Love's New Rituals

Long ago in a faraway place called 20th century America, when lovers would get serious about their relationship, they would usually announce to the world that they were “going steady" (or, "going together"), and then if all went well, that they were engaged to marry, ideally even to "enter holy matrimony" with a church wedding.  There God would not only be asked to join them together, but to make the marriage work by joining their families and friends together as a faith community for the couple.  How many of those weddings have you even heard about in recent years?

Nowadays we have new rituals for love.  Today’s lovers are more likely to just hook up (have sex), shack up (move in together), announce a destination wedding, or worse still, a civil ceremony that is a done deed by the time you hear about it. Each of these rituals might mean just about anything to the couple, or almost nothing. It all depends on the commitments the lovers have made to each other. Commitments these days are often minimal, and hard to fulfill without the help of many family and friends. These rituals may or may not mean that one or both lovers have committed to pursuing a healthy marriage, so it's hard for others to know how much to celebrate the mile markers in today’s love relationships.

A couple would do well to tell each other quite plainly in advance of their first sexual union what difference they hoped this activity would make for their relationship.  Perhaps they would agree that a good sex life would deepen their communication, improve relationships with each other's families, enable them to earn and save more money, or help to solve problems they are having in their relationship.  If any of these goals turns out not to be met down the road, they could jack up their incentives for reaching them after taking a break from sex until this or that goal is met.

Likewise before they move in together, the couple would do well to tell each other and their loved ones what their cohabitation is being designed to accomplish.  For example, which of the following goals (and in what prioritized order) will they hope to accomplish by living together: companionship and saving money, romantic love and good times while they last, growing up and finding direction for themselves individually and as a couple, deepening their communication and commitment, or preparing for their future married life together?  Telling everyone why they are going to live together allows the couple to back off from people that will undermine their goals, and to receive guidance and support from those who will embrace them.

After choosing to leave home, the most important decisions an adult person will ever make are giving their lives to the service of God, getting married, having children, choosing a career, and choosing a place to settle down and live (I believe in that order of importance). Choosing a life partner and designing how their marriage will work are both important decisions, and they impact each other tremendously, plus all the other decisions that will follow.

For those romantics who are loving, loyal and lucky enough for their libidos to last long enough, some kind of wedding usually gets planned. Describing for one's lover a healthy mission for their marriage is one of the best ways I know to repel unhealthy lovers and attract healthy ones. (I have written a previous column about this, and would be glad to send it to anyone who requests it, at [email protected].)  Briefly, some healthy goals that might be part of a good marriage mission are: building a partnership of equals, earning and saving money, promoting each other's faith and career, nourishing each other 's physical and emotional health, supporting the healthy growth and welfare of each other 's families and friends, raising healthy children, and relying on mutually trusted third parties to help the couple understand what “healthy” means in a given situation.

A wedding ceremony should be designed to build a spiritual, emotional, and relational house for the couple to live in.  It might include vows, communion, inspiring songs, dedication of the guests to support the marriage, and encouragement and teaching from the pastor.  By contrast, many wedding ceremonies today are designed primarily for the temporary enjoyment of the couple and their guests.  A civil ceremony (justice of the peace presiding) merely joins their beds and bank accounts, giving the couple joint ownership of their stuff and their debts.  It builds no cultural house for them to live in, celebrates no role models to remind them of their vision, and creates no family of faith to help with their mission.

That is so foolish. It reminds me of a home I once visited in one of the more rundown sections of town to deliver a Christmas basket from our church.  I was shocked when I walked in to find a huge flat-screen TV inside that was twice as big as my own fat tuber.  Everything a family member would need to be healthy in that house was dirty, worn-out, in short supply, or missing altogether, all because of the time and money that had been put into the television.  It produced a household of occasional pleasure and lots of time that was emotionally shut down, just like too many marriages today who didn’t build themselves a better social and spiritual home.

When today’s young people pass through their premarital rituals of making love, deciding whether to shack up, and planning their wedding, the quality of their future marriage will depend in large part upon the meanings and purposes they do or don't give these little rites of lovers’ passage.  So if your close friends and family don’t tell you what these rituals will mean for them if and when they go there, feel free to hand them this article and ask them.

