Some time ago we were leading a seminar for sexually sophisticated, exuberant and articulate young couples from a local church when James, one of the husbands, said: 

Nancy and I have long since learned how to insert Tab A into Slot B, so we don't need a sex manual. We know all about adequate foreplay for women, exotic positions, and multiple orgasms. We love our nights of romance but we now must learn how to make our marriage worth keeping together when we are not making love.

 

Emotionally healthy men and women almost always share their lives with lovers whose happiness is crucial to their own fulfillment -- even if they failed to understand the reciprocal nature of mutual satisfaction while they were young. In our youthful years we may be so filled with such intense sexual desires that we forget it really does take two to tango successfully for any length of time. If either lover feels deprived, the music soon loses its ability to charm us. As we learn to love a person deeply, we want both to be personally satisfied -- while also becoming a pleasing lover.

* Your Keys to a Loving and Lasting Relationship.

• Benefit: learn the personal tools to revitalize and fulfill your relationship.

* Consistent joyful sexuality in your relationship.

• Benefit: achieve sexual intimacy without guilt or game playing to increase your joy.

* Predict your Personality Pattern and your partners.

• Benefit: learn specific communication techniques to better influence your partner.

* Learn to manage your conflicts through the Three Stage Conflict Avoidance and Control ASRAC PROCESS.

• Benefit: learning this alone could save your marriage or relationship.

* Create Couple's Contracts that really work for you and your partner.

• Benefit: negotiate about money, sex, discipline and everything else without conflict.

* Self-Focus Exercises in every Chapter.

• Benefit: achieve personal empowerment and understanding.

* Learn many interesting things about yourself and your partner with our Personality Pattern Predictor.
 

Our sexual pleasure remains second rate unless the lover becomes a full partner in the intimacy. Of course, some neurotic persons use sex in a power play for ego benefits that have little to do with love. We insist -- all psychospiritually healthy women and men want to please the sweetheart with whom they share physical, emotional, and spiritual intimacy. Anything less is selfishness -- is prima facia evidence that one is still an emotional adolescent, grasping what he or she can in a short term relationship. Sexual selfishness and the potential for abuse that follows is always the result of one's serious emotional and spiritual failures.

Despite the universal need for loving relationships, one marriage out of two fails, with a major cause of divorce being serious sexual disappointment caused by some form of narcissism -- satiation or some kind of neurotic power struggle within the relationship. Many of the marriages which survive are such emotional and sexual disasters that the partners are left with a terrible sense of disappointment about the entire affair. Comparatively few men and women actually remain lovers for life with the joy that guarantees. It is obvious that many couples have not mastered the attitudes, activities and relationships needed to make love permanent. We, Roberta and Jard, realize that we have done pretty well -- we are still sharing our love for one other and enjoying our erotic intimacy after half a century of love and marriage. We have thought much about all this and have come to the delightful conclusion -- We are not yet through! Despite all odds and some glaring mistakes along the way, we have managed to remain lovers because we understand some key factors about relationships: 

• WOMEN AND MEN REALLY DO NEED EACH OTHER FOR LOVE TO PROSPER.

• SEXUAL INTIMACY AND PLEASURE IS A NORMAL NEED FOR ALL LOVERS.

• FULFILLMENT INCREASES CONSISTENTLY ONLY AS WE MATURE TOGETHER.

These are attainable ideals that unfortunately, because of narcissism and nihilism, can be crippled enough to destroy relationships. However, since the need for love and intimacy does not end with conflict and unhappiness -- even after separation and divorce, most persons with failed marriages usually seek someone new with whom to share romance. We have learned how vital it is to have a loving partner who cares deeply about us; who enthusiastically and joyfully joins their body, mind and spirit with our own. Unfortunately, some people continue looking for a perfect partner rather than learning how to become a better lover. Nevertheless, most second marriages succeed well enough to be held together. Couples, the second time around, usually have more realistic expectations and attitudes -- can abandon the youthful selfishness that comes between themselves and their lovers, and accept the partial loaf of a sound relationship if not a grand romance.

