Nurturing Relationship

Close loving relationships provide the potential for the highest lovemaking possible. It is worth nurturing relationship if you want to open up more possibilities in the area of your lovemaking, because as your relationship grows closer, your love grows deeper and sex gets better. There is nothing better than having a fabulous sexual experience with the person whom you love the most in life. Sex can be fabulous out-of-relationship, but it can be even more fabulous with a person who deeply loves and trusts you  because then you have the intimacy as well as the sexual passion.

The topic of relationships deserves a whole book, so I won’t try to cover everything I have studied, experienced and taught in this area. However, I would like to point out some of the things that I feel have been a great asset in keeping my marriage together and the relationships of many others with whom Diane and I have worked.

First of all, in discussing relationships it is important to point out that relationships in their current form in our society are not working. Statistics show that in Western societies more than fifty percent of married couples get divorced. Once we fall in love, we get married and take the vow to honour and love each other forever, in sickness and in health. Even though we may truly hope for this at the time, the evidence is that fairytale marriages ‘they got married and lived happily ever after’ are rare. Yet deep down many people still expect this to happen for them, and when it doesn’t, they get deeply hurt.

If, on the other hand, we had been conditioned to accept and honour ‘serial monogamy’ as the norm, then we wouldn’t put such pressure on ourselves or our partner to be happily married and in love for a lifetime.

Is nurturing relationship worthwhile?

But that is not how we are conditioned by the fairytales and by society. Our society has decreed that we marry for love and that love should last for a lifetime. This is a wonderful proposition. However, because we are given little or no education on how to achieve it, it’s destined to fail.

In Challenge of the Heart, by John Welwood;s1, it is pointed out that ‘no earlier society has ever tried, much less succeeded at, joining together romantic love, sex, and marriage in a single institution.’ In traditional societies it was normal for marriages to be arranged by the families. Happiness was not the goal of marriage, which was more to do with family lineage and property. Feelings of love were never considered a reason for marriage. Marriage for love was not attempted until the nineteenth century. However, it was regarded as degrading for a woman in Victorian times to have sexual feelings, so men often had sex with prostitutes.

It’s important to understand the impact of this, to understand that you are a pioneer, one of the first of mankind throughout history to even attempt to combine love, sex and marriage. No wonder you have difficulties. It’s not simply to do with you and your partner’s inadequacies. It’s a huge challenge and there is very little education on how to combine love, sexual passion and marriage for a lifetime together. That’s why I love the work Diane and I do with couples on a journey into love. The average couple will not look at this type of education until they have big marital troubles.