Do we marry the wrong people?

An article about "How We End Up Marrying the Wrong People" in the Philosopher's Mail is wonderfully thought provoking, full of great insights and very wrong.  I probably should agree with it since it recommends that people undergo lots of self-reflection and guided psychological processes before they get married.  In fact, the last line is a call for "psychological marriages."  Sounds like it would be good for business. 

The good.  

The article -- which, oddly, is unsigned -- has many fantastic observations about relationships.

“We ‘project’ a range of perfections into the beloved on the basis of only a little evidence. In elaborating a whole personality from a few small – but hugely evocative – details, we are doing for the inner character of a person what our eyes naturally do with the sketch of a face.
We don’t see this as a picture of someone who has no nostrils, eight strands of hair and no eyelashes. Without even noticing that we are doing it, we fill in the missing parts. Our brains are primed to take tiny visual hints and construct entire figures from them – and we do the same when it comes to the character of our prospective spouse. We are – much more than we give ourselves credit for, and to our great cost – inveterate artists of elaboration.”

This is a lovely way of showing us how much we project onto our partners.  I spend a lot of time with couples trying to get people to disentangle what they want or fear or expect from their partners, from what their partners are actually saying or doing or feeling. 

“Prior to marriage, we’re rarely involved in dynamics that properly hold up a mirror to our disturbances. Whenever more casual relationships threaten to reveal the ‘difficult’ side of our natures, we tend to blame the partner – and call it a day. As for our friends, they predictably don’t care enough about us to have any motive to probe our real selves. They only want a nice evening out. Therefore, we end up blind to the awkward sides of our natures.”

In my experience, both personal and professional this is true.  Couplehood can make us to examine our faults because there is a lot at stake.  But is knowing oneself a prerequisite for a good marriage?  Of course a publication called the Philosopher's Mail thinks so.  Me, not so much.  

The Mistake

What follows from this smart, though pessimistic, view of human nature and relationships -- that a battery of psychological testing prior to marriage will enhance self-knowledge and knowledge of the other person and thereby fix what ails marriages -- is a mistake.  A whopper of a mistake.  A mistake on the order of picking a life-partner with eight strands of hair and no nostrils. 

The mistake is that it both underestimates and overestimates what psychology is. 

I recently saw a couple who had been married for 25 years in which the man was completely resistant to all my psychological blandishments, he wasn't hostile or 'in denial' or 'defended'; he just was completely uninterested in his own motivations.  As he saw it, over the course of a long marriage, he had forgotten to treat his wife well and now he wanted a chance to do what she was asking for; more attention, more romance, more sex.  I wanted to know 'why' but after three sessions he had changed and she was happy.  The surgery was a disaster but the patient not only survived but felt much better.  The lesson: Who cares 'why' if a relationship works?  There are plenty of couples who are happy enough, for enough of the time that they don't need to spend a lot of time reflecting on it.  (This is one of the great discoveries of John Gottman's research).  It is easy to extrapolate from unhappy couples in a therapist's office to assume that all couples are unhappy.  The dubious statistic (Philosopher's Mail, thankfully does not) about 50% failed marriages can re-enforce this idea (for why the statistic needs to be taken with a grain of salt see here).  Even if we grant it for a moment that 50% of marriages will last sixty years, it is worth noting that the vast majority do so without without anybody ever stepping into a shrink's office.  As I have remarked before, marriages, like people, are resilient.  A realistically optimistic focus on individual and couple resiliency is honest and healthy. 

The most serious problems people encounter in couples are not magnifications of the same problems they encounter in friendships or the work place.  The reason for that is that a couple relationship isn't the same as other relationships.  I see a lot of young couples, couples who have recently moved in together after a year or two of dating.  They fight, they hurt.  They come in bewildered because what they are experiencing is so different from what happens in the rest of their lives and what happened for the first year of their relationship. 

