I really don’t worry about all these killers. I take all the dire reports about them with a grain of salt. (But just a grain; too much will kill me.) If they are killing us, they are taking an awfully long time doing it. Yeah, they might just get us in our seventies or eighties. Besides, no one can avoid all these things. We have to eat something, or we’ll starve to death before one of them kills us.
But I do worry about one killer. It’s the number-one killer of all marriages. Since I make my living working with married couples, I’ve been fighting this killer for years. It’s boredom. I’m on a crusade to stamp out boredom in marriages.
As I explained in chapters 1 and 2, the standard marital contract leads to rigid, patterned rituals. The rituals—doing things the same old female and male way—lead to a terrible boredom. After you’ve paralyzed your marriage with boredom, you turn to intimacy substitutes—persons or activities that take the place of the lost passion with your marriage partner.
We’ve been exploring a strategy that will beat boredom and create an exciting, spontaneous, and fresh love between you and your spouse. You’ve already read most of the strategy. We’ve taken a good bite out of boredom by correcting the classic wife and husband mistakes. You’re well on your way to a new and better marriage.
Now we need to finish the job. I’m going to help you shake up your remaining rituals and peel away your intimacy substitutes.
SHOOT YOUR OLD MARRIAGE
Tired of being bored? Throw out your old marriage and build a new one that works. The two of you can do it together! I tell couples all the time, “Your relationship is awful. It bores me to death just listening to you describe it. Please, put it out of its misery. Take it out back, shoot it, and bury it. Let’s start over.”
Rebuilding with your marriage partner is God’s answer. It won’t be easy, but it’s what God wants, and He’ll help you do it. Part of growing as a Christian is putting off the “old self” and putting on the “new self” (Col. 3:9–10). The same thing is needed in your marriage. You have to put off the old marriage and put on the new one.
You may be on the verge of giving up. Don’t! You may think you’re stuck with the marriage you have. You’re not—unless you want to be.
God wants your marriage to work. He wants you to turn over every stone in an effort to build a new marriage. If you demonstrate real faith in God and take the necessary rebuilding steps, He will bless your efforts.
ATTACK YOUR RITUALS
Study your relationship and discover all the rituals. Reread chapters 1 and 2 to get some good clues; then study your relationship to discover and label all the rituals. Finding them will not be that tough once you start looking. You’re like two trees in a petrified forest. Nothing ever changes. The time has come to change your old, boring, intimacy-sapping routines.
Change your morning routine.
Get up earlier and share coffee or orange juice together. If you have kids, get up before they do. Beat them to the punch! Or keep them in their rooms while you share a few quiet minutes together.
Shower together occasionally. Two persons can fit in most showers. Why, that’s perfect, because there’s two of you! I’ve gone door-to-door in communities all across the United States to research the size of showers. I’ve found that almost all showers can hold two individuals. But very few married couples ever get in there together. Come on!
Showering together in the morning will start your day with a jolt. It’s a jolt you need. You can do a lot of things in a shower besides taking a shower, if you know what I mean.
When you leave home, lay a long, wet one on your spouse. A real gum-scorcher of a kiss. A teeth rattler. You’re kissing your baby! You’re kissing your stud man! And what comes along with that big old whopper of a kiss? Two or three more show-stopping kisses, a sensual embrace, and an “I love you, __________.”
I know married couples who don’t kiss in the morning as they prepare to go their separate ways. Standing only ten or fifteen feet apart, they say to each other, “Hugs and kisses.” That’s about exciting as being in the bedroom and instead of touching each other, merely saying, “Foreplay and sex.”
Change your evening routine.
Go home, carry your television set to the front door, kick the door open, and throw that stupid set into the front yard. Get rid of it! If you won’t do that, cancel your cable or satellite service. You don’t need 150 channels.
At the very least, don’t turn on the television until after you have communicated and connected as a couple. Don’t give your best hours to that idiot box. You know what it makes you? An idiot!
When you get back together in the evening, show you’re glad to see each other. Do the multiple kisses, the tender hug, and the “I love you, __________.” Cook dinner together. Clean up after dinner together. Take a walk around the neighborhood. Play a card or board game, just the two of you.
Early in the evening get rid of the kids and carve out thirty minutes to be together. No distractions, just the two of you. Don’t let the kids interrupt you. Ignore their usual pathetic excuses to avoid going to bed. In response to the classic “I need a drink of water,” say, “I need you to stay in bed. If you die of thirst, I’m sorry.”
Nothing is more stimulating and unpredictably intimate than conversational and spiritual time together as a couple. Read a couples’ devotional, talk about what happened during the day, share what God is doing in your lives, pray, read the Bible, and do some massaging and making out.
Change your bedroom and weekend routine.
Change the side of the bed where you usually sleep. That’ll shake things up! Experiment and try new things in your sexual relationship. Be creative and have some fun. Husband, rig up a branch in the bedroom and start swinging like our old friend, the gibbon. If you can’t find a branch that will work, use the ceiling fan. If these ideas are too far out, come up with better ideas.
Go out on a romantic date once a week and do activities you’ve never done before or haven’t done in a long time. Take turns surprising each other. Rent a sailboat. Fly a kite. Play miniature golf. Take in a community theater play. Volunteer at a homeless shelter.
PEEL AWAY YOUR INTIMACY SUBSTITUTES
Just about every married person will find himself or herself an intimacy substitute—an activity intended to replace intimacy with the spouse; it may even be a person. In the first seven to ten years of a marriage (sometimes sooner), you realize you can’t meet each other’s needs. You don’t know how!
Your rituals have drained most of the passion out of your relationship. Boredom has set in with a vengeance. Since you still have a deep need for passion and intimacy, you both turn from the relationship and develop substitutes.
