Keep Your Hands Offa My Mojo

[Kettricken]

Of course, some of us just have a life-long penchant for kicking this kind of twaddle around. (Excellent Spouse and I knew we'd found our song when we heard the line, "Let's waste time/chasing cars/around our heads".) It's all good so long as you don't (as Dia mentioned) over-escape into analyzing at the expense of actually living-n-stuff.

The whole ILYBINILWY thing has always struck me as kinda ludicrous. It all rests on the totally-unreliable-from-person-to-person definition of love. If "in love" means the cosmic mindtwist of new infatuation chemicals and you expect that to last and last at the same level indefinitely, sans effort .... well, good luck with that. I tend to share the view of whoever upthread suggested that that it's a spirit compact of both action and emotion, choice and spontanteous response. You can (hopefully) evoke the emotion by actions such as speaking each others' LL, observing the five-to-one-or-better-positive-to-negative interactions rule, practicing gratitude, doing shaky bridge stuff, etc, etc. I know some people think that's "fake" and "you shouldn't have to work on it if itz reeeeeeeel", but that seems both unreasonably pollyanna and fatalistic to me.

Re: why the divorce rate/WASness now, I found this, from Esther Perel, compelling: "Traditionally, Perel points out, marriage was a business relationship, designed for procreation and economic survival. It asked nothing more of its partners than stability, reliability and a day-to-day ability to get along. Recent generations added romantic love and sexual passion to the mix, followed by demands for equality after the resurgence of the feminist movement in the late 1960s. As our society placed new requirements on the institution of marriage without stripping away much of its historical functions, we responded by expecting our spouse -- one person -- to provide what in the past it had taken an entire village of people to give us.........Relationships are crumbling under the weight of our expectations. We want marriage, companionship, economic support, family life -- and then on top of that we want our partner to be our best friend, confidant and passionate lover."

Also, from the same article, speaking to the belief that "in love feelings" should be spontaneous: "There is a notion people have that in the beginning of relationships passion is spontaneous. They actually forget that the beginning was one big story line. There were hours spent anticipating, planning, plotting, developing the script, imagining what you're going to wear, what you're going to eat, where you're going to go, the whole thing. But people remember things as explosive and in the moment and unplanned. And that's not true. But passion can die because we forgo the willfulness, the intentionality and the imagination that fuel the erotic. " Now *that's* what I'm talkin' about.

SP, here's what I think is brilliant about where your wife is right now. She knows she is angry at *a lot of things/people*, Not. Just. You. That story about how everything was your fault, she's letting it go, she's letting herself recognize and sit with her own emotions and not just projecting it all immediately Smileys-Personward. Seems like that has to be a net positive for both of you, however it all shakes out in the end.