The Pandemic Coupledom 2021: A Year of Reinventing the Meaning of “Us” A Year of Loss How is your Coupledom doing a year into the abhorrent challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic? Have you suffered the greatest price, the loss of a loved one – your partner or your parent, your child or your friend? I […]
Intimacy
Toolkit of New Years Vows for 2016
New Years Vows 2016: Each Day 1. Each Day I will wonder about you – how are you doing? How was your day? And each day I will take a moment to ask you. And each day I will actually listen to your answer. 2. Each Day I will tell you the truth. Each day […]
Lonely in The Coupledom: Post Holiday Blues
How Were The Holidays? The post holiday season can be an especially challenging time for couples. Perhaps you are empty nesters and the kids went back to school. Could be your vicarious thrill in watching your young children’s Christmas joy has waned with the new year or maybe when the grandparents flew back to home […]
The Poison Sex Dart: Objectifying Love
Not a Prescription Nor a Cure, Just a Perspective: What does it take for two people to always feel mutually stimulated and sated in a long-term relationship? Probably magic. As a therapist what strikes me as most ironic and piercingly problematic is that the bedroom, specifically and most likely, the bed, often evolves into being […]
Getting Married? How To Stay Sexy Together From The Inside Out
A Gift Of A Mind-Set: The wedding date is approaching and you and your partner may already be residing together. Or you may be living apart but have enjoyed sexual intimacy for sometime. Perhaps the two of you have delayed that most intimate of connections for your wedding night. Then again, you may be amongst […]
The Un-Romantic Bed
Bill Maher: If ever there were an unromantic guy, it is Bill Maher with his surgeon-like skill to slice away all artifice and get to the earthy or seamy underbelly of so much of life, political and otherwise. Recently, he made a comment about sleep which got me thinking about the unromantic aspect of sleeping […]
Couples Counseling: A Tool For Life?
Checking In: When a couple comes in for counseling, they are motivated by a personal crisis, either within The Coupledom or one pressing on the Coupledom. Typical triggers are a particularly volatile fight, an encounter with relatives/in-laws that leads to a clash of attitudes, a financial crisis, a child’s acting-out, loss, an affair, a suspected […]
Who Listens? Let It Be Your Coupledom
Telling Stories: Someone asked a psychiatrist ‘How can you listen to people talk about their problems all day.’ Comedic pause. Psychiatrist: ‘Who listens?’ Of course many of you may have anecdotes or evidence that validates that ironic response but one could insert husband and wife or wife and husband, in any particular order, and make […]
The Coupledom Dreams: Using Our Unconscious To Communicate
Talking In Our Sleep: Lying next to each other, so near yet in our own worlds, The Coupledom dreams, every night in fact, during what is called the REM stage of sleep, which amounts to approximately 25% of sleeping time. Yet what do we do with this rich resource of mental activity as a couple? […]
The Affair: A Symptom of Marriage Rot or A Rotten Spouse?
Affairs Come In Colors: Not all infidelities look alike. The red-hot mega-media adulteries are not the prototype for most unfaithful Coupledoms. The shades of color for the common household variety of betrayal are in grays, not black, white or red-hot. Yet folks on either side of the betrayal highway feel more comfortable thinking in black, […]
Husbands Without Friendships or Heart: Why?
Boys Are Socially Illiterate? Niobe Way, a psychologist at New York University whose area of specialty is adolescent development, recently published a book entitled Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and The Crisis of Connection. The book focuses on her research on male adolescent friendships, her experience as a high school guidance counselor and observations as the […]
Bully Wives? Yes, But They Don’t Know It.
Powerful Impact: Women are depicted as the “weaker sex”; have been for centuries. And in so many ways the inculcation of that notion, along with certain biological and physical realities, has successfully rendered them so, a state many of us fight each day. Yet there are times when sitting in my office, or out socializing, […]
Oldies but Goodies: Sex In The Coupledom: A Powerful Absence
Happy Labor Day Weekend! Jill is taking a break from the blog this weekend to rest and relax post Hurricane Irene. Here is one of her most popular posts from the past year or so. Excerpt: No Shame Needed Here: The fact that a significant number of couples are not having great sex, frequent sex […]
Oldies but Goodies: Weight Gain, Sex, And The Coupledom: Weight Tells A Story
Happy Labor Day Weekend! Jill is taking a break from the blog this weekend to rest and relax post Hurricane Irene. Here is one of her most popular posts from the past year or so. Excerpt: A Forbidden Topic: Weight talk in a relationship is so tricky and full of traps that most couples avoid […]
The Coupledom: Is It Too Late?
Inspiration: This post was inspired by a friend. He calls it “Nurture the Coupledom.” He and his wife arranged for their child to be left with grandparents for her first overnight to enable them to “go out”, as in a “date night.” I could hear his pride both in his daughter’s readiness for this big […]
Stereotyping The Coupledom
Stereotyping Your Partner: One marvels at the power of gender stereotyping in The Coupledom, that domicile in which the relationship resides. Years, even decades into a marriage, partners interpret behaviors in the language of expected gender norms. Often these interpretations are inaccurate and create emotional distance rather than facilitate connectedness. Dismissive or Disengaged? At the […]
Owning Your Stuff Builds Coupledom Trust
Trust Busters: There are ample ways to mar and maim belief in someone’s regard for you. Trust marring can be as fleeting as overhearing a derisive comment about you, or as weighty as discovering romantic texts and hotel charges. Like the derma that covers our organs, we have muslin-like layers of protection covering our emotions; […]
Weight Gain, Sex, And The Coupledom: Weight Tells A Story
Weighty Topic: In recent days I read an alarming article on newly published obesity statistics nationally, glimpsed a Today show segment on a book about post-its to make overweight folks feel beautiful, and browsed through a piece in The New York Times Magazine on retail’s struggle to provide a profit margin in dressing the overweight […]