Marrying your best friend romantic partner can be a wonderfully validating and rewarding experience. It has the potential to give you someone who is always there for you no matter what. The intimacy can be amazing. If a couple is lacking the closeness of a best friend relationship, they probably need to work on liking each other more. Perhaps they can figure out what they have in common, how they can spend more time together and what new subjects they can discuss. In other words, do what friends do. In my experience, the way married best friends are most likely to go wrong is in defaulting to be just best friends. When they get overloaded with the stress and complexity of married or family life, they tend to let the romantic, passionate and sexual parts of their relationship go. They seem to believe they can just pick up where they…
Read more
I’ve noticed that more and more women are becoming practical about the realities of love and marriage. If they want to be married and have children, they need to do more than just marry in time to accommodate their biological clocks. They also need men who can share the child care priorities and responsibilities. This requires the couple to be able to talk, discuss and negotiate as friends. There appears to be less risk of divorce, or at least ugly expensive divorce, between people who value each other’s friendship and plan to co-parent. With or without children in the picture, marriage is a big deal because of its social, legal and financial implications. It’s generally smarter and safer to tie yourself to someone who is your lover and your best friend.
Read more
I think there are multiple factors that have contributed to the trend of the last decade that has seen women combining the ideal mate with the best friend. Online dating, social media, texting and sexting have ironically made people feel more disconnected and anonymous in some ways. It’s entirely possible to link up with others and present yourself to the world without anybody ever getting to know who you really are. Life can be very lonely unless you have family or friends who know you and love you. We’ve also had the phenomenon of friends with benefits for quite some time. It doesn’t work for everybody. But I think the idea of combining friendship and sex has filtered into our consciousness. Our divorce rate has been soberingly high for a long time. It might now be starting to go down. The upsetting and expensive reality of divorce has made many…
Read more
In my experience, it is difficult and painful, but possible, to look at divorce as a step towards personal growth. It can be very sad, even heartbreaking, but nonetheless an inevitable reality. Something critically important in the union between the two people has broken down. And on one side or both sides, there’s not enough resilience, love, passion or interest to bring the relationship back to life. In cases of cheating, there’s usually a lot of high emotion; blaming the cheater for everything that went wrong in the past and present. The outrage of the betrayed person can truly be a force to be reckoned with. Another situation that elicits high emotion is the breakdown of the couples physical relationship. Usually one partner was more likely than the other to avoid sex, which made the other feel rejected and unloved. These situations often degenerate into one of them counting the…
Read more
Basically, you need to zero in on the connection between you. And sift through the tumult of emotions you experience when you’re attracted to someone, falling in love or in love. Separate out your feelings into three camps: Sexual Hopeful Resonating Sexual feelings are any that drive you towards physical intimacy. Hopeful feelings are those you add to the facts. Facts include what is actually happening in front of you; what is concrete and real. Let’s suppose there’s appreciation, respect, kindness and dignity between you and someone. Then there is what you hope, dream and wish all of that means. It’s your interpretation blended with your vested interest. Beware that your vested interest can go either way: false positive or false negative. You might be wondering why anyone would have a false negative hope. This occurs when an individual is afraid of being set-up for failure. Instead of leaving him/herself…
Read more
