Max Said
We went to a baby shower for Amirah today, the latest baby addition on the Goodale side who came into the world a little on the early side. It was a small family gathering with a few additional close friends. Andy, the father, was also an only child and hearing him talk about the importance of family to him and how grateful he was to have been accepted into the Goodale clan got me to thinking about my own only-childhood.
It is indeed a bit of a lonely path being an only child. There are limits to how far a parent can fill the non-stop play needs of a young child. My mom certainly was, and still is with Stephen, one of the most accommodating and patient playmates one could imagine. But nonetheless a sibling connection is something completely different. Here is another person who can completely relate to all the same things you do and who is close enough to your age level to get into the same things you do. Especially for our family where we have created a loving and nurturing place for our kids to be happy together with sleep-sharing and just general emotional wholeness. Our kids genuinely love each other and enthusiastically relate with real interest for the others well-being. I believe school, with its emphasis on age segregation, can weaken these sibling bonds, but that’s another topic.
So not having that sibling connection as a young boy has I think left me with a certain paradoxical tendency to crave human connection, and yet also at the same to fear it. The little boy that found solace taking lengthy showers and escaping into his own little world there still sometimes comes out and keeps me in my comfort zone of isolating.
Seeing how our children relate and interact with each other makes me very happy that we did not stop with one. While each of them needs time to themselves and their own space at time, as a rule, they seek each other out for company and connection. I think this is a much healthier default way of being – to find solace, joy and happiness in connecting with another human being. The well-developed and happy sibling relationship provides the perfect proving ground for figuring out how to relate in a healthy way. It is a safe place to try things out. Often the kids’ play involves role-playing, acting out different scenarios. I think this is part of the process of practicing different kinds of human interaction as well.
Anyway, the main connection that I am coming away here for today is that my being an only child is a possible root cause for my reluctance to reach out and connect. I have never had a large group of friends. Basically, I was more or less alone with occasional play dates and one good friend that I can remember, John Thompson, until I met Fred who became a surrogate brother from 13 until 18 when I met you. From there forward, you have been my best friend.
Not sure where to go with this realization, but somehow it sheds light into my soul and makes this part of me a bit less mysterious. I am extremely grateful for my deep connection to you – our relationship has the history that makes it feel like you are the sister I never had.
Denise Said
Let me catch my breath. I didn’t see that coming and it went directly to my heart and I am crying. A sister. You know what that means to me I am sure. Raising loving, kind children - two sisters and a brother - and watching them interact on a daily basis, and caring for them on a daily basis, has practically been my life for the past 17 years and to compare our children’s relationship as siblings to ourselves means the world to me. I take great pride in my role as mother and the choices I’ve made regarding attachment parenting. To be put into the role as a sister for a few moments given the high value I place on child-rearing is stunningly beautiful and loving. Thank you.
As we read daily about Gretchen and Jon’s struggle this past week with Gretchen’s serious illness and hospital stay, I felt there was an element of brotherly and sisterly love hovering over them as Jon never left the hospital. Sure they were acting like spouses too, yet to be so deeply connected to someone and to care for them feels more like kin.
I’m happy we decided to have more than one child too. Two women years ago warned me to not have just one, it was too lonely they both told me. There were days after we had two kids, and then three kids, that I had my doubts that this might just be the hardest thing a person ever had to do, but those doubts were short lived as watched our children dance (Stephen’s moves are crazy), laugh their loud belly laughs when they are sharing a sibling moment about the hamster or White Northern Beans that we don’t get at all, and sing to their heart’s content from Meet Me in St. Louis or Pirates of Penzance. These years are golden moments etched upon my heart and I cling to them not knowing when they might end.
I did like having a brother and sister to grow up with. To share a history with. Someone to get your life when you were a kid. Someone to share camaraderie with when parents fought. I think I took having siblings for granted though a little now reading your thoughts. They were just there. They just showed up one day. I love my siblings and when you called me your sister, deep feelings poured out of me from perhaps missing them because we now live far apart, and not under the same roof.
