Moody Bitches: The Truth about the Drugs You’re Taking, the Sleep You’re Missing, the Sex You’re Not Having and What’s Really Making You Crazy.... Julie Holland
self-hatred fueling that burning rage.
Something else to keep in mind: we re-create our childhood environment as we project our hurts, insecurities, fears, angers, and anything else from our traumatic pasts onto our partners. If our parents were reliable and warm, we’ll be drawn to that type of relationship in adult life. If they were disengaged, neglectful, inconsistent, or self-involved, that’s the type of person we’ll pick for our mate.
The brain isn’t very good at discerning past from present social pain. Partners often unwittingly trigger each other by re-creating early scenes that were tagged as emotionally salient in the past. No matter how idyllic your childhood was, you had psychological trauma. At some point your needs weren’t met and it left you devastated. Any reminder of an early attachment failure will set off alarm bells in the stress network of the brain and body. The memory centers of the hippocampus will grade how emotional an experience is with help from the amygdala, the fear center. Frontal input gives the final yes or no on what gets expressed. This is why the more mindful and present you are, the less emotionally reactive you’ll be. Mindfulness strengthens that final frontal inhibition, the “don’t do it or you’ll be sorry” part of the brain. Higher cognitive functions are shut down by intense emotions. Cultivating mindfulness can help maintain an emotional balance within you and between you and your partner. Enhancing awareness can help to strengthen the “top-down” control, enhancing rationality and dampening emotional reactivity. Here we have the conscious marriage, using mindfulness to keep your attachment strong.
In yoga, the postures that you hate performing are the ones your body likely needs the most. That’s why they’re the hardest. They reveal your weakest, most inflexible parts. In life, the people whom you find the most challenging inevitably are the ones who have the most to teach you. Unlike codependent couples who enable unhealthy behavior, conscious couples enable positive, healthy aspects of each other’s behavior, and in the process they heal each other’s childhood wounds. The goal is for each of you to stretch toward the middle, widening your shared repertoire of behavior. As opposites, you each have the blueprint for the other’s personal growth. Individuals need to harmonize their own feminine and masculine qualities; so do couples. Balancing the yin and yang qualities that each of you brings to the table will benefit both of you.
To my patient who’s always complaining about her husband, I said something like this: “Stop fixating on how he isn’t like you. Nobody is, and you wouldn’t want to be yoked to your carbon copy anyway. The fact that he’s so many things you’re not, and vice versa, is exactly what makes your partnership work. Opposites attract for a reason. The two of you make something bigger than each of you alone ever could. An effective team.”
Division of Labor: Sex and Power
Interesting news: we’re becoming the men we wanted to marry. The number of women who are their family’s sole or primary breadwinner has soared, to 40 percent today from 11 percent in 1960. Things are switching around from where they were in the fifties, when women were warned, “If you sink into his arms, you’ll find your arms in his sink.” Back then, men had career goals, and women wanted those men. These days, women are bringing home the bacon, and one out of five married moms has a higher income than her husband. A recent business school survey showed more women defining success through work, while men chose personal growth as a priority. A common configuration in New York City is the alpha woman working at an executive-level position married to a guy who works at home on his computer, if he works at all. He picks the kids up from school and might do some household chores while Mommy has meetings and travels for work. Powerful woman, slacker husband. See, opposites really do attract.
Because nearly two-thirds of families have two working parents, it’s a toss-up to see who’s going to be doing which chores. My thinking is, some people are more or less meticulous about particular things, so you divide the chores accordingly. Fess up to each other about the housework you don’t mind doing. Owning up to your traits is one way to be more authentic in your relationship. Sharing earnings and household chores decreases the likelihood of divorce, unless the wife earns more than her husband—then they’re more likely to report marital troubles and consider separating. The best odds arise if the wife earns around 40 percent of the household income and the husband does about 40 percent of the housework.
Even though the egalitarian marriage creates higher emotional satisfaction and promotes longevity of a relationship, there is a casualty. Sex. On one hand, women surveyed made clear that marrying a man who was willing to help out with the child care and household chores mattered more than his level of income or his religious beliefs. We want to marry a housewife as much as they do. The problem is, we don’t want to have sex with the maid. It turns out that sexism is sexy. We want the men to do the manly chores, like taking out the garbage and maintaining the car. When our husbands are doing dishes and laundry, we’re less likely to have sex with them.
I can’t tell you how many of my patients are in sexless marriages, but it’s more than I ever would have thought. These are perfectly peaceful partnerships where the division of labor seems adequate, and there’s love and comfort there, just no sex for very long stretches—months or years. There’s a spark missing, a frisson between partners that’s required for animal coupling. One requirement for sexual energy is gender differentiation. You’re manly and I’m womanly and those opposites attract. In households with stay-at-home dads, it may be that he feels less confident without his “day job,” and his harried, working wife may start to lose some respect for his position. Men who take care of the children and the house may seem a little less manly to us when we finally plop into bed at night, even though we tell them how happy we are with the division of labor during the day. What’s the problem? Equality and “consensual everything” just isn’t sexy.
For many of us, part of what makes sex hot is shifts in power. Being controlled, dominated, or “taken” is a common factor in arousal. As much as we’re for women’s liberation, some habits die very hard, especially in the bedroom. There is often a direct correlation between being powerful outside the home, in the boardroom, and then wanting to be submissive in the bedroom. It may be that when a man spends his days loading the dishwasher according to his wife’s tutorial, or folding laundry just so, he’s got no more mojo for doing his wife to her specifications.
Then there’s resentment. So unsexy, and so common. Wives in my office regularly voice their complaints about how hard they work, how they don’t get the help and support they desire and deserve, and it’s impossible to ignore these discrepancies at the end of the day when they finally turn in. Sometimes the bedroom is the only place where we can say no and have it be a complete sentence.
The Seven-Year Itch Is Real
As might be expected, the longer a couple stays together, the more likely sexual infidelity will eventually happen, with a spike in the numbers around seven years of marriage. When gender is teased out, the timing differs. Women are more likely to cheat in their twenties and less likely in their fifties, while men are most likely to cheat in their thirties. The likelihood of an affair peaks in the seventh year of marriage for women and then ebbs from there. For men, the likelihood of an affair decreases over time, until the eighteenth year of marriage; then it increases. High-risk times for men straying tend to cluster around pregnancy and the months following the birth of a child. This may be psychological more than biological as men’s testosterone levels naturally recede a bit when they’re new dads. But if their needs for sex and attention aren’t being