From what I have seen, after a year or two in a relationship, if and when we feel safe with our partners people sometimes do something different than they do in other relationships such as friendships.  My metaphor for this is: we come to our partner timidly, expectantly, filled with hope and reach out to them and offer them a beautiful silver platter filled with our shit.  When we feel safe and loved and secure enough we bring out things that we haven't paid attention to or thought about or reflected on for years, things that we are ashamed of, afraid of, mistrustful of, don't have any idea how to handle.  It is a paradox that the tribute of love is our own least loved parts.  These are things that psychological testing won't discover.  And our partner's reaction to us offering up our damaged bits can't be easily predicted. 

Couples can and should talk about their expectations: money, career, housework, children, sex.  People need to be honest with themselves about what is important in a partner but also need to know that will change over time. 

I don't believe in compatibility so much as I believe in kindness, flexibility and positivity.  Those qualities will see couples over a lot of hard stuff including a lot of incompatibility.  

Teen use of internet porn. When is it time to panic?

The ubiquity of pornography has got to be one of the biggest changes in society in my lifetime.  An acquaintance asked me what I thought the long-term effects of total access to porn would be for shaping the sexuality of kids growing up today and I really had no idea how to answer.  There is much heat and little light on the subject because sexuality in general and kids' sexuality in particular is such a fraught topic.  

On the one hand, today's nearly unlimited access to pornography via the internet is part of the demystification of sexuality which has been building steam over the last one hundred years.  It is connected -- at least in a six-degrees-of-fornication kind of way -- to changes which I view as absolute social goods, like decriminalizing miscegenation and homosexuality, allowing women (and everybody) a greater degree of control over reproduction and generally removing some of the shame from sexuality for everyone, male, female, gay, straight etc.  It is worth remembering that lynchings of non-white men for sex with white women, death by back-alley abortion and 'curbing' of gay people are pieces of North American history that happened within living memory (and are practices some would like us to return to).  The impulse to curb sexual freedom, including the freedom to view porn, can be an instrument of sexual repression and shame.  A lot of the conversation about pornography and young people -- any sexual topic and young people for that matter -- seems to smack of a old-person's cocktail of wistfulness and resentment ie. "If I can't have lots of crazy sex, then nobody should."  

On the other hand, pornography has to own some of the criticisms made of it; it is hugely male-oriented and at least some significant portion is downright anti-women.  It seems pretty intuitive that a barrage of woman-degrading porn would do anybody's developing sexuality harm.  More generally, porn is, by definition, commercial sexual objectification.  Young men and women who grow up viewing sexuality (and we are talking largely about women's sexuality) as an object for purchase or trade, rather than a subjective experience seem more likely to generalize some of those lessons to non-porn sex.  These are both arguments that can be made about any type of pornography.  There is also a particular techno-bent to some anti-porn writing that makes the argument that a quantitative difference of the internet makes for a qualitative difference. 

“What happens when you drop a male rat into a cage with a receptive female rat? First, you see a frenzy of copulation. Then, progressively, the male tires of that particular female. Even if she wants more, he has had enough. However, replace the original female with a fresh one, and the male immediately revives and gallantly struggles to fertilize her.
You can repeat this process with fresh females until he is completely wiped out.
This is called the Coolidge effect—the automatic response to novel mates. It’s what started you down the road to getting hooked on Internet porn.”

— http://yourbrainonporn.com/doing-what-you-evolved-to-do

Digression:  Perhaps 2014 should be the year that nobody says "The area of the brain that lights up when..."  Regular readers will know that I am sceptical of some of the claims of 'brain science'.  The next post on "Your brain on porn" has fMRI images showing how sections of the brain "light up" when exposed to porn which proves that the subjects of the brain scans are addicted much as people get addicted to heroin. ( A primer on fMRI goofiness. )  Here is a picture of a dead fish in a fMRI with its brain lighting up when asked to imagine humans in social situations.