You and I have the history of siblings. I like that and am sorry I didn’t see it until now. I get to live with you as my best friend, be silly with you like a brother, and go to sleep with you every night as my husband for as long as we live –under the same roof.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Psychology of March
Denise Said
It’s half-past March. The Ides of March gone by and it’s officially spring as of yesterday. So far so good. I’ve had wobbly moments this month where I could have sunk into my usual late winter blues. This year I was determined though to approach the month , not fiercely dreading it, but looking forward to it, realizing it’s always been a creative time for me, despite illnesses and depressions of the past that always seemed to strike me at this time. I decided to think of myself like the earth in its last moments of winter, building up energy before bursting in bloom.
I can’t say it’s been a highly creative month except for making a few of my greeting cards and running another series of girls fertility/cycle classes (which I LOVED doing), however I have felt very healthy and happy. This week especially I felt a shift, a calmness, and a real gratitude for my life and my life with you Max. Maybe it was the 70 degree weather and sunshine and my taking the time to sit read an engrossing book, maybe it’s from being in a progesterone state of mind, maybe it was the loud, absolutely breathe-taking opera music I was listening to while driving home at night, maybe it was a peaceful moment reading to Stephen about dinosaurs and really feeling our placement on this planet in time, maybe it was from a deliciously quiet moment in a new library where I just sat and read a couple magazines. Maybe it was just my new approach to March.
The library moment gave me what I needed for today’s blog and another reason to feel grateful. When I walked into the Scotch Plains Library I wandered a little bit until I strongly felt a magnetic force pulling me to the magazine section. The first magazine I noticed, and not one that I have ever read or picked up before was Psychology Today (March/April 2010). The cover had a man and woman wearing comfy close-fitting beige underclothes doing a sort of swing embrace with the man lifting the woman in the air Fred Astaire-style - with the title The Love Fix in bold black catching my eye. I perused the magazine shelf a little more checking for Mothering Magazine, and my article, but it wasn’t there. (What’s wrong with that library? Ah…actually it might have been in the kids’ section.) So I kept perusing and found myself drawn back to the Psychology Today. I picked it up, found a cozy little odd chair and sat. I looked around me. No one was stopping me from sitting and enjoying myself. At one point a child came near and I panicked and thought “Oh no! She’s senses I’m a mother and needs my help!” But no she was just wandering my way.
I started in on the article, entitled The Expectations Trap by Hara Estroff Marano, and saw immediately why this article had found me. It was saying exactly the same things that we have been saying in our blog. Excitement struck through me! Holy Toledo! We are on the right track in our thinking about our marriage ideas. All our ideas were right there in black in white and so nicely written out by a professional writer. Max, I might let you go into more of the details, if you feel so inclined, since I think you would a better job of explaining the main points in the article. (I went out and bought the magazine two days later.) The entire ten-page article should be read by anyone in a marriage or thinking of getting married. And the photos! I loved the photos of the cover couple throughout the article stretching and twisting in different dance/yoga/gymnastic-like poses, which I think illustrated so beautifully the different aspects of the marriage dance. Sometimes we’re walking on the other person. Sometimes we’re flying out the door. Sometimes we’re in a most intimate embrace. The quote that struck me the most was this one: “Important as it is to chose the right partner, it’s probably more important to be the right partner. We focus on changing the wrong person.”
Max Said
Unfortunately, it appears that March is messing with me instead this year :) I don’t really think this, but I am fighting some combination of a head cold and mild heat stroke I guess. Just the sudden heat and a push to finish building Stephen’s “Family Pond” I suppose. All this is to say that I a bit groggy as I sit down to write this entry.
I am very happy that you have found a different way to approach March this year. It really is true that anything in our lives is what we make it. I think your new outlook on this month is a sign of the shift you have made towards just taking ownership of your own happiness.