Actually, many marriages fail because the institutions that are supposed to help men and women live together without too much conflict, fail at their tasks. For example, many people tell us that the church must accept a full share of the responsibility for the failure of many relationships. Its emphasis on archaic rules, the condemnation of spontaneous sexuality made possible through birth control, and reluctance to accept lovemaking as a spiritual relationship in and of itself, long after science has separated sex from child- bearing, has been crippling to a great many marriages. Too many reactionary clergymen have simply not come to grips with the realities of life and love since neurotic Medieval myths and superstitions about sexuality were accepted as basic religious morality.

Even today in most reactionary religious denominations, morality is connected almost entirely to sexuality. In much of the right wing church you can engage in virtually any kind of racism or sexism -- condemning minorities and manipulating women -- so long as you profess to have been born again and don't commit adultery with your neighbor's child or spouse. Or at least don't get caught committing adultery! We find that not only a simplistic view of spirituality but really a mockery of faith, hope and love within the Judaeo/Christian and the Islamic traditions.

Our educational institutions have done just as poorly, for they frequently teach sexual mechanics and techniques while ignoring the need for spiritual love which is vital to keeping a relationship alive and well, filled with sexual satisfaction and make the sweet- hearts mutually supportive over the years. Few of the sex classes we see go beyond simply teaching how to be sexually effective, how as James said, to insert tab A into slot B. Now, with most of the emphasis on how to have a glorious orgasm (or half a dozen of them), it's as though love, acceptance and mutual support have become sexual taboos. Not enough attention is paid to those things that make intimacy satisfying throughout life, to keep one's relationship permanent. The vast majority of sexual self-help books have failed to make this vital point clear since they are often based on several distorted assumptions about life and love. Usually missing from such books is the understanding that human are always subjective beings with deep spiritual needs that must be satisfied or else life turns sour. Life must become meaningful rather than just successful if we hope to live with satisfaction. Our needs and motives go beyond the physical and psychological levels of personality to the philosophical. As a result, many books that don't consider the psychospiritual aspects of life fail to help the users all that much.

LOVERS FOR LIFE is based on the principle of partnership and mutual acceptance. We simply cannot find lasting satisfaction except in honest partnership. It is also based on the belief that we all need to live with spiritual values, positive attitudes, high expectations, mature beliefs and responsible choices. Of course, few couples begin this way -- we must learn how to survive together while we mature as real persons. The myth that men and women are so different that misunderstanding and conflict are inevitable is just that -- a myth. Conflicts arise when we relate as lovers from the immature or neurotic needs of adolescence, when we fail to understand personality patterns, when we are pushed from our comfort zones, and when we behave in selfish ways that cause resentment. Then lovers become adversaries who are struggling to win power, prestige pleasure and possessions without regard for the other person's needs. Dissatisfying lovemaking virtually always occurs because one or both of the lovers is behaving narcissistically.

Because sexuality and love-making is so compelling in and of itself -- so important to normal, unrepressed women and men, we sometimes fail to realize that sexual satisfaction is always the result of having a mutually supportive relationship rather than the cause of a good marriage. Because of the prominence of the pleasure principle, many people still put that cart before the horse. Many and many a person in counseling tells us that they cannot understand why they are having so many problems when the sex is still good. Of course it is -- it is the only thing still holding them together -- with so many other problems both are determined to make something work well. We find that fearful women who remain with brutal, battering men often engage in wild, orgiastic love- making with their cruel abusers, doing everything the men want, trying to make something in the relationship satisfying. But it isn't a mutual connection -- such a man is very much the tyrant she is frantically trying to please in the only way she can win intimacy with him. This seldom lasts long when everything else good has collapsed. And unless a woman feels trapped, unable to take care of herself, with no one to turn to for deliverance, many women soon decide that sexual satisfaction purchased at such a price is too expensive in the scheme of life. They soon move on. 

The lives of women became so much better during the 20th century that few needed to abandon marriage and children as the Shaker sect taught in order to become real persons. Thus the Shaker colonies withered away as society changed drastically.

