Archive for August, 2010

Q: I’m getting married in a month and I’m concerned about what my married friends have been telling me. Most of them seem to think it’s impossible to maintain a passionate marriage over the long haul. I don’t want my friends to negatively influence me, but I also want to have realistic expectations about marriage. Are my fiancé and I doomed to a passionless marriage?

~Erica, Santa Fe

A: Congratulations on your upcoming marriage, and thank you for raising this important issue, an issue that many couples face—how to keep passion alive over the long haul.

There are three points that you should be aware of when it comes to passion and desire.

Relationship Help: 3 Points to Remember about Passion and Desire

1. The intense, passionate fervor that engulfs many new relationships does fade over time, and what once seemed effortless and spontaneous now may require work and planning. Couples get into trouble when their expectations about what passion should look like stems mainly from the first two years of their relationship.

Keeping passion & Desire alive

It’s also important to note that the level of passion and desire that you and your spouse share will probably be different from what your friends (and others in general) experience.  If you judge the health of your marriage or sex life by comparing yourself to others, you might be inadvertently ignoring the unique rhythms and strengths of your own relationship.

2. Passion and desire are fragile and can easily buckle under stress and the pressures of daily living. Many of the couples I work with report that as the stress of work, parenting, finances, etc. increase in their lives, their libido takes a nose-dive. An over-scheduled, stressful life can often lead to a passionless marriage.

While daily life won’t allow us to avoid all stress, buffering your marriage/relationship from unnecessary stress should be a priority—especially if you want to keep passion and desire alive.

3.  The responsibilities of commitment and emotional sharing are not always passion-friendly.

In her book, Mating in Captivity, Esther Perel explores the dynamics of desire in long-term, committed relationships. One of the important points she makes is that the conditions needed for couples to experience a sense of emotional security can inadvertently rob the relationship of a sense of adventure and excitement.

So at times the predictability and security that couples seek can be at odds with the conditions that fuel passion and desire. Think of these two relationship dimensions (security/predictability versus desire/passion) as existing at opposite ends of a continuum: When you create the conditions that only nurture one end of the continuum and neglect the other end, something gets lost. This is a challenge all couples in committed, long-term relationships face.

Awareness of these three passion points can prevent your marriage/relationship from getting stuck in the quicksand of a passionless existence.

Marriage/Relationship Resources

I’ve created a workbook that focuses exclusively on giving couples tools needed to keep passion and intimacy alive. Check out my Passion, Sex & Intimacy workbook.

Wishing you and your relationship all the best,

Dr. Rich Nicastro

When you feel “close” to your spouse/partner, you are experiencing an emotional connection that is the essence of a loving relationship. For so many of us, this special bond brings a sense of emotional completeness and vitality to our lives.

But the gift of emotional intimacy, the emotional bond that sustains a loving union, is fragile and can easily be undone.

Emotional intimacy is the foundation of a fulfilling relationship

While it’s natural for the emotional connection you feel with your spouse/partner to change throughout the life of your marriage/relationship (so one shouldn’t expect that feeling a deep emotional connection will be a constant), there are certain conditions couples should be aware of that can nurture emotional intimacy.

The goal is to create and maintain certain relationship conditions that will allow emotional intimacy to germinate. These conditions are created by the mindsets, behaviors and interactions that occur between you and your spouse/partner.

Conditions Needed for Emotional Intimacy

Read the rest of this entry »

Relationship Help Quick Tip:

If you want to strengthen your marriage/relationship, think small: Pick one tiny behavior that you’ve wanted to change about yourself (or a behavior that drives your spouse/partner up a wall) and commit to changing it.

You might be thinking “easier said than done.” But if it’s a small change–something that wouldn’t take a great deal of effort—your chance of success increase significantly. And don’t kid yourself, small changes add up to big differences over the long haul.

As a marriage and couples counselor, I’ve seen first-hand how important consistent follow-through is to strengthening a marriage/relationship and creating lasting change.

The golden rule for meaningful change is patience and persistence.

One Reason Why Marital/Relationship Problems Persist Read the rest of this entry »

In the first article in the Love and Lies series (Love and Lies: Why Spouses Lie to Each Other, Part 1), we explored some of the reasons why couples might overtly lie or, at times, subtly distort the truth to each other. While some degree of deception in marriage and long-term relationships is common, lying always runs the risk of damaging what you and your spouse/partner have worked so hard to build together.

Broken trust in a relationship can destroy a once healthy marriage/relationship.

It’s easy to make the argument that “honesty is always the best policy” in your marriage/relationship. And while this is an ideal that we should all strive to achieve, the first article explored the complex motivations that can lead you or your partner to lie to one another (sometimes with the best intentions).

Relationship Help: Why do you lie to your spouse/partner? Read the rest of this entry »

Q: We need marriage help! I thought I had a happy marriage, but over the last year I’ve noticed that I keep catching my husband in these little white lies and his deceit is starting to get to me. I don’t know if I can trust him anymore. He told me everything is fine, but why would he continue lying to me if he doesn’t have something to hide?  ~Amy

A: Thanks for the question, Amy. While I cannot speculate exactly on why your husband might lie, let’s examine some reasons why couples end up lying to each other and how this impacts a marriage.

Relationship Trust and Emotional Safety

As you alluded to in your question, honesty and trust in a relationship are central to building and maintaining the foundation of a healthy marriage.

When you establish trust, you create an atmosphere of safety (the focus here is on emotional safety). Feeling emotionally safe with your spouse/partner will allow you to share more of yourself—the deeper parts of yourself that only a few people may get to see. This type of sharing nurtures and deepens both emotional and physical intimacy.

This might seem obvious, but in order to develop a trusting, stable relationship with your partner, you must feel that s/he is honest. Imagine how difficult life would be if you couldn’t count on what your spouse or partner told you. If you feared your partner usually handed you lies, your natural curiosity about his/her whereabouts or feelings would easily turn into suspicion and chronic doubt.

But the truth of the matter is that most of us fib to our partners now and then, and sometimes with good reason (at least we convince ourselves it’s for good reason). But when lying becomes the norm rather than the exception, and when dishonesty stems from self-serving reasons only, the relationship suffers. Therefore, becoming mindful of the reasons why you might lie is important to the overall health and well-being of your marriage/relationship. Read the rest of this entry »