The Psychology Today article is a truly uncanny thing. That you would be drawn to even pick this magazine up out of the blue is enough to convince me that the universe has some plan going on here. But then to read the article and find that just about every major point in the article was mirrored by one of the blog posts we have made over the last few months sealed it for me. There are two things that I find extremely exciting and positive about these remarkable overlaps. First of all, it makes me realize that what you and I have distilled from our 20+ years of learning from and about our relationship are fundamental and universal truths about long-term committed relationships. The second is that these truths are being spoken intelligently and cogently in a major US publication.
The bottom-line conclusions that both the author of this article and we ourselves have independently reached are that having a successful relationship means dealing with our own issues and becoming conscious of the cultural messages that do not serve us so that we can make choices driven by our inner guidance systems. I believe that both of these conclusions apply to just about anything. Even March :)
I echo your excitement about the Pysch Today article and am going to recommend this as required reading to anyone that I know who is in or looking at entering a long-term committed relationship.
I am going to go before I have another sneezing fit.
It’s half-past March. The Ides of March gone by and it’s officially spring as of yesterday. So far so good. I’ve had wobbly moments this month where I could have sunk into my usual late winter blues. This year I was determined though to approach the month , not fiercely dreading it, but looking forward to it, realizing it’s always been a creative time for me, despite illnesses and depressions of the past that always seemed to strike me at this time. I decided to think of myself like the earth in its last moments of winter, building up energy before bursting in bloom.
I can’t say it’s been a highly creative month except for making a few of my greeting cards and running another series of girls fertility/cycle classes (which I LOVED doing), however I have felt very healthy and happy. This week especially I felt a shift, a calmness, and a real gratitude for my life and my life with you Max. Maybe it was the 70 degree weather and sunshine and my taking the time to sit read an engrossing book, maybe it’s from being in a progesterone state of mind, maybe it was the loud, absolutely breathe-taking opera music I was listening to while driving home at night, maybe it was a peaceful moment reading to Stephen about dinosaurs and really feeling our placement on this planet in time, maybe it was from a deliciously quiet moment in a new library where I just sat and read a couple magazines. Maybe it was just my new approach to March.
The library moment gave me what I needed for today’s blog and another reason to feel grateful. When I walked into the Scotch Plains Library I wandered a little bit until I strongly felt a magnetic force pulling me to the magazine section. The first magazine I noticed, and not one that I have ever read or picked up before was Psychology Today (March/April 2010). The cover had a man and woman wearing comfy close-fitting beige underclothes doing a sort of swing embrace with the man lifting the woman in the air Fred Astaire-style - with the title The Love Fix in bold black catching my eye. I perused the magazine shelf a little more checking for Mothering Magazine, and my article, but it wasn’t there. (What’s wrong with that library? Ah…actually it might have been in the kids’ section.) So I kept perusing and found myself drawn back to the Psychology Today. I picked it up, found a cozy little odd chair and sat. I looked around me. No one was stopping me from sitting and enjoying myself. At one point a child came near and I panicked and thought “Oh no! She’s senses I’m a mother and needs my help!” But no she was just wandering my way.
I started in on the article, entitled The Expectations Trap by Hara Estroff Marano, and saw immediately why this article had found me. It was saying exactly the same things that we have been saying in our blog. Excitement struck through me! Holy Toledo! We are on the right track in our thinking about our marriage ideas. All our ideas were right there in black in white and so nicely written out by a professional writer. Max, I might let you go into more of the details, if you feel so inclined, since I think you would a better job of explaining the main points in the article. (I went out and bought the magazine two days later.) The entire ten-page article should be read by anyone in a marriage or thinking of getting married. And the photos! I loved the photos of the cover couple throughout the article stretching and twisting in different dance/yoga/gymnastic-like poses, which I think illustrated so beautifully the different aspects of the marriage dance. Sometimes we’re walking on the other person. Sometimes we’re flying out the door. Sometimes we’re in a most intimate embrace. The quote that struck me the most was this one: “Important as it is to chose the right partner, it’s probably more important to be the right partner. We focus on changing the wrong person.”
