Dear Miriam, 
I feel quite odd writing this letter. You probably don’t receive a lot of letters from men. But, I want to express something that I am sure a lot of us wonder about: Where is the woman I fell for? How has something that started out so great turned into a loveless (and sexless) marriage?
B.G., 34, Married 6 (LONG) years…

Dear B.G., 
Let us talk about love, sex, and communication. “Where is the woman I feel for? What happened to the woman I loved?” Essentially, you both cry, “You’re not what I expected!” After many, many hours of counseling couples (both, married and unmarried), I am still amused that in almost every case, both man and woman are looking for the same intimate connection and love, but don’t see it. Why do we not see that our partners have the same needs and desires as we? Because the natural ways of going about meeting these needs are quite different. You’re probably too familiar with the old cliché “for a woman to feel sex, she needs love. For a man to feel love, he needs sex.” Did you ever wonder why that is? To summarize; for women, the primary way of connecting is through sharing and communication. For men, the primary way of connecting is through action and creation; thus, making love.

It would take too much time to explore why and how these differences come to be, but we can all see that times have changed. The traditional methods of relation that we’ve learned from our parents are now counterproductive. Our parents couldn’t teach us “new rules”, because that generation still played out the traditional male and female roles. We need to learn these “new rules” of relation, rules that define new roles! A husband who “brings home the bacon”, or a wife who maintains a nice home and takes care of the kids – these things are no longer enough to create a lasting, fulfilling relationship. There is a new way to understand and communicate that offers a way of creating and sustaining loving and fulfilling relationships; we can celebrate our differences in love and with love. It is much easier and much more enjoyable than to live in a loveless home.

In the words of Dr. Viscott, “The best of all things is to belong to a family. To come home… and simply be let in, to be each other’s.”

Love and Blessings,
Miriam