THE DESEXUALIZATION OF THE AMERICAN MARRIAGE/WAY TO LEAVE YOUR LOVING: THE MYTH OF PARALLEL DEVELOPMENT
Super Marital Sex Rule: Marital partners will never be at the same stage of development together. Super marital sex depends on learning to enjoy one another’s development, both partners’ valiant struggle to adjust and to grow.
Just when I got established in my career, he wants to change his. When he first talked about women’s liberation, I knew he was getting ready to quit his job. Now he wants to work, I want to work, neither of us wants to parent. When I want to do something, he does. We just don’t match up right.
WIFE
We assume that life’s passages will be encountered by each of us in our marriages at the same time with the same ease. It just does not work out that way. There is really no such thing as a mid-life crisis, only a lifelong set of crises we are just now paying attention to. So it is with marriage. We assume that things will just “develop,” but they will not. We will enter phases of life differently, putting stresses on our marriages through our lack of understanding and tolerance of individuality.
Marriage vows sometimes say “until death do us part.” They should day something like “as we struggle together to renegotiate through the hundreds of changes we will each encounter together and separately.” Our vows of intimacy should reflect the assumption of constant change, learning a marital dance in which leader and follower are forever changing.
I tell my couples “never divorce someone you don’t know.” Many couples will not listen. They see divorce as an adjustment rather than an end. Sometimes therapists teach them that. They are wrong. Divorce often relates to marital inability to work through differences in developmental challenges, changes in readiness to parent, to work, to play, to rest, to love. Until American marriage sees that it is as cyclical as individual development, reflection, directing, and responding to our changes as people, it will tend to end “too soon” too often.
All marriages struggle with the individual differences of their partners as they go through their individual lives. You will learn that sex can be one of the best aids to carry us through differences in development. In fact, super marital sex can save marriage by teaching its partners to flourish in the changes and growth of both spouses.
We must learn to remarry a different and changing person several times during our marriage. We can choose to divorce and seek out dozens of transitional partners to match our changes, or use change to sculpt the marriage as an ever-changing artwork. Good marriages depend much more on being the right person than finding the right person. Experiencing developmental changes with someone else can be as exciting as it is difficult.
In a pre-fab, pre-developed, ready-made culture, we learn to look for pre-developed partners, already formed to match our own developmental stage at a given time. If our house is too small, we move. When we get too much stuff, we look for bigger and better places to keep it. We must also learn ways to get rid of some stuff, particularly psychological stuff, yet stay in the same house.
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