Men and women who have lovingly committed their lives to each other have every physical, psychological and spiritual reason to develop deeply satisfying sexual relations as a positive aspect of life. Each of us needs a loving soul with whom to share the responsibilities and rewards of life, to labor with during the day and to fill the nights with the magic of a passion that doesn't fade but becomes more mature and fulfilling as we enfold one another with kisses and caresses We believe that anyone who teaches otherwise, who wants to limit a couple's sexuality to conception, whether in the church or out, is emotionally crippled and wants others to suffer with him rather than mature in the physical aspects of love.

We, Roberta and Jard -- have lived together for almost half a century. We reared three kids and even our grandkids have kids now and we still love each other dearly. We would like to be able to report to you that we had a storybook romance and marriage: We would like to, but alas, we cannot. To start with, Roberta certainly did not get a Prince Charming in Jard. He is a stubborn, willful man who has gone through life doing precisely what he wanted to do. Of course, Roberta wasn't a Fairy Princess so at times the sparks flew. They still do! But, we started life even, both having naive attitudes about living together. She assumed Jard would be like her father, and he thought Roberta would be like his mother. Don't all young couples make that mistake? We soon learned how wrong that was but above all we shared a strong religious faith that helped us!

At one time we were even like two veteran riflemen in combat. One soldier was from the Louisiana marsh country while the other was from the mountains of Colorado. They had little in common but survival, they didn't understand each other, and they would not have even known each other but for the fact that they were drafted into the Army at the same time. However, they have saved each other's life so many times each had forgotten how to survive without the partner. One kicks in the door and the other throws in the grenade. Without a great deal of deliberation!

We have even moved past that and now are fairly tolerant and understanding. The repeated grinding of two dominant personalities, although it created friction and sparks on many occasions, has abraded a pretty good fit to our marriage. Sexual pleasure and psychospiritual intimacy are still vital parts of our ivies, and we recommend them highly to everyone (although we realize that sexual satisfaction can exist only as a part of our total relationship). We are fortunate that we have kept our sexual relationship alive and deeply satisfying -- despite the myth that sex is for the young. I suppose many in the reactionary church who would limit sex to conception and childbirth consider us a dirty old couple -- but you can imagine how little time we spend worrying about their neuroticism! Love is a constant source of rejuvenation for our life together.

In this LOVERS FOR LIFE course we have included projects and processes for your use. They have proved very valuable for us and for couples in our seminars. In the beginning, using them may make you feel as awkward as giving a speech or singing a solo for the first time. They will become familiar with use, however, and will help you develop a mutually supportive partnership that remains pleasurable and permanent. Use them well to strengthen you mutual concern and self-transcendence; for they are tools with which to build greater understanding. Even if boredom and desperation have set in, these methods have the power to revitalize a relationship and make it worth keeping -- even when you are not making love at the time. May God bless your attempts to grow toward happiness and fulfillment, for all of life!

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Complete the sample Self-Focus exercise shown below. Discuss the answer if you are in a group that is studying this course -- or write out your answer if you are studying it alone. Write two or three sentences and then go on. That will help you think situations through for yourself.

WHY DO YOU SUPPOSE OUR VICTORIAN ANCESTORS WERE SO DETERMINED TO KEEP WOMEN SUBSERVIENT TO MEN -- EVEN TO THOSE WHO WERE ABUSIVE AND SOMETIMES MURDEROUS?

WHY DO YOU THINK MANY MEN STILL ASSUME THAT THEY OWN THE WOMEN IN THEIR LIVES -- THAT IF THEY CANNOT CONTROL A WOMAN, THEN NO OTHER MAN CAN HAVE HER?

Discuss with a friend or write a short paragraph of two or three sentences on what the following could mean to you.

• WOMEN AND MEN REALLY DO NEED EACH OTHER FOR LOVE TO PROSPER.

• SEXUAL INTIMACY AND PLEASURE IS A NORMAL NEED FOR ALL LOVERS.

• FULFILLMENT INCREASES CONSISTENTLY ONLY AS WE MATURE TOGETHER.

We wish you the very best as you make your life meaningful and fill it with love.

 

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