No matter what issue couples present in therapy, 97% of them will cite communication as a core problem in their relationship.
In a recent post, I shared that the #1 predictor of divorce is a lack of love.
When the “in love” phase of your new relationship energy slows down and brain chemicals like norepinephrine, dopamine, and endorphins decrease, you can find yourselves suddenly bickering or not seeing eye to eye on issues that never bothered you before.
Your communication styles break down.
You react instead of respond, lose sight of the good in your mate and create emotional wounds.
When you stop caring, stop expressing your feelings, and no longer hold each other in high regard, you live in a love-less state.
You literally love less.
Your Intimacy Dance
This often shows up in what you say or don’t say, in your eye contact or lack of, facial expressions, breath patterns and tone of voice.
In couples therapy, we help couples see their unique intimacy dance and how it affects their ability to love.
This includes learning about who tends to lead, follow, control, be aggressive or passive, pursue or distance, shut down, withdraw and so much more.
In fact, this chart highlights skills we help couples avoid along with teaching them what they can do instead to help make their intimacy dance more fluid, connected, and loving.
10 Communication Skills for Couples
Conduct an honest assessment on yourself.
Mark the behaviors on the left-hand side that you know you might do and practice the suggested behavioral changes on the right.
Healthy intimacy requires strong communication skills.
As you can see from the chart above, the skills are not mysterious or complicated.
They’re not vague or abstract.
They are concrete, tangible, do-able behaviors that you can start to practice right away.
Remember, a series of small right actions can heal emotional wounds and course-correct most relationships.
Far too many couples fail to learn basic skills that can transform their relationship.
With simple behavioral changes, you can stop hurting each other and start to feel alive and happy again.
Good communication skills help you create high levels of relationship clarity, connection and satisfaction.
What resources do you use to help you be a strong, clear communicator? What skills do you use to tune in and listen well?
How do you remember to practice “loving”, consistently?
Unfortunately, today’s media pigeonholes the partner with the “lower” sex drive as dysfunctional. Couples seek out therapy wanting to “fix” the person with the “lower” drive.
But the idea of “fixing” can actually further that person’s sense of feeling like a non-sexual person.
Mismatched Desire
What if I told you that when it comes to mismatched desire, no one needs to be “fixed”?
Let me break down the latest research on understanding libido to help you better understand your personal sex drive and that of your partner.
What We Used to Believe 📖
For many decades, we thought that you needed desire to have sex.
The model looked something like this:
Desire → Arousal → Climax → Rest
Desire leads to arousal, which leads to climax. Then the body returns to a state of rest.
So, according to this model, if you don’t have desire, you can’t become aroused, yadayadayada…
And thanks to the pioneering work and research of Emily Nagoski, Ph.D. who wrote the book Come As You Are, we now have research that helps us better understand how desires differ and why.
As I break this down for you, think about how desire shows up for you.
Think about your partner.
Think about the areas that you feel stuck, hurt, confused and frustrated with desire and sex.
What We Believe Now 🧠
Nagoski’s work shows us that there isn’t just one kind of desire. It’s not a situation where you either have it or you don’t. Desire varies from men to women and it varies within gender as well.
In her research, she identified 3 types of desire: Spontaneous, Responsive and Contextual.
Let’s look at each one and see which applies to you.
Three Types of Sexual Desire ⭐️
Spontaneous desire means that desire shows up instantaneously.
Seventy-five percent of men experience spontaneous desire, 25% of men don’t.
Only 15% of women experience instant desire, whereas 85% of women don’t.
Look at those statistics again. They’re important.
In this description, spontaneous = instant. Sex is merely mentioned or initiated, and desire instantly shows up, ready to go.
Responsive Desire means exactly how it sounds.
This refers to desire that grows in response to some form of stimulation.
When something sexy happens, desire grows. Five percent of men and 30% of women experience responsive desire.
So, if you don’t necessarily initiate sex or think much about it, but tend to respond to your partner’s advances, you may have responsive desire.
Contextual Desire means that sexual desire is dependent on the circumstances and the environment.