The Four Seasons of Love Before Marriage 

Another post here shows how love relationships work a lot like other living things—children, pets and houseplants. Like fruit trees, they grow through the cycle of seasons, and the time before marriage seems to me a cycle of four seasons.

A problem in most relationships is that the partners are in two different seasons of readiness for love.  A good future for such couples requires one to speed up growth while the other slows down, so they can get into the same season.  Notice the progression in each season toward greater purpose, sacrifice, openness, and romantic affection.

WINTER: Dormancy

            In winter you are not ready for love, because you are getting over past love relationships (perhaps you’re just leaving home). The purpose is to become healed from the wounds of loss, rejection and abuse suffered in past relationships. The sacrificial commitment is to avoid the anesthesia of drugs, alcohol, compulsive habits, and a premature rebound relationship. It’s time to let go of the old lover, and feel the pain.   The personal disclosure is to take inventory of what went right and wrong in the old relationship. For romantic affection, we are best sustained by the hugs and tenderness of friends, family, and the family of faith, but not from other single adults of the opposite sex.

SPRING: Dating Light 

Here the purposes are to have fun, pick out a potential partner, and discover if he or she is lovable. The sacrificial commitment is to stay in spring: coming out of winter hibernation, and avoiding prematurely going steady. Both of us can and should date other people. The personal disclosure is to put your best feet forward, focusing on who you both are now. Show the particular friends, family, activities, groups, feelings, beliefs, habits, personal history, and future plans that you think the other would most enjoy. This should include some light (nonseductive) flirting. Romantic affection should be light and easy at this stage, expressing warmth with brief hugs and kisses, such as at the end of the date.

SUMMER: Steady Dating

            Your purpose here is to deepen the commitment and to know each other better. Sacrificial commitment requires exclusive dating, giving up the freedom of going out with anyone else of the opposite sex. Togetherness at this stage should be punctuated by evenings alone, time with same‑sex friends, or in separate trusted groups of mixed company. Suggested guidelines for friends of the opposite sex are no private or after‑hour rendezvous, no intimate touching, and no talking about each other’s current love life or relationship.

Personal disclosure involves going deeper into your past and approaching the more secret and unacceptable sides of who you both are, including problems with disease, mental health, genetics, and fertility. You begin to admit mistakes and character faults, and show efforts to correct them. For romantic affection, light petting is still the best, not yet exploring erogenous zones.

HARVEST: Engagement to Marry

Here the purpose is to work through final reservations about marriage. Sacrificial commitment requires that nearly all evenings are shared together. Limits must be established on intense outside relationships that would threaten your marriage. Some couples will need full disclosure of certain finances, conversations or whereabouts toward the end of this phase. A major purpose is to close the door on old flames and to limit anti-marital influences.

Personal disclosure involves focusing now on the future, the selves you want to become. The ideal is to know each other as well as you know yourselves. Establish goals and priorities for the future. Especially if in doubt, it is always a good idea to get a premarital evaluation from a psychologist, marriage counselor, or pastor. For romantic affection, somewhat heavier forms of touching can now be enjoyed. To keep things in balance, I believe the physical union in intercourse is best saved until the personal union of marriage.

I discuss at some length this last point in the book, Growing Your Love Life, available on amazon.com.

 

 

Packing your Suitcase with the Facts

I grew up in the fifties, thinking that marital fidelity was just what you do.  As far as I had heard, most all the Schmidts had apparently been faithful to their spouses. I was told that it just made good sense, for families and for society.  At church we were told this was one of the big Ten Commandments.  At school I was taught that family was one of the backbones of Western civilization, and fidelity was the backbone of the family, the core that held everything else up and made it work.  I learned in summer camp that our director was being faithful to his wife, not to get pie in the sky, or because God would just die, but because he wanted the good life here on earth.  The twinkle in that man’s eye, the bounce in his step, and the laughter in his voice told me he was living it.

When I went away to college, I was having a lot of trouble saving sex for marriage, even being faithful to my girlfriend back home.  I suddenly realized that for five years, my father had been going door-to-door selling investments and insurance.  No doubt he had stumbled upon some pretty good opportunities to cheat on my mom.  So I asked him one day, “I don’t want to know if you have been faithful to Mom or not, but I just want to know what have you learned from struggling out there with your temptations to cheat on her.”

