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Part II: Keeping your perfect partner
Let's look at your history of the partners you've been with:
How long did you stay together?
Did you stay too long or leave too early?
How successful have you been in "keeping" a partner?
What did you do to stay together?
What made it hard to stay together?
How do you know when to stay or when to leave?
What tells you you've both on the right track?
What tells you that you may not belong together after all?
How realistic are your standards of your partner and yourself?
Are your standards working for you?
Are they too high, too low, or just right?
Your sex life together...or not
Bored with your sex life? Too much routine? Maybe it's time to explore other ways to turn yourself and your partner on. Organizations like Body Electric focus on helping men and women explore new aspects of their sexuality. Don't just get complacent and give up on having a lively sex life, reinvent it for yourself and for the two of you: keep what you enjoy and replace the rest with something new. Let go of your Tired Old Morals (what good did they ever do for you?) and get explore erotica, movies, and new ideas of sexuality and sensuality...why not get an erotic massage together or hire an escort for an interesting threesome? Free your mind and your libido will follow.
Answer these questions:
What's great about your sex life with current/past partners?
What didn't work so well?
Don't Let Your Sex Life Sag!
After months (or years) of a relationship, many experts tell you that it's okay if your sex life starts to suck. I say: no way! Sex is a crucial part of a healthy relationship. When we find ourselves too busy, stressed out and/or not emotionally connected with our partner, sex is one of the quickest and most pleasurable ways to reconnect. It helps you both to re-experience being those madly-in-love people you used to be. It's all too easy to put off sex...but don't do it! There's nothing like a shared orgasm and a happy, post-coital glow to improve your outlook on life and remember why you love that man you've been with all this while. A good sex life is part of your mental health: cherish it, hold it as a priority and make it happen.
Answer these questions:
What are your obstacles to a great sex life?
Describe the best sex you've ever had: what made it so great?
Monogamy or open relationship?
How do you see your ideal sex life? Monogamous, open relationship, a combination of these, something else?
What are your pros and cons regarding monogamy or non-monogamy?
Keeping your relationship (and yourself) youthful
Some people would literally rather die than change how their relationship works...and they do. For other people, their relationship just gets better as it ages. Are you flexible and easy-going or rigid and perfectionistic? The latter will age you and make your relationship tense and unpleasant. Can you both, as a couple and individually - experiment more with your life: travel, try new things, take up new interests, go to new places and meet new people. You want to stay young? Keep doing new things and your brain pathways will thank you for the stimulation! You want your relationship to thrive? Keep reinventing it. My friend Susan once told me, "I feel like I've been married to the same man seven times. Each time it feels like a new relationship. " She and her husband have seen their relationship grow and change so much that it FEELS like they’ve been married seven times! Could your relationship be like that?
Take a moment and close your eyes and imagine a youthful, alive, stimulating relationship. Now think about a stale, stagnant, dull relationship. Open your eyes and write down what you saw.
Acceptance, forgiveness and letting him have it
In past relationships, how good have you been at acceptance and forgiveness? Oh, well, joint the club. It's HARD. No matter whom we're with, we're going to annoy them and vice-versa. What do we do with these feelings? It's not useful to blame our partner for our own unhappiness. We can take responsibility for our part in a problem, even if it's only 5% and their part is 95%, we can always work on our contribution to an unhappy situation. In any relationship, we need to be able to face problems with our partners, do the best we can to find a mutual solution, forgive our partner and yourself for any harm we caused, and then move on.What from your past relationships is still bothering you? Have you found it hard to forgive your exes? Your current partner? Yourself?
Comfortable with uncertainty: what's in the future for you both as a couple?
The older we get, the more we see how God laughs at OUR plans, substituting Her own instead. Uncertainty is a reality, and the sooner we make peace with it, the happier we'll be. No relationship turns out as we planned it...there's always shit along the way that we didn't expect. How do we make peace with all that uncertainty? What do you find most scary about future relationship(s)? What direction do you see your life headed (alone or with a partner)?
Balancing your heart, head and libido in an ongoing relationship:
Most of us are stuck in our heads, we overanalyze and try to figure out everything our partner does, what does he/she mean by that? You know! We seldom drop down into our heart to see how we feel. Our head worries we're not being loved the right way, our heart only wants to express love. But it's scary to feel your heart. All those songs about heartbreak are no accident. Our hearts are broken and heal over and over and over again in life. It's unavoidable. It takes courage to live more from our hearts.
People who have addictive sexual behavior are NOT in touch with their heart: their emotional hunger never gets satisfied, so they need to keep looking for the next sex partner, and the next one after that. Way too much of our culture (especially porn) emphasizes the libido-based (sexual) part of relationships and leaves the mind and heart far behind. For many men, the mind and heart are almost seen as "girly" or "feminine" parts of relationships. And yet, without the mind and heart's involvement, our relationships are doomed.
Answer these questions:
In past relationships, how has your head/heart/libido balance been?
How would you like it to be in your next (or present) relationship?
ecurity or Boredom?
We all have different needs. Some of us like our independence and don't need much emotional support; others of us like to have a strong shoulder to lean on. Lots of relationship self-help books preach: "Don't take your partner for granted". But doesn't taking your partner for granted mean that you can count on, depend on and trust him/her? That you are both absolutely there for each other? You need to feel secure enough to lean on your partner without worrying that he/she will flake on you. This doesn't mean treating someone badly; it does mean that you can count on each other and watch out for each other. This is also known as "security" and "dependability". But it's tricky here, because many of us want a wild man/woman in bed and Clark Kent/Suze Orman at tax time. How do we negotiate that balance?
Answer these questions:
In your ideal relationship, describe the balance between predictability and excitement?
How predictable or not are you? Are you happy with this or want to change?
Partners, best friends or both?
You and your (future) partner know each other better than anyone else, so why wouldn't you be best friends too? One person cannot be everything to you. If they are, it's a setup for unhappiness. Too much time together with little room to breathe is usually suffocating for relationships. You need a little mystery so you have things to tell them that they don't already know about you. Don't share everything! The best relationships are a balancing act: time alone, time with friends, time with partner. Don't give up your friendships when you fall in love...you need more than one person in your life to be close to, laugh with, cry with, hang out with, do stuff with. It's normal to sometimes feel closer to your best friend than your partner. Just keep reconnecting to your partner and keep sharing your life with other people who love you.
Answer these questions:
How do you typically balance alone time/partner time/friend time?
Are you happy with this balance or would you like to change it?
Breaking the rules: the courage to have an "eccentric" relationship.
This isn't often talked about. How do you find the courage to live outside the box? To not compare your relationship with others that you see all around you? How can you dare to do it YOUR way, even if your friends think you two are weird or boring? If you live and die by the changing standards of what self-help books say, you're probably very confused! We - and our partners - need to find out what we like, don't like, and be true to ourselves. Dare to be a happily eccentric couple. Yeah, some people may think you're weird, but there's nothing like the satisfaction of doing it YOUR way...whether anyone else approves of it or not.
Answer these questions:
How have your past relationships been "typical" or not?
How would you like your next (or present) relationship to be "outside the box"?
In Conclusion
I believe that there are many potential "perfect" partners for all of us, and that we could be happy with any number of people. I hope that this article has been helpful to you in finding – and keeping – your perfect partner.
QUESTIONS? COMMENTS? WANT TO KNOW MORE?
Give me a call at 619-955-3311 or
email me at beyondtherapy@cox.net
I hope this was useful for you!
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