Even if you feel stimulated, if the circumstances and the environment don’t work for you, your desire cannot fully show up.
This might help explain why you lack desire when the kids are sleeping in the next room, you had a hard day at work or you feel tired.
For you, context is everything.
Nagoski found that most people, regardless of gender, fall within a blend of responsive and contextual desire, but for some, desire can feel spontaneous, even though it may not be.
They may not realize that the other factors all fell into place in order for their desire to show up “instantaneously”.
Sexual Desire and You 💫
We typically love sharing this information in our couples therapy sessions because it generates so many A-HA! reactions.
Finally, couples can begin to make sense of their experience and better understand each other.
Information like this helps the “lower desire” partner remember that they are capable of desire, lust and erotic expression.
It also helps the “spontaneous” desire partner depersonalize the perceived lack of desire in that partner.
It makes room for us to consider that there is no “right” or “wrong” way to experience desire.
It’s just different for everybody.
So often, as we’ve evolved from being pre-adolescents to teens to adults, we didn’t get the right information about sex.
No one really taught us. We grew into our adult bodies and entered adult romantic relationships lacking critical information!
One of the joys of being a relationship and sex therapist is that we get to set the record straight.
You’re never too old and it’s never too late to get solid, clear, accurate sex education.So which types of desire do you and your partner experience?
Love starts with you. ❤️
Unfortunately, many couples experience divorce before they actually formally divorce.
Divorce is often the result of a silent separation that happens over many years. It creeps in slowly and quietly. No specific trauma required.
In fact, it can happen when couples don’t practice the most fundamental aspects of loving:
Intimacy – genuine care for the welfare of the other, mutually sharing thoughts and feelings, being supportive, practicing empathy
Passion – demonstrating attraction, desire and physical connection through affection and sexual exchanges
Commitment – attending to the relationship in a conscious, mindful way on a consistent basis
It all comes back to this article where we learned about Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love.
Are You in a Spiritual Divorce?
In her book, Learning to Love Yourself, author Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse offers the following symptoms as signs that you may be in a spiritual divorce:
Habitual sadness in the couple – low energy
Mutual sentiments of boredom and emptiness
Indifference to each other’s problems or dreams
Frequent coldness or avoidance in sexual encounters
Lack of small courtesies and politeness
Climate of mutual distrust
More confidence in someone outside the relationship than with each other
Communication routine and superficial
Frequent feelings of being alone or misunderstood
Insults and sarcasm and a discomfort with healthy anger
Much avoidance and littleconfrontation
Overbusy and chaotic social or professional life
Loss of capacity for play and joy
An atmosphere of the “violence of silence” in the home
Notice how many behaviors from this list tie right back to the Triangular Theory of Love.
Passivity, Disengagement and Loss of Interest
What stands out to me in the spiritual divorce is not so much what’s done but what’s not done. This list reflects a couple that has lost interest in each other, who engage passively, lack meaningful dialogue or experiences, live parallel lives, avoid each other and feel lonely even though they share a life together.
In modern love, it’s easy for this to happen, even to couples that were once incredibly close.
Modern-day couples live with unprecedented demands, especially in today’s climate of managing life during a global pandemic along with our charged political climate.
Even in moments where you might feel like you can relax, these issues sit beneath the surface. They’re with you on every shopping trip, school drop-off, family event, work engagement and social media feed.
It’s hard for our bodies and minds to drop into real relaxation. It’s hard to have the energy to be interested in your partner’s day. Life feels hard right now.
If You Find Yourself in a Spiritual Divorce
If you’ve read the list above and can check many of the statements, please don’t panic. You can find your way back to a more connected, loving relationship. It’s not too late.
Here’s a great exercise to try with your partner.
Time Machine
Set aside an hour on a Friday or Saturday night
Make tea or cocktails with a snack
Start to go back in time and remember when you first met
Talk about that day/night
Who approached who?
What attracted you to each other?
What was your first date like? First kiss?
What felt fun and light back then?
What individual hobbies were you into?