I will never know how many mistakes he had to make in order to learn this, or how much he was able to learn from the mistakes of others, but I remember him telling me this: “Marriage is hard work, Son.  Every year, your mother and I have to work a little harder than the year before it seems, to give and take and solve our problems.  We keep expecting it to get easier, but it hasn’t.  Yet we feel marriage is worth the effort.  Every year we have gotten closer, and we enjoy our time together and feel more in love each year than we did the year before. We take good care of our marriage, and it takes good care of us.

“Now here’s what I can tell you about the other women that you and I could play with on the sly.  If you touch that body of hers, you won’t just be playing with it, but you will also be playing with all the heartaches and problems and relationships that live in that body.  They will find their ways back home to your family, and pester you to take care of them.  It is like feeding a stray cat at the back door.  When you are trying to go to sleep in your bed, that cat will be up on your windowsill, whining and scratching to get in.

“So do you want to know what I have learned?  I’ve learned that it is all I can do to get along with your mother.  There is just not enough of me to go around to take care of two women,” he said with a big smile.  “The last thing I need in my life is another woman.”  Now, after 46 years of being married myself, and 40 years of hearing 2000 couples tell me both sides of what their marriages are like, I know my dad was telling me truth.

And yet nowadays, Americans young and old are being taught that it is not smart to be faithful.  Today’s culture tells them it is smarter to use sex for pleasure than for enriching a marriage partnership.  They are told that they would regret leaving any fun on the table, and be haunted by wondering what fun they had missed.  With all the divorces and unhappy marriages most Americans see around them, the old-fashioned purposes of using sex to make marriage last and thrive are not seen as realistic.  Having sex outside of marriage is widely seen as a natural byproduct of poor marriages, and not as one of their main causes.

In light of this huge cultural shift away from marital fidelity, being faithful requires much more than believing that cheating would hurt God and our spouse and our children.  We don’t always sense their presence in the heat of temptation that occurs in the dark corners of our lives.  Frankly, even when we think of our loved ones, sometimes at the moment, we just don’t much care about them.  We have such insanely selfish moments that we think of ourselves as solitary individuals, as if we are already single again.  At such times we only care about ourselves, and maybe the alluring one we are with.  Both of us have fallen into the same illusion, that our bodies are not secretly carrying the infections of heartaches, problems, needs, and people back home.

So fidelity requires an informed selfishness.  We need to know that it isn’t worth it.  Like my father did, I need to realize that it isn’t good for me, I can’t afford it, and I would regret it.  If we are going to be faithful to our spouses, we have to know that it simply doesn’t pay for us to cheat.  The selfish self we call the ego has to know better, if the body which hosts it is going to be true to its spouse.  Most of us married folk once swore before God and our families that our two bodies had become one flesh.  But few have realized and fewer remembered this truth: anything which affects one of our bodies is going to affect the other, just about as much.

Therefore being true to our spouse and our marriage vows will require the selfish self to do the math of a cost-benefit analysis, and realize that the cost of cheating far outweighs the benefits. This case for marital fidelity can serve as protection for your marriage every time you leave home. It can be like a suitcase that caries a flame-retardant suit, to protect you from the fires of lust and betrayal. Here are the facts that tell the tale of the unbalanced scale:

