Recipe for a Perfect Marriage

[MJontheMend]

You can consciously control your dopamine/oxytocin addiction tendencies by altering your behavior.

Do you mean avoidance or denial?

On another thread you said you were the "love addict" in your relationship. What that might really mean in that the mesolimbic reward system in your brain is highly reactive to dopamine. When people who describe themselves as being "in love" are brain-scanned the same regions are activated that respond to cocaine and other opiates.

I'm not saying there is anything "wrong" with feeling "in love" or allowing yourself to feel "in love." In the right context it can be a wonderful feeling. However, a lot of times it can make you feel miserable so it can be helpful to know that it can be controlled. For instance, when I would have the urge to hug my 2bx even though I knew it was highly likely I would get a stiff body response, I figured out that I just needed to go cold turkey on the behavior of hugging him. That was exactly the right thing for me to do in order to stop sending chemicals down the brain pathway associated with that behavior.

Anyway, it's pretty clear to me that it is possible to consciously choose to no longer be "in love". Probably it is also possible to choose to not allow yourself to fall "in love". The thing that isn't clear to me is whether it is possible to summon up such feelings without the sorts of triggers to which you might usually respond. Maybe if a person who felt like they were no longer "in love" but wished to be purposefully did the kinds of behaviors that a person who was "in love" but wished not to be would avoid that person could create or revive dopamine pathways in the brain. For instance, a victim of unrequited love will recover more quickly if he stops obsessively looking at pictures of his love object. Maybe purposefully looking at pictures of a former love object would revive feelings for someone who had lost their passion.

[MJontheMend]

According to your rules, Mo, all I have to do to solve this, is to start the courtship dance again, or decide that it really isn't worth my time because "familiarity and comfort has destroyed the libido thrill of the chase or the slow-build up of resentment has killed emotional connection."

Actually, if you decide that familiarity and comfort has destroyed the libido thrill of the chase you can add excitement to the relationship and you know there are actions you can take to restore emotional connection.

The problems right now lie solely with me. What do I want. Where do I want to go. Do I want to continue investing in this R. Does it have to deepen. Can it just stay the way it is. What is really bugging me. If I am losing initial chemical bath attraction, can I get it back or develop a synthetic version.

Since it is a given that chemical bath attraction will come and go in a LTR, it is radically important to ask yourself questions like this. One question in the book which I found interesting was "Would you want to have lunch with this man if he was a woman?" Forget about all the male/female attraction stuff for a minute and figure out if you truly like the person.

[stu]

I think many problems that arise in the course of a marriage can be resolved by sort of hitting the reset button and doing the courtship dance again or by thinking about why this is not possible. For instance, if a man has lost his purpose in life or a woman has gained 50 lbs. or familiarity and comfort has destroyed the libido thrill of the chase or if a slow-build up of resentment has killed emotional connection

Can you elaborate on this a bit? By a reset do you mean leaving? You left me hanging on the second sentence, there's a missing THEN in the IF statement. Sorry for the software joke, I couldn't resist. What do you do if the better half is familiar and comfortable?

I enjoyed reading your post BTW, sounds like you have the theory figured out but the reduction to practice is the hangup. As with just about everything.

[MJontheMend]

Can you elaborate on this a bit? By a reset do you mean leaving?

I don't mean leaving although that might be the end result. It's just so much easier for me to see how my H and I both got the dance wrong now that I've been dancing with other men. People do so much stuff to mess up their sex lives and relationships once they're married that they would never do if they were single and rational. For instance, consider the HD guy who thinks if he buys his wife some flowers he might get laid and then gets annoyed if he doesn't. In a dating scenario that guy would be a total obnoxious nutcase. Or consider the LD woman who doesn't want to have sex with her H because she is 20 lbs overweight and the baby is usually in the marital bed. What's going to happen if her H gets run over by a Mack truck tomorrow? Is she going to put a profile up on Match that says "I am currently overweight and asexual and if you want to spend the night with me there will be a 10 month old in the bed." Our expectations and priorities once we are married get way out of alignment with those that would naturally lead to sex and romance. The reason "leaving" does work sometimes is that this sort of thing becomes quite clear. For instance, my 2bx had convinced himself that it was reasonable that he didn't want to have sex because he hated his job so when he found out I was dating men who had better jobs than him he had a complete ego-meltdown freakout. OTOH, I discovered that I like my men on the good-looking side so I needed to take my game up a notch, which is probably something about which I should have been more self-aware if I hadn't been suffering from some "enchanted cottage" romantic delusion when I was married. I actually had to make out with a man who I found physically unattractive before I could break myself from this delusion.

