Emotional connection
People say to me, "Relationship problems are about differences." And I say no. If you look at happy couples, they have huge differences. The point is, if you can create a safe emotional connection, you can deal with all kinds of differences and still reach for each other, and feel loved. It's the emotional responsiveness that matters. And if you don't have that, then every difference is a sign of separateness, a sign that your partner is indifferent to you.
In your book Hold Me Tight, you talk about the following dynamic: A wife appeals to her husband for an emotional connection, he responds intellectually, and she internalizes this as no response. Basically, the man wants to solve things by dispensing advice, but the woman wants something else entirely.
That's right. And the really sad thing is that the men are trying to be good husbands when they do that. Men have been taught that a good man fixes stuff. So a man might look at his wife and say, "Oh, she's upset. Right, I've got to fix it." And he goes into cognitive mode. It's so sad to watch because most of the time she's asking for him. She's asking for her husband to be emotionally present. If the man were to say, "I see you're hurting right now, but I don't know what to do," the woman would respond to that, because he's there emotionally.
Why do you think people are so afraid to get to that place of intense emotional connection?
I think we haven't understood emotion. Leaving emotion out of love relationships is like leaving peanut butter out of the peanut butter sandwich — it's dumb. In the past, we've viewed emotion as a problem; we believed we needed to take emotion out of the equation — just get couples to be reasonable, get them to make deals with each other for different behaviours. Well, it doesn't work that way. You can't make a deal for compassion, sexual desire, love. It's not a cognitive deal.
What's the first step for a couple who comes to you for help?
First, we give them hope. And that in itself is a big step forward from when couples therapists would say, "Well, we've got a few interventions and maybe we can try this."