  1. Sex outside marriage is an addictive, pain-killing escape from reality, responsibility, and relationship.  Like adding cocaine to sex inside a marriage, it spoils natural lovemaking at home.  It will always make your married love life seem less enjoyable by the distorted comparison.
  2. Comparing your spouse to someone else always deceives you.  Anyone would look more attractive than they are, if you haven’t yet experienced them sharing stressful responsibilities with you.  Managing a schedule, budget, household, childrearing, and extended family relationships bring out our worst traits.
  3. Burning the candle at both ends will burn you out.  It doesn't leave time for a balanced life that includes personal and family rest and recreation.  Saving sex for home and for the future will keep a twinkle in your eye when you are old.
  4. Infidelity will ruin the divorce it tends to create.  Almost never will a spouse partner in mediation of a divorce when there is any suspicion of ongoing infidelity as a cause or complication of the split-up.  Your spouse will likely resent perceiving that you have primarily caused the divorce, and that you are making your road the easier of the two in getting out.  Compared to a mediated divorce, a litigated divorce will take much more time, money, and emotional wellbeing out of everyone involved.
  5. "I don’t care what makes me hungry, I am going to eat at home."  Smart people tell themselves this, and when their sexual energy is aroused outside their marriage, they come home and give it to their spouses.  Use your private parts to take care of your spouse, not your lover.  This will motivate your spouse to use his or hers to take care of you.
  1. Why not retrain yourself, to want your spouse more?  Like Pavlov with his dogs, when you pleasure yourself mentally or physically, you are training yourself to want whatever you are experiencing or imagining when that pleasure comes.  Why train yourself to desire more of what you can’t afford to have, and less of what you do have?
  2. Talk through your marriage conflicts together.  Your infidelity isn’t caused by your mate’s shortcomings, but by your own failure to talk and work through your frustrations, with a counselor if needed.  When you avoid conflict and your anger isn’t talked out, it gets acted out, as in infidelity.  Why not learn how to get angry at situations and habits that are unfair, instead of at each other?
  3. If you want to juice up your sex life, why not do it at home?  If you want more recreational sex or more romance, you may need to invite your spouse to go with you to a professional to teach you how.  As long as you go, learn to do your part, and keep offering it thoughtfully and unconditionally for a good period of time, you can tell your children and others that you have tried everything before seeking divorce.
  4. Your firewalls will not hold up.  You can successfully hide infidelity for awhile, but it almost always grows outside its bounds.  That’s because the more you cheat, the more you want to cheat.  And to punish you, your hidden guilt makes you increasingly careless.
  5. Don’t pretend that what your spouse doesn’t know will not hurt him or her.  Your marital infidelities do not reflect on your spouse, since he or she isn’t present during your adultery.  Spouses are present for the cover-up.  Hiding things insults a spouse, as it says, “You can’t handle the truth.”  You do the lying right to your spouse’s face, and that’s why your cover-up hurts your spouse more than what you do away from home.  Your lies make your spouse imagine what other betrayals you haven’t confessed.
  6. Be smart enough to think through an affair before you get into it.  You are smart enough to decide whether you can afford a car, house, or vacation before you purchase it, and this has a much bigger sticker price.
  7. Infidelity is going to tear you apart, even before you get caught. You will be two different people living in one body. You can’t imagine the cost to repair the damage to yourself, and this crazy division makes you damage your lover and your family as well.
  8. Do the math here: the total pain greatly outweighs the total pleasure.  Cheating benefits only a small part of two people’s lives, and just in the short run.  It hurts much more of you than it blesses, and the painful damage grows over the long run.  It also hurts all the friends and family of both parties.
  9. Your body belongs not only to you, but also to God and to your spouse as well.  If you look at it that way 24-7, it will bond you to all three.  If you use your body to bond with love instead of hate, this not only fulfills the two great commandments of Jesus, but helps you solve a lot of other problems as well.
  10. You can’t feel the blessing presence of God during extramarital sex, or so they have told me.  You can learn to do that in marriage.  Asking God’s blessings on sexual activity makes it more exciting and fulfilling for those who try it.
  11. There is not enough of you to go around, to satisfy two partners.  And you sure don’t have enough left to take care of your children, career, friends, and your own personal life.
  12. Your disloyalty will put a lot of damage and pain into your spouse.  It will put hurt, anger, shame, and insecurity into your home.  That will put a very real ceiling on the love, joy, and peace anyone can experience in those who live there.  Research proves that fidelity brings huge benefits to you and your family, including better health and longer lives.
  13. Adultery leaves a powerful legacy of cheating for your children.  As with other self-destructive behaviors such as drug abuse and suicide, your offspring are more likely to follow suit.  If your affair partner has a family, you mess them all up as well.  The Ten Commandments include a specific warning that the effects of sin carry down into the third and fourth generations of the sinner’s offspring.

This article has built a case for marital fidelity.  To make it your own, modify and personalize it.  Print it out and meditate on it, by emailing me for your own copy at [email protected].  This will make it like a suitcase you will pack up take in your heart and mind every time you leave home.  When you are tempted to cheat, just unpack your suitcase, and put on your flame-retardant suit.  You’ll enjoy everything else about your time away more, and you’ll enjoy your homecoming a lot more

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE:  

How does Yours Stack up?