Max Said
Unfortunately, it appears that March is messing with me instead this year :) I don’t really think this, but I am fighting some combination of a head cold and mild heat stroke I guess. Just the sudden heat and a push to finish building Stephen’s “Family Pond” I suppose. All this is to say that I a bit groggy as I sit down to write this entry.
I am very happy that you have found a different way to approach March this year. It really is true that anything in our lives is what we make it. I think your new outlook on this month is a sign of the shift you have made towards just taking ownership of your own happiness.
The Psychology Today article is a truly uncanny thing. That you would be drawn to even pick this magazine up out of the blue is enough to convince me that the universe has some plan going on here. But then to read the article and find that just about every major point in the article was mirrored by one of the blog posts we have made over the last few months sealed it for me. There are two things that I find extremely exciting and positive about these remarkable overlaps. First of all, it makes me realize that what you and I have distilled from our 20+ years of learning from and about our relationship are fundamental and universal truths about long-term committed relationships. The second is that these truths are being spoken intelligently and cogently in a major US publication.
The bottom-line conclusions that both the author of this article and we ourselves have independently reached are that having a successful relationship means dealing with our own issues and becoming conscious of the cultural messages that do not serve us so that we can make choices driven by our inner guidance systems. I believe that both of these conclusions apply to just about anything. Even March :)
I echo your excitement about the Pysch Today article and am going to recommend this as required reading to anyone that I know who is in or looking at entering a long-term committed relationship.
I am going to go before I have another sneezing fit.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Holistic Relationships
Max Said
It occurred to me recently that what you and I are good at is the maintenance of a healthy relationship. Often when I am asked for advice on relationships it is because the relationship is in crisis and I am always a bit uncertain on what to say. I can offer some pretty sound advice on what to do in order to keep yourself and your woman happy in a functional long-term relationship, but when the dishes are flying and divorce is a topic of conversation, I am not so sure of my ability to offer anything helpful.
But this line of thinking started me making connections to other areas of our lives. We approach our health in a holistic way. And at core what this means to me is that we have a great deal of faith in our bodies’ natural healing powers. We take care of the whole body with good diet, plenty of sleep, happiness and exercise (well not so much exercise over the winter :) But in addition to this there is a basic underlying assumption of wellness being our natural state. If we contrast this approach to the typical allopathic one, I think the difference is pretty striking. Medical school teaches health practitioners to search for and treat pathologies. If one approaches the body from this perspective, one is almost certain find something wrong. The myopic focus of the highly-specialized medicine that is the rule I think also contributes to this find-something-to-fix brand of health care (or sickness care really.) If some indicator related to the heart is outside of normal parameters, then it needs to be fixed regardless of how the patient feels overall. Treating this one symptom perhaps means taking a drug that has a negative effect on the patient’s –they get headaches – so this then becomes another problem to fix, and so on…
Then there is our approach to learning. On our best days, we feel relaxed and confident about just letting our kids learn what they want how they want to learn it. Again, it is a “nothing is broken” approach to things. We trust that the human animal is imbued with a natural love of learning and we just do our best to facilitate this for our kids and stay out of their way. Taking as the obvious contrasting option to this approach, let’s look at public schools. Here testing, measurement and conformity rule the day. Students battle math problems, teachers call out behavior problems, kids are medicated because they have problems concentrating, etc… More of the find-something-to-fix mindset.
So, how does this all tie into relationships? Well, I guess what I am trying to say is that maybe what really needs to be shifted here is the way we look at things. Perhaps we are creating problems by looking for them? Maybe nothing is broken? There were certainly plenty of times in our relationship’s history when things did not seem overly rosy. We had bad fights; we did not see eye-to-eye on important things and probably each thought (at least briefly) about leaving. But we have always had that core of certainty to fall back on and over time that has developed into a nothing-is-broken philosophy in our relationship. This philosophy makes everything just flow. Sure we still hit bumps, lose our tempers, have moments of despair, but they just seem to roll off pretty easily.