These substitutes help you avoid your partner (and the pain and frustration of unmet needs) and meet some superficial needs. But they cause more and more separation and loneliness in the marriage.
Television addicts
You are mesmerized and utterly fascinated by your television set. You flip it on as soon as you can and leave it on as long as you can. Often, you’re not even watching it. It’s just background noise. The people on television are your friends and companions. You are living through them. And they’re not even real!
Television is your escape, your relaxation, and your entertainment. It’s turning your mind into mush. You are a zombie! Is television really that fulfilling? No. Is it better than nothing? Yeah. Yeah, it is.
Computer hacks and phone junkies
Tippy, tippy, tippy on the keyboard all night long. You send e-mails and texts. You read and send e-mails. You tweet and post on Facebook. You play games. You spend time in chat rooms talking to persons you don’t even know. You surf the Internet checking on your investments and shopping for great deals. Your mission is to seek out new worlds and new civilizations. To boldly go where no person has gone before. To reach level three of the new game you just installed.
You are powerful. You have unlimited knowledge at your command. With the stroke of a key, you can know the mating ritual of the bobtailed booby. Actually, you are the booby! You are wasting hours of time on the computer and on your phone. You are unavailable to your spouse. You are a techno dud! You are in love with your technology. Admit it!
Pet lovers
You give your pet more time, talk, and affection than you give your spouse. When you get home, you walk right past your partner, and you’re all over your pet: “Hello, baby. Did you miss me? I love my sweetie.” You stroke, you massage, and you whisper sweet nothings. You walk your pet, you feed your pet, and you play with your pet. You even kiss (yuck!) your pet, don’t you, Dog Breath?
If your spouse has a bad cold, you say, “Too bad. I hope you feel better.” If your pet gets the sniffles, you’re at the vet in record time: “Doctor, help me. Snuggles is sick!”
Loving and demonstrating love to a pet is a whole lot easier than loving and expressing love to a human, isn’t it?
Putterers
You just can’t sit still and relax in your own home. You have ants in your pants. You’re always moving, always doing, and always puttering. You feel good when you are being productive and completing jobs. You can’t stand to leave any job undone. All the unfinished jobs call to you. Men putter on the lawn, in the garage, and with their cars. Women putter by cleaning, performing a million household jobs, and doing crafts, or creating photo albums.
You putter away the whole evening. Your spouse asks you to join him or her, but you don’t. You have to putter!
These are just a few examples of intimacy substitutes. The list could continue: kidaholics, workaholics, bookaholics, golfaholics, fishingaholics, huntingaholics, churchaholics, etc. Often an intimacy substitute can be a destructive addiction: pornography (now so easy to view on the Internet), another man or woman, alcohol, drugs, gambling, food, cigarettes, etc.
These substitutes, like all substitutes serving in the place of the real thing, are cheap and unsatisfying. Why would you settle for a pathetic imitation when you can have real, honest-to-goodness intimacy? I’ll tell you why. You hang on to your substitute because you don’t think your partner will ever meet your real needs. You’ve given up on that dream!
In your old relationship you’re right. It’ll never happen. In your new relationship, the one God will help you build, it can happen. It will happen—if you both work at it.
MAKE IT TO EVER AFTER
God says in Genesis 2:24 and Ephesians 5:22–33 that the marriage relationship is to meet your deepest human needs. That’s why He created marriage. That’s what it’s for! If you don’t have intimacy, which meets vital, God-given needs, something is wrong. Your marriage is not fulfilling God’s design and purpose for you.
So how do you get there? First, shoot the old marriage. Second, attack the rituals. Third, peel away the substitutes.
How do you do that last part? Start by identifying and admitting you’ve chosen an intimacy substitute. Don’t deny it. Nearly everyone has one. My substitutes are reading, sports on television, and my career. Then put your substitute in its place. If it is not bad in itself, its place is beneath your partner on the priority list. Make sure you connect with your spouse first; when you meet your spouse’s needs to their satisfaction and happiness, then you can enjoy your substitute. I’m not suggesting you get rid of your substitute unless it is a sin. Just relax with your substitute after you have met each other’s needs.
Talk and touch and meet needs as a couple first. That’s what the regularly scheduled thirty-minute talk times are designed for. Then you can do whatever you want to do the rest of the evening. Most spouses do their substitutes first and then, at the end of the evening, give each other the leftovers. Meeting each other’s needs and connecting intimately is impossible when you’re exhausted. If you do this, you’ve given your best hours to your substitute!
Agree that your old relationship is over. Let it go. Say a prayer of farewell over it and scatter the ashes. With God’s help, start building a new relationship by changing your routines and dropping your intimacy substitutes.
When you started reading this book, I’ll bet you wondered if you could ever live happily ever after with your spouse. At this point you know this kind of wonderful, intimate relationship is within your reach. It does take work, but you can achieve it!
Fix the ten mistakes and face each other in true intimacy, just as you’ve learned how to do now, and step into the happily-ever-after marriage you were always intended to have.
Build Your Happily-Ever-After Marriage
1. How is your marriage? Be honest. On a scale of one to ten (one being super boring and ten being thrilling), how would it score? What has made it as boring as it is?
2. Are you willing to shoot your old marriage and start over? Pray right now, and tell God you’re ready to build a new marriage.
3. Talk specifically about how you can change your morning routine, your evening routine, your bedroom routine, and your weekend routine.
4. If you have an addiction, agree now that you and your spouse will seek professional help to defeat it.
5. Tell your spouse (as if he or she doesn’t know already!) what your intimacy substitute is. Are you willing to put your spouse above it and give him or her your best time, never leftovers?