This is, I think is the crux of our problems here.
"I believe that we cannot adequately meet our own intimate needs in life. Someone whom we love and who loves us must meet them for us. Those intimate needs include affection, intimate conversaton, sexual fulfillment, recreational companionship, admiration, and many others. When someone meets these needs, we fall in love with that person and want to be with them for the rest of life, so that our needs can be continually met. In other words, we come to depned on that person to meet our intimate needs. That's what romantic relationships are all about.
So when one person in a romantic relationship stops meeting the other person's needs, it creates a crisis. After all, the purpose of a romantic relationship is the meeting of these important emotional needs. If important emotional needs are no longer met, it's no longer a romantic relationship. ... When two people in a romantic relationship understand each other's emotional needs and have enthusiastically agreed to meet them for each other, not as gifts but as a joing committment to insure the success of their relationship, they are interdependent. As long s the way they meet these needs take the interests of both into account, and their promises that the needs will be met are kept, no one feels controlled." End Quote.
We have relationships where emotional needs aren't even recognized, much less is it agreed that they should be met in marriage.
If there is no foundation of this truth in the relationship, how can there be any true forward growth?