How did you like to spend your time as a couple?
As you go back in time, notice how it feels to remember. What do you miss?
What are the qualities that you want to bring back to your life now?
What matters to you most?
How can you make some changes?
What are you both willing to commit to?
Hug often as the night unfolds
You Can Reset and Restart
Finding your groove again as a couple doesn’t always have to require grand gestures. You don’t have to take a vacation somewhere to find each other, although vacations are certainly nice.
Sometimes, a few meaningful conversations can get the ball rolling. But talk isn’t enough.
You have to follow through with action.
What actions can you put into place (remember, small and meaningful go a long way) to start to bridge a divide that might have been growing between you?
What behaviors are you willing to shift to prevent a spiritual divorce?
Have you ever worried about falling “out of love”?
Partners will tell us, “I’m just not ‘in love’ anymore”.
In love. Out of love.
Do these phrases simplify our complex human experience? Do they influence our perspective of love to be all or nothing? You either feel it or you don’t, and by the way, it’s temporary…?
Current research tells us that a predictor for divorce is not infidelity, lack of romance, financial stress, or co-parenting differences.
It’s a lack of love.
Yes, life happens. But conflict between partners arises when they decrease their emotional expression and intimacy, positive regard for each other and demonstrations of caring. Couples can live in that love-less state for years.
Research from the Gottman Institute shows us that on average, couples will wait at least five years before they reach out to a relationship therapist for help.
In the words of playwright Jean Giraudoux, “If two people who love each other let a single instant wedge itself between them, it grows – it becomes a month, a year, a century; it becomes too late.”
So what does it take for a couple to achieve and sustain love for the long haul?
Lucky for us, research shows us specific ways we can make our love sustainable.
“In Love” vs. “Loving”
On our website, we refer to, what most couples call “in love”, as, “the honeymoon phase” of your relationship.
It refers to a common experience during the early dating process where you may have felt lots of excitement about your partner. Sex may have happened often and felt passionate.
In the book, A General Theory of Love, authors, Lewis, Amini and Lannon, distinguish between the honeymoon experience of being “in love” and the experience of “loving”.
They note that being “in love” conjures up the memory of the energy and excitement of a couple’s first meeting and early courtship. In that phase, two people achieve instant attraction and passionate sex, often while barely knowing each other.
They also highlight that our culture values an “in love” status. Books, magazines, movies and media cast images of being “in love” without acknowledging the work involved to maintain that high state of arousal.
The authors show us that the “in love” state shown in the media is merely an entry point to the long-term experience of “loving”… if one chooses.
Further, they explain that “loving” involves “synchronous attunement and modulation”, and requires the investment of time to really know each other. Synchronous means “in person, in real-time”. Modulation refers to adjustment and regulation.
In our take-a-pill, fast-food, high-speed internet, instant messaging culture, “in person, in real-time” experiences become less prioritized. Instant reactivity seems to supercede self-regulation and adjustment.
We expect connection and intimacy to happen quickly or through digital emoji hearts. We are not encouraged to “make time for and attune” to our partners. As the authors put it, we’re encouraged to “achieve, not attach”.
Lewis Amini and Lannon added, “If somebody must jettison a part of life, time with a mate should be last on the list…”
So we know that being “in love” captures an entry point and that loving occurs over time, in multiple, real-time, in person, interactions. It requires us to know the depths of our partners and ourselves.
But what about the sex?
Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love
Now that we can distinguish between being “in love” and “loving”, let’s explore how to actually achieve a “loving” state in relationships.
Some of the foundational work that we do in couples and sex therapy is based upon the research of Robert Sternberg. As a psychologist and social scientist, Sternberg gave us the model of the Triangular Theory of Love.
It is based on the image of a triangle and each corner includes one of the core components of loving relationships.
In fact, our Intimacy Breakthrough course for couples weaves these principles throughout the lesson modules, focused on strengthening your emotional, physical and sexual intimacy.
Let’s explore Sternberg’s three components and how you can apply them.