Like mental intelligence, emotional intelligence is a combination between inborn giftedness (temperament) and learned abilities (acquired skill sets). It is easier to learn if we didn’t inherit an extreme emotional disposition, and if we have had healthy role models, or chosen them for ourselves.

The theory and research do not provide a single clear picture for what emotional intelligence is, but I have found some good insights and skills to help my clients solve the problems in their lives. We can pretty well measure our emotional intelligence by how well we believe the insights and show the skill set below.

  1.  Being able to tell how other people feel (emotional discernment).  We can read their emotions based on their body language, their behavior, and the situations they are in.  Some tests we can find online about facial expressions and body language can be rather fun to try. This mental ability is sometimes called sensitivity.
  2. Being able to feel what other people feel (empathy).  With emotional intelligence from items below, we can choose whether and when to make another person’s pain a bond instead of a barrier in the relationship.  I believe most women know how to bond with pain better than most men. Autism makes these first two skills very difficult, but they can learn most of the rest.
  3. Having a good emotional vocabulary, being able to put feelings into words.  For my clients who can’t speak this language, I give them a wallet-sized list of 25 feeling words, five different variations each of sad, mad, glad, guilty, and scared.  (For your own copy, email your request to [email protected].)   After people learn to feel and express these comfortably, they can add their own favorite feeling words.
  4. Taking responsibility for our emotions. Others put feelings into us, but we choose what we do with them.  To get painful emotions out of our system, we can always learn constructive expressions from friends or counselors, to put them back where they came from.  For example, believing that we are victims and others are villains dooms us to hold in fear and anger.
  5. Believing that all emotions are OK, and at the moment, unavoidable.  They are accurate internal indications of how people perceive situations they are in, and the people around them.  We have a right to our feelings, and to the opinions that evoke them, but we do not have the power or the right to impose our feelings or our opinions on others.
  6. Believing that we can suppress or deny our feelings, but we can’t make them go away.  Healthy expressions require awareness.  If feelings don’t come out, they fester and control us.
  7. Feeling our feelings and talking them out, so we can believe our beliefs and act them out.  You can email me for another article I’ve written on this, again using [email protected].
  8. Being able to admit, feel, and tolerate our own emotions.  This means that when we are hurting, or sensitively sharing in the pain of someone else, we don’t need to distract ourselves, numb out, or puke our feelings out onto another person.  When we dramatize our feelings to make ourselves feel better and others worse, this is called emotional vomiting or puking.
  9. Believing that the wisdom and guidance of our heart is as important as what comes from our head, and vice-versa.  Some people, more often males in this culture, are taught to devalue the heart.  Other people, more often females, or taught to value the heart over the head.
  10. Being able to come up with many different ways to express the emotions we are feeling.  It helps to know that we can express emotions now or later, to various different people, and by using body language, verbal language, or acting our feelings out with behavior.  The ability to wait and feel our own emotions later on when it is safer is an important skill that Scott Peck described as “bracketing” in his best-seller of the 80’s, The Road Less Traveled.
  11. Accurately perceiving how those various expressions will affect the people involved.  Knowing when, to whom, and how we can afford to express our emotions is vital to a well balanced life.  If we aren’t sure, we can ask the person if they are ready to hear how we feel.  People lose respect for us when we start going on about our emotions before they are open to it.
  12. Realizing that it isn’t always about us.  It helps to know that we don’t cause the behavior of others, that others’ behavior isn’t always directed at us, and that things often affect other people more than they affect us.  Don’t take things personally just because your emotions do. People aren’t always doing things to you – they are usually doing things for themselves.  Not realizing this is a “math problem, getting your to’s and for’s mixed up.”
  13. Realizing that it is not wise to try to fix someone else’s emotions unless you are asked.  If you aren’t sure the person is asking for help to work through their emotions, ask.
  14. Mentally and emotionally validating the feelings of other people.  Listen carefully enough to hear the emotions the other is expressing.
  15. Realize how anybody would feel the same in that situation if they saw it the same way. Then express this validation to let the other person know that they are understood and respected. “If I were hearing criticism of me, and I believed the other person was just trying to hurt me or control me, I would also feel very threatened and angry.”

In closing, it certainly will help both your personal and your public lives to learn to show more emotional intelligence in the way you react to other people’s feelings, and to your own.

Questions?

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Dr. Paul F. Schmidt