But, as evidenced from the couple of examples listed above, much of our culture encourages us to look at things from a problem-oriented perspective. So then the bumps, anger and despair become symptoms of a relationship that is fundamentally flawed and on its death bed. So I guess what can say to those who are having problems in their relationship is to stop looking the problems and start looking at what is good and what is working. Use the salve of gratitude for the good things to heal the discontent. Realize that we are trained and influenced by our culture to focus on the negative and with that knowledge make a different choice.
Denise Said
Once again I amazed at your insightful and well-written post. It’s very true Max. We are a problem-oriented society. We focus on what isn’t working instead of what is. I would add also: Why not work with what you’ve already worked on so many years in a marriage relationship? I think we make the same mistakes over and over, even with another partner, unless we shift our thinking to a healthier outlook and look within ourselves to see what needs adjusting and get the right help so that both husband and wife feel empowered in the marriage.
After I did my Sterling’s Women’s Weekend and when I was involved in the Family of Women in NYC during many of the meetings the leader would always say, “If you want a healthy relationship, find a woman in a healthy relationship and do everything she says to do. Don’t question her wisdom; just do it.” Many women approached me, (yikes!)one even took me out for a drink at 3am near Gramercy Park during one of our sleep-over events to pump me for information. I never knew what to say. I was just starting to heal our marriage relationship. I was unsure of myself and my advice. My advice seemed archaic and old-fashioned and honestly from the 50s. One group leader said to me when I told her I don’t have any special magic to offer women, “What you do Denise is just a part of you. It comes easily.”
But I had learned very specific things to do in my relationship at that point and was working to implement those changes, I just wasn’t so sure of myself and whether these specific things were really going to work. But I had/have a good man, and one willing to do the dance with me of being a happily married couple. We had the initial vision of being together and enough history to stay together. So what those women were seeing in those meetings was a very new Denise, one that was teetering on stepping stones in a stream. I couldn’t really verbalize then what I was doing.
I had my sister Karen and my good friend Cora, who I spoke with often, and who were both also working on their marriage relationships and their relationships in general. These two women were the people I went to, to work out aspects in my marriage relationship that I needed help with. They told me straight what I was doing wrong and how to shift things. And I did the same for them. I now know what I’d say to someone seeking my advice because I’ve been doing it for years. It is archaic and relatively simple, and not very sleek and glamorous. Max you’ve allowed me to heal our relationship and we’ve been honest through the process. I am lucky. I am lucky in that you chose to always be willing to forgive me when I fell off the wagon and made a big mistake, like telling you you fucked up something. (Rule #1 to women – Don’t ever tell your husband they fucked up!) There’s always a better way to communicate, but it takes practice and a knowing that relationships can be healthy and holistic. We don’t have to fall into the trap that it just gets worse after the honeymoon – as several people told me on my wedding day. No broken dishes here – not on purpose anyway. xo
It occurred to me recently that what you and I are good at is the maintenance of a healthy relationship. Often when I am asked for advice on relationships it is because the relationship is in crisis and I am always a bit uncertain on what to say. I can offer some pretty sound advice on what to do in order to keep yourself and your woman happy in a functional long-term relationship, but when the dishes are flying and divorce is a topic of conversation, I am not so sure of my ability to offer anything helpful.