Three Components to Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love
Sternberg helped us understand that a relationship’s success is not based on one aspect of relating. It’s the combination of different components that make up the whole of how we love.
There may be times when one component feels stronger than another. His work helps us understand that love fluctuates. He also showed us there are different types of love shared between couples throughout the course of their relationship.
Intimacy
Sternberg placed intimacy at the top of the triangle. To Sternberg, intimacy meant the close bonds partners might share with each other. It reflects how interested they are in each other, how they show respect to each other, caring for the welfare of the other and in general, contributing to their partner’s happiness.
Consider your own relationship: How do you and your partner practice intimacy as defined above? How well do you communicate your ideas and feelings? Do you hold each other in high regard? Do you value each other? How warm do you feel around each other?
Passion
To the left of the triangle, Sternberg placed passion. He said that passion is an important component in the beginning of relationships because it reflects strong feelings of desire, attraction and love. Initially, it contributes to the motivation for loving. It combines romance, physical attraction and sex.
Consider your own relationship: How do you and your partner demonstrate romance? How special does your partner make you feel? How might you rate the quality of your sex life on a scale of 1-10, 10 being full satisfaction? How sexy and desired do you feel?
Commitment
To the right side of the triangle is commitment. Commitment refers to a couple’s decision to be together, and in the long term, to the maintenance of their love. It refers to choice. Choice is not limited to a one-time decision in the beginning. It’s a daily exercise of not only choosing your partner, but also of maintaining your love, through thick and thin.
Consider your own relationship: What do you do on a daily, weekly or monthly basis that helps you maintain the love of your relationship? Be careful not to only name the ways you manage life together. Focus on how you behaviorally show your partner that you commit to your love.
Apply This to Your Relationship
The experience of life-long loving, as shown in the Triangular Theory of Love, helps us understand that a healthy relationship cannot succeed on just any one component of the triangle. Even further, we can see that when all areas are strong, the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts.
Naturally, as you ride the ebb and flow of your relationship, there will be times when some components feel stronger than others. There will also be times when the strength of one component will increase the strength of another. And vice versa. They’re interconnected.
Sternberg wrote that when all three components are strong, couples achieve, what he calls consummate love. In consummate love, couples feel happier together than apart, work through conflict with grace, delight in each other’s stories and enjoy a healthy sex life.
We believe that many couples can experience consummate love throughout the lifetime of their relationship but not as a constant state of existence. All relationships ebb and flow. For those couples who worry about any component of the triangle, well, there’s resources that can help greatly improve all three areas.
When couples take our Intimacy Breakthrough course for couples, they get closer to consummate love. They learn to make time for their relationship (commitment), strengthen communication, positive regard, empathy, affection (intimacy) and find their spark through sexual connection (passion).
Consider the questions above, below each component of the triangle. Check-in with yourself. Be honest.
Where can you improve on your loving? What tools do you need to help you do it?
I’ve always said relationships are your greatest vehicle for personal growth and development.
They will challenge you, excite you, and sadden you. They can make you feel high and free or stuck and afraid. They can trigger your old wounds or remind you of how deeply you feel loved or that you belong.
The complexity of your relationship experience extends beyond the person before you. It involves your own history, family of origin, past romances, traumas, and losses. It also includes any hopes, dreams, fantasies, and desires that you have created in your mind’s eye.
It’s no wonder that as we navigate our relationships, we struggle to stay present to our current experiences. Our past is often triggered, or we get stuck on how we thought things ought to be, those dreams and fantasies we hold in our minds.
Our past influences our current experiences.
So much of our past influences our current experience. And we also get attached to ideas about the future without any room for psychological flexibility. Yet, it is only in the present that we have any influence on our experience at all.
Of course, this doesn’t just apply to relationships. In our more difficult life experiences, we are masters of avoidance, distraction, defensiveness and attachment. Then we may wonder why our lives or relationships feel less than satisfying, stressful, empty, and overall less fulfilling than we’d hoped for.
To live fully, you must make room for all of your relational experiences. In this month’s article, I’m going to share some neurosystemic research that can help you understand your experiences better, plus give you tools to feel your feelings and your life more fully without staying stuck in the hard stuff.
