OUR MARITAL HEALTH/SEX AND PROBLEMS OF DAILY LIVING: FOR LOVE AND MONEY
May 18th, 2009 | Posted by admin | Category: General healthNo Comments
You would think we would be able to deal with money. There isn’t much of it anyway. We spend more minutes on money than we have money. I wish we got paid to worry about money. We’d be rich.
HUSBAND
There are several books that trace the relationship between love and managing money. Carol Colman’s book Love and Money explores some of the patterns that evolve in marriage related to financial issues. Money seems to be the great quantifier of worth in our society and even in our marriages. Earlier in this chapter you read about the man who had sexual problems because of his wife’s higher salary. Several of the couples reported problems in this area.
Here are some of the adjustments couples made to issues of money and sex. Discuss these and the other problem remembering that super marital sex is a process, not a goal.
The Banker: This spouse feels that his or her entire self-esteem is measured by his or her control of the family finances. He or she controls the checkbook, saving books, all shopping, buying, allowances, and investments and seems to get more enjoyment out of a balanced checkbook than a balanced love life. Super marital sex cannot survive if partners exclusively assume any one marital task.
The Client: This is the spouse who is married to the Banker. He or she may criticize the lack of money, poor investments, missing checks, the size of the grocery bill, but make little effort to share the financial responsibility. The Client defaults financially, and so ends up defaulting sexually, feeling unfulfilled but helpless to correct the problem because the spouse “is responsible.”
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SUPER LOVE FOR SUPER SEX/LOVE-MAP LANDMARKS: DESCRIBE A “SEX REHEARSAL”: SEX PLAY YOU ENGAGED IN WITH SOMEONE OF YOUR OWN GENDER
May 18th, 2009 | Posted by admin | Category: General healthNo Comments
Same-gender sex play is common, and most spouses could remember a specific time when they engaged in such behavior. Think back to your own sex play with a same-gender person, perhaps a sibling, a cousin, a neighborhood friend?
“That’s easy,” one wife reported. “We had a breast-comparison contest. My best friend and 1.1 must have been about fourteen or so, and so was she. It started out with looking, then she touched mine and I touched hers. It wasn’t like sex excitement like it is an adult, but a tingling sensation. I imagined she was a boy. Somehow we kissed. She stuck her tongue in my mouth, and I started to spit. I spat until I was dry.”
This wife had mentioned a concern that she might be homosexual, not an atypical concern of the wives. She felt guilty even now, and added that “I’m still curious about other women’s breasts.” She was converting natural curiosity and arousal to fear and misunderstanding. Love maps can take wrong rums when we compare what happened to us in our natural learning with what we fear might happen to us.
“We just unzipped each other’s pants and reached in. I touched his penis and he touched mine. Then we watched each other pee,” reported one husband. “I think he is probably a fag now as an adult, because he was the instigator.”
There are societies in which the absence of homosexuality activity during sexual development is viewed as abnormal. One such society is the Sambia tribe of New Guinea, where all young boys are expected to live temporarily with males, ingesting semen as a counterbalance to their drinking of mother’s milk. Only after this act takes place can they truly become men. We must look far beyond our own ethnocentrism if we are to begin to leam about the evolution of gender orientation. Certainly, sex play with the same gender is almost universal in our own society, and fears about it only block further healthy love mapping.
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