But this line of thinking started me making connections to other areas of our lives. We approach our health in a holistic way. And at core what this means to me is that we have a great deal of faith in our bodies’ natural healing powers. We take care of the whole body with good diet, plenty of sleep, happiness and exercise (well not so much exercise over the winter :) But in addition to this there is a basic underlying assumption of wellness being our natural state. If we contrast this approach to the typical allopathic one, I think the difference is pretty striking. Medical school teaches health practitioners to search for and treat pathologies. If one approaches the body from this perspective, one is almost certain find something wrong. The myopic focus of the highly-specialized medicine that is the rule I think also contributes to this find-something-to-fix brand of health care (or sickness care really.) If some indicator related to the heart is outside of normal parameters, then it needs to be fixed regardless of how the patient feels overall. Treating this one symptom perhaps means taking a drug that has a negative effect on the patient’s –they get headaches – so this then becomes another problem to fix, and so on…
Then there is our approach to learning. On our best days, we feel relaxed and confident about just letting our kids learn what they want how they want to learn it. Again, it is a “nothing is broken” approach to things. We trust that the human animal is imbued with a natural love of learning and we just do our best to facilitate this for our kids and stay out of their way. Taking as the obvious contrasting option to this approach, let’s look at public schools. Here testing, measurement and conformity rule the day. Students battle math problems, teachers call out behavior problems, kids are medicated because they have problems concentrating, etc… More of the find-something-to-fix mindset.
So, how does this all tie into relationships? Well, I guess what I am trying to say is that maybe what really needs to be shifted here is the way we look at things. Perhaps we are creating problems by looking for them? Maybe nothing is broken? There were certainly plenty of times in our relationship’s history when things did not seem overly rosy. We had bad fights; we did not see eye-to-eye on important things and probably each thought (at least briefly) about leaving. But we have always had that core of certainty to fall back on and over time that has developed into a nothing-is-broken philosophy in our relationship. This philosophy makes everything just flow. Sure we still hit bumps, lose our tempers, have moments of despair, but they just seem to roll off pretty easily.
But, as evidenced from the couple of examples listed above, much of our culture encourages us to look at things from a problem-oriented perspective. So then the bumps, anger and despair become symptoms of a relationship that is fundamentally flawed and on its death bed. So I guess what can say to those who are having problems in their relationship is to stop looking the problems and start looking at what is good and what is working. Use the salve of gratitude for the good things to heal the discontent. Realize that we are trained and influenced by our culture to focus on the negative and with that knowledge make a different choice.
Denise Said
Once again I amazed at your insightful and well-written post. It’s very true Max. We are a problem-oriented society. We focus on what isn’t working instead of what is. I would add also: Why not work with what you’ve already worked on so many years in a marriage relationship? I think we make the same mistakes over and over, even with another partner, unless we shift our thinking to a healthier outlook and look within ourselves to see what needs adjusting and get the right help so that both husband and wife feel empowered in the marriage.
After I did my Sterling’s Women’s Weekend and when I was involved in the Family of Women in NYC during many of the meetings the leader would always say, “If you want a healthy relationship, find a woman in a healthy relationship and do everything she says to do. Don’t question her wisdom; just do it.” Many women approached me, (yikes!)one even took me out for a drink at 3am near Gramercy Park during one of our sleep-over events to pump me for information. I never knew what to say. I was just starting to heal our marriage relationship. I was unsure of myself and my advice. My advice seemed archaic and old-fashioned and honestly from the 50s. One group leader said to me when I told her I don’t have any special magic to offer women, “What you do Denise is just a part of you. It comes easily.”
But I had learned very specific things to do in my relationship at that point and was working to implement those changes, I just wasn’t so sure of myself and whether these specific things were really going to work. But I had/have a good man, and one willing to do the dance with me of being a happily married couple. We had the initial vision of being together and enough history to stay together. So what those women were seeing in those meetings was a very new Denise, one that was teetering on stepping stones in a stream. I couldn’t really verbalize then what I was doing.
I had my sister Karen and my good friend Cora, who I spoke with often, and who were both also working on their marriage relationships and their relationships in general. These two women were the people I went to, to work out aspects in my marriage relationship that I needed help with. They told me straight what I was doing wrong and how to shift things. And I did the same for them. I now know what I’d say to someone seeking my advice because I’ve been doing it for years. It is archaic and relatively simple, and not very sleek and glamorous. Max you’ve allowed me to heal our relationship and we’ve been honest through the process. I am lucky. I am lucky in that you chose to always be willing to forgive me when I fell off the wagon and made a big mistake, like telling you you fucked up something. (Rule #1 to women – Don’t ever tell your husband they fucked up!) There’s always a better way to communicate, but it takes practice and a knowing that relationships can be healthy and holistic. We don’t have to fall into the trap that it just gets worse after the honeymoon – as several people told me on my wedding day. No broken dishes here – not on purpose anyway. xo
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Tag! You're It!