Why Does Our Brain Do This?
Polyvagal Theory (PVT) is a modality that helps us understand the ways we move between mobilization, disconnection and engagement. It helps us see how we spend a lot of time in protection energy versus connection energy, in relationships and in life.
Developed by Stephen Porges, PVT teaches us how to better understand our autonomic nervous system and its response patterns. PVT can help you know your internal reactions and states better so that you can learn how to respond instead of react to various life circumstances, particularly those that feel like they threaten your sense of safety and connection.
Since you are neurologically wired to find connection and a sense of belonging, relationships present the greatest threat to your sense of safety.
It can simply take a tone, a look, a body gesture or a snarky comment from someone else to trigger your neurosystem into protective mode. Your protective states will either mobilize you into a fight or flight response or simply shut you down altogether in what’s known as a freeze state.
While relationships present the greatest threat to safety and connection, they also provide the most powerful vehicle to bring you toward a sense of belonging and feeling loved.
So, how do you navigate both sides of this experience, in relationships and in life?
Start By Strengthening Your Mindfulness Skills
As a species, we need our neurosystemic responses to help us survive. Stephen Porges helps us understand that our bodies experience something called neuroception, a surveillance system, if you will, that constantly scans the environment for threats.
Neuroception is cued by the environment and activates your body’s somatic responses. It sends those sensations send signals to your brain. The brain then tries to interpret those signals through perception and creates stories based on this information. This, in turn, influences how you behave or what you decide at a given moment. All of this can happen within nanoseconds, often unconsciously, outside of your awareness.
So, while it’s necessary to have neuroception, your brain may create at times stories that do not accurately represent the current moment. This can create a disservice to your relationships or your life, particularly when past experiences become triggered.
Mindfulness gives you tools to use to help you increase awareness of your internal states so that you can become more conscious of what you feel, how you feel it, and what your brain does with that information. With that awareness, you can decide how to live and respond from a conscious, intentional state of being.
4 Steps to Bring Mindfulness to Neuroception
Deb Dana, Ph.D., PVT practitioner and author of The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, wrote about the “A, B, C and Ds of Neuroception”, which align well with mindfulness practices. I’ve broken down each component below:
A – Recognize that your autonomic response is constant; it’s always happening. It’s designed to help you assess threats and danger in order to survive. It also assesses safety and connection and exists as the undercurrent to all of your life experiences.
B – Learn to bring awareness to your autonomic responses so that you can influence your own perception of your experiences. Learn how to “be with” rather than “be in” the experience from an observer stance. This helps interrupt the pattern of living on autopilot, often driven by old patterns of being.
C – Learn to connect to yourself first with a compassionate stance. A key component to mindfulness and polyvagal theory is practicing an inner dialogue of kindness and care. You can learn how to bring safety and connection to yourself from within.
D – By interrupting the automatic, knee-jerk responses that you may have, you make room for developing and deepening curiosity about your patterns, reactions and beliefs. From a more regulated state, you can reconnect with yourself and others, make healthy changes and create a new story.
Coming Home
Vulnerability sits at the core of intimate relationships; therefore, it makes sense that relationships can often trigger our sense of safety and connection. Our autonomic nervous system constantly scans faces, bodies, tones, gestures, and more for danger, as well as for belonging.
However, if we cannot understand or regulate what’s ultimately happening within our own bodies and minds, it’s difficult to then regulate what happens in the space between ourselves and others.
Mindfulness offers us the tools to know how to come home to ourselves first, in our own bodies. It helps us strengthen attention and awareness internally and externally so that we can be with our experiences and not over-identify with any of them, good or bad.
Learning how to live in our own bodies and minds first helps us bring higher levels of consciousness to our lives and relationships.
Ultimately, it helps us disrupt patterns of automatic responses. We then establish a positive relationship with ourselves by achieving connection and safety from within. It is only then that we can make choices and behave in ways that truly support what we actually want – safety, connection, belonging, and ultimately, love.