[OG_Lou]

Mojo any advice for guys in M's, other than get out?

[GonnaGoBlind]

Lou, How about a vacation alone with an indefinite return date? Another possibility is to move out, a separation if you will, without a divorce. Just because you are married doesn't mean you have to sleep in the same bed, or even in the same house.

[MJontheMend]

Mojo any advice for guys in M's, other than get out?

Lou, You've already been given some good advice which you haven't taken. You should take a solo trip to Alaska and you should join a dance club or think up any other activities like that.

Here's an exercise. Write up your profile for Match or some other dating site. If you aren't pretty much happy and confident with how you are able to present yourself in such a forum then make improvements. If you are content with what you have created, print up a copy give it to BB and say "I will not stay in a sexless marriage. Here's what I'll be posting online in 3 months if I don't start getting some action.We can discuss this further if you wish when I get back from Alaska."

[Lillieperl]

Hmmm... what I think Lou really wants is to know stuff he can do that will change BB. Of course, there is NOTHING.

The trip to Alaska and the dance classes are still great ideas... also the vacation with no specific return date.

[MJontheMend]

I came across a quote by Schnarch the other day in which he seemed to indicate that the summation of his teachings or philosophy would be "Desire is a choice." I think we can all pretty much get the concept that in a mature relationship "Love is a choice." Rather than a noun that you fall into, love becomes a verb. So Schnarch is basically saying the same thing about desire. In a mature relationship, desire is an action not a feeling.

Over and over again on this BB we see examples of interactions in relationships that go like: One spouse is HD. One spouse is LD. Cr*ppy cr*p happens for many years. HD spouse leaves and suddenly LD spouse "feels" desire. Unfortunately, at that point it is usually too late because the HD spouse, depending on his/her level of differentiation, no longer "feels" love or desire or has made a choice to no longer love or desire their spouse. Of course, this can go vice versa, I'm not trying to pick on either HD or LD manifestations of fusion as being worse. The point I'm trying to make is that the partner who flip-flops in his or her "feelings" because of the behavior of the other partner in leaving ends up suffering due to his or her own inability to understand that there was a behavioral choice that could have been made.

So I'm going to take another stab at defining differentiation and suggest that if you are differentiated you understand that "love" and "desire" and other emotional states or feelings can instead be choices that we make about our behavior (and I am definitely not talking about repression but rather expression). From this definition it necessarily follows that it would be almost impossible to maintain a relationship with anyone who was at a different level of differentiation from you.

I think this is really clear if you look at how two women like Corri and myself came from opposite ends of the spectrum to the point that we are mostly in agreement with each other on many issues. Corri has given many examples of how she works on desire as a verb in her current relationship. In my case it's more a matter of that I don't believe that anybody owes me the feeling of desire although I will almost definitely freely choose to not be in relationship with a man who doesn't choose to verb on desire. lol This is exactly the same as me saying that I would freely choose to leave a relationship in which I was not treated in a loving manner. The reason I would leave would be that I would know that my partner was either freely choosing to treat me unlovingly or was not differentiated enough to know that he had a choice about his behavior.

[GonnaGoBlind]

MJ,
As I recall, Schnarch even makes a similar observation: People entering relationships are nearly always at similar levels of differentiation. As the people in the R grow, if one achieves a higher level of differentiation, then either the other is forced to catch up or the relationship disintegrates.