End digression:  There is a growing set of men who say that they are addicted to internet porn and/or incapable of erections with actual humans as a result of using porn regularly.  This is a tough claim to verify since it is so subjective.  Men may experience less frequent erections and attribute that to the use of porn; that doesn't necessarily mean that was the primary cause.  That is what is known as the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.  It does seem to make intuitive sense that if you don't masturbate for a long time you are more likely to experience an erection in a particular circumstance.  It also seems like it would be pretty hard to look at a lot of porn and avoid masturbating, so the two do go hand in glove (as it were). There is a whole online Nofap community where people, mostly men, pledge to stop masturbating and/or viewing porn.  They support one another to achieve goals in days.  When does this shade over into shaming a normal and healthy sexual behaviour that has already been the target of a lot of shame?  I wrote a blog post a while ago about Marty Klein's argument that the term "sex addiction" is a way for people living in a sex negative culture not to address their sexual desires about which they feel incredible shame. 

There are a couple of things I am pretty confident about in all of this. 

1.  The whole "erectile dysfunction" piece of the conversation about porn and masturbation needs to get scaled way back.  Men are easily goaded into thinking that a rock hard penis is the only legitimate route to sex.  That's false and it isn't good for men's sexuality (or for their partners).  Start having sex without an erection and you may get one.  Keep having sex after an erection goes away, and it may come back.  But if you make having and maintaining an erection a prerequisite, that can mean a lot of heart ache.  Paradoxically, lots of porn and lots of nofap both seem to perpetuate the myth of no sex without an erection. 

2.  Porn is not sex education.  Teens need to know that what they will see in porn is not what happens between most people's sheets. Talking to teens about what porn is and isn't is part of the job description of every parent, and that needs to go beyond telling them it's bad or women-hating.  Porn:Human Sex::2Fast2Furious:Driving.  A fantasy. 

3. Teens will try to make their own porn.  Not every teen but plenty of them.  Maybe not your kid but plenty of kids your kid knows.  As Dan Savage has pointed out, smart phones are -- among other things -- mobile porn production and distribution suites.  And parents hand them over to kids without thinking about or talking about that.  If you must give your teen a smart phone, disable the camera.  Tell your kids you will search through the contents of their phones and then follow through.  Millions of adult Americans use their phones this way, should we expect teens to act any more maturely? 

Your therapist, Ron Swanson?

Men often fear that therapy is stacked against them.  Whether it is couple, family or individual therapy, they think that they are entering a domain where their skills and strengths will be counted as liabilities and they will be asked to do things that aren't just difficult or scary but unbecoming.  That isn't a man problem.  That's a therapy problem.  I was talking recently with another male therapist, Dr. Darrell Johnson, a friend and mentor.  I mentioned this campaign to him... (Okay, it isn't Ron Swanson but a Ron Swanson knock-off.)

It is from the Office of Suicide Prevention of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.  It's geared at connecting with men, particularly working-age 25-54 men who are twice as likely to commit suicide as any other age group according to the white paper that was used to develop the Mantherapy campaign (US stats).  Darrell and I talked about the idea that men are typically more resistant to therapy (part of what accounts for their higher suicide rates than women).  I joked that soon it would be possible for therapists to use cookies to give different design templates to their websites so that women and men would be presented with different web sites that are gender specific since too much "feelings" language might be off-putting for men, essentially presenting themselves as Rick Mahogany when men click through.  But the Colorado campaign doesn't seem to have been a raging success despite the high production values.  The Richard Mahogany video that has the most views on YouTube is at around 8,000.  Maybe those are 8,000 saved lives and if so, great, but I don't imagine that therapy's problem with men has been touched much.  I think the character seems inauthentic, not just playfully unreal, and for men or women authenticity in therapy is important. 