Denise Said
Sex is extremely important in marriage, I believe, yet it goes through changes as the marriage evolves over time. In the beginning of a relationship, married or not, sex is very exciting, romantic, can last for hours, frequent, spontaneous, adventurous; it's new. It's exciting to get to know someone in such an intimate way. Happiness is usually part of this early sex picture too and when we put together these emotions - happiness and excitement - with sex and we mix them all up - we create a lovely imprint upon ourselves of what we expect it to always be. A joyful fun time. The imprint, while a wonderful memory, I think, hinders us and sometimes keeps us from moving forward in the ever-evolving relationship of marriage. We're expecting sex to be like it was in the beginning. The great part about being married for so long is if we work through the lulls, upsets, miscommunications, sex can get better and better and even move to a spiritual level, and not just get worse or a become a thing of the past. We've found this to be true in our marriage.
Although we've got different appetites for love making, how frequently we have it is the one aspect that we've always had to communicate about the most. The other morning, after making love late one night, (the only time for it now) I woke up and said, "Tag! You're it!" With the busy-ness of our days and life now with our kids most evenings we're so tired to do anything but give each other a goodnight kiss, if we're lucky. Through the years when we've gotten too busy to get to sex we've had to make appointments to make love. Usually we'd say to the other, "Okay by Sunday night have to get to it." Sometimes this works, but what we've found is many times we're both tired and neither of us wants to initiate love making. Who's responsible for starting all that energy? And also so late at night there isn't much left to give. However, letting it go and not making love for over a week starts to affect us and we become irritated and annoyed with the other. We get "backed up" as an old friend used to call it. We had the idea then that we should try taking turns. Whose ever turn is was had to initiate sex within the time limit agreed upon by both of us. That helped tremendously making it less of a responsibility for one of us all the time. Taking turns initiating sex keeps an element of playfulness in our marriage - like that imprint that I have from the early days. Tag, you're it honey!
Max Said
I am always extremely grateful that we have kept our sex spark alive. It certainly has evolved into a truly amazing and fulfilling part of our relationship. A joyful and spiritual physical manifestation of the dance of balance between the masculine and feminine that a happy marriage can, and should, be.
I remain a bit puzzled about the physiological quirkiness of the male and female sex drive trajectories. When I was at my testosterone peak and fairly preoccupied with sex, I did not really have the best outlets for it. Even though we started having a physical relationship while I was at this energized age, we unfortunately had guilt about what we were doing because of our religious beliefs at the time. It took some time for me to work those negative sex associations out. And now, here we are with all the wonderful, but sometimes exhausting, commitments of parenthood in a house that feels a bit small when it comes time for us find an intimate space to make love, and you are pretty much raring to go :)
I have always been a bit self-conscious about the fact that you have tended to want to have sex more often than I did. It never seemed to jibe with most of the stories I heard from other men where the tables were pretty much always turned the other way. But I think that part of what is behind other men's obsession with sex, or their complaints about not having enough, is what you touched on - they are expecting it to be like the first blush intimacy. When things start to evolve into something different neither partner is completely sure what do to with it. The pressures of life set in and because sex is no longer the thrillingly motivating force that it was in the early days, it gets dropped out. Since we did not let this happen, largely due to your relationship management instincts and skills, I have never felt like sex was scarce and have therefore never felt the need pursue it all that aggressively.
But of course the dilemma is that you want very much to be pursued by your lover. When we have the time and space, this comes pretty naturally for me (see the Quiet Time blog post :) At home with the day-to-day busy goings on and the proximity of our close-knit family, it is a bit more of a challenge. But, as you often do, you have hit on the pragmatic answer to this with our alternating initiation roles.
Well, it's getting late, and I'm it, so signing off from the blogosphere for now.
Sex is extremely important in marriage, I believe, yet it goes through changes as the marriage evolves over time. In the beginning of a relationship, married or not, sex is very exciting, romantic, can last for hours, frequent, spontaneous, adventurous; it's new. It's exciting to get to know someone in such an intimate way. Happiness is usually part of this early sex picture too and when we put together these emotions - happiness and excitement - with sex and we mix them all up - we create a lovely imprint upon ourselves of what we expect it to always be. A joyful fun time. The imprint, while a wonderful memory, I think, hinders us and sometimes keeps us from moving forward in the ever-evolving relationship of marriage. We're expecting sex to be like it was in the beginning. The great part about being married for so long is if we work through the lulls, upsets, miscommunications, sex can get better and better and even move to a spiritual level, and not just get worse or a become a thing of the past. We've found this to be true in our marriage.
Although we've got different appetites for love making, how frequently we have it is the one aspect that we've always had to communicate about the most. The other morning, after making love late one night, (the only time for it now) I woke up and said, "Tag! You're it!" With the busy-ness of our days and life now with our kids most evenings we're so tired to do anything but give each other a goodnight kiss, if we're lucky. Through the years when we've gotten too busy to get to sex we've had to make appointments to make love. Usually we'd say to the other, "Okay by Sunday night have to get to it." Sometimes this works, but what we've found is many times we're both tired and neither of us wants to initiate love making. Who's responsible for starting all that energy? And also so late at night there isn't much left to give. However, letting it go and not making love for over a week starts to affect us and we become irritated and annoyed with the other. We get "backed up" as an old friend used to call it. We had the idea then that we should try taking turns. Whose ever turn is was had to initiate sex within the time limit agreed upon by both of us. That helped tremendously making it less of a responsibility for one of us all the time. Taking turns initiating sex keeps an element of playfulness in our marriage - like that imprint that I have from the early days. Tag, you're it honey!
Max Said
I am always extremely grateful that we have kept our sex spark alive. It certainly has evolved into a truly amazing and fulfilling part of our relationship. A joyful and spiritual physical manifestation of the dance of balance between the masculine and feminine that a happy marriage can, and should, be.
I remain a bit puzzled about the physiological quirkiness of the male and female sex drive trajectories. When I was at my testosterone peak and fairly preoccupied with sex, I did not really have the best outlets for it. Even though we started having a physical relationship while I was at this energized age, we unfortunately had guilt about what we were doing because of our religious beliefs at the time. It took some time for me to work those negative sex associations out. And now, here we are with all the wonderful, but sometimes exhausting, commitments of parenthood in a house that feels a bit small when it comes time for us find an intimate space to make love, and you are pretty much raring to go :)
I have always been a bit self-conscious about the fact that you have tended to want to have sex more often than I did. It never seemed to jibe with most of the stories I heard from other men where the tables were pretty much always turned the other way. But I think that part of what is behind other men's obsession with sex, or their complaints about not having enough, is what you touched on - they are expecting it to be like the first blush intimacy. When things start to evolve into something different neither partner is completely sure what do to with it. The pressures of life set in and because sex is no longer the thrillingly motivating force that it was in the early days, it gets dropped out. Since we did not let this happen, largely due to your relationship management instincts and skills, I have never felt like sex was scarce and have therefore never felt the need pursue it all that aggressively.
But of course the dilemma is that you want very much to be pursued by your lover. When we have the time and space, this comes pretty naturally for me (see the Quiet Time blog post :) At home with the day-to-day busy goings on and the proximity of our close-knit family, it is a bit more of a challenge. But, as you often do, you have hit on the pragmatic answer to this with our alternating initiation roles.
Well, it's getting late, and I'm it, so signing off from the blogosphere for now.
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