There were a few things in the white paper that I thought were really interesting for therapists to consider about working with men, things that hadn't occurred to me despite having worked with boys and men a lot.  One is the value men often place on fixing something themselves and how to make therapy an exercise in 'solving it myself (or ourselves) with help'.  One man said to the researchers of the white paper, "Show me how to stitch up my own wound like Rambo."  Okay, that's some pretty serious hyper-masculinity but the point is that therapy can benefit from emphasizing the client's efficacy in problem-solving with the therapist as trusted assistant. 

The other thing that I thought was really wonderful was the importance some men place on giving back.  I was in Hawaii last year.  A companion and I went kayaking.  We visited a small island and had a great time but when we went to get back in our kayak, we got hit by several waves in succession and my companion got knocked over in the surf and couldn't get up.  I watched, barely able to keep myself afloat trapped on the other side of the kayak thinking I might very well see this strong, capable person drown before my eyes in three and half feet of water.  But before that could happen two kayakers (much more capable than us) grabbed our kayak and my companion, hoisting him out of the water.  I thanked them.  They said, "That's what we do."  They viewed helping as part and parcel of who they were.  I, on the other hand, felt grateful but unsatisfied as they paddled away.  I couldn't pay back the debt I owed them.  Therapy is a uni-directional process as far as help goes; codes of ethics forbid outside relationships so it is very hard for a client to pay his debt with his skills through labour exchange or barter.  I never thought about how important it can be for some clients to be able to show their competency and mastery to a therapist by doing meaningful work or sharing their own products, to give help for help received, and that men might feel that more acutely.  The report points out how central the idea of repaying a debt is to AA, for instance.  Now I am considering requiring clients in some circumstances to agree to pay part of the cost of therapy by "paying forward" to others using their own strengths and capabilities (see the Milwaukee African Violet Queen).  Ron, would like the idea of paying off your therapy by carving duck decoys with kids in an after-school program? 

"I'm a a bit fearful that we are verging on what I call 'feelings territory.'"

Most disasterous parent-child sex talk ever?

Talking with kids about sex can be tough for parents even when we think we're ready for it.  Julia Sweeney gives the best (or worst) account of having the sex talk with a child ever. 

I actually think listening to this is a great way to prepare yourself for talking with kids about sex.  Once the topic comes up, kids, especially young kids may ask all sorts of questions that we might never expect, but that are pretty obvious if you take some time to consider it from their perspective.  After all, everything about sex seems pretty unlikely to an eight year old. 

Also her account is loving and humorous and sort of makes the point that we all make mistakes when we talk about sex with kids, and if we have a loving relationship with our kids, we will get lots of chances to go back and talk more.  The importance of having an ongoing dialogue with your kids about sex was demonstrated by a 2008 study done by researchers at Ste. Justine hospital, here in Montreal.  That study found that while parents assumed their adolescents looked to friends and celebrities to shape their attitudes towards sex, teens (the study was of teenage girls) report that it is their parents who are their most significant role models, but that despite that they do not feel comfortable talking with them about sexuality.  So take heart, your child will look to you more than peers or the popular culture for her ideas about sexuality but you should start laying the groundwork for conversations about sex early.   

The label of "sex addict" and sex negativity.

Dr. Marty Klein makes a really fascinating argument about the term "sex addiction" in an article in "The Humanist"; that that label  is a way for people not to have to reckon with the conflict between their desire for what certain kinds of sex gives them and the consequences of acting out their desires.    

“New patients tell me all the time how they can’t keep from doing self-destructive sexual things; still, I see no sex addiction. Instead, I see people regretting the sexual choices they make, often denying that these are decisions. I see people wanting to change, but not wanting to give up what makes them feel alive or young or loved or adequate; wanting the advantages of changing, but not wanting to give up what makes them feel they’re better or sexier or naughtier than other people. Most importantly, I see people wanting to stop doing what makes them feel powerful, attractive, or loved, but since they don’t want to stop feeling powerful, attractive or loved, they can’t seem to stop the repetitive sex clumsily designed to create those feelings.”

— http://thehumanist.org/july-august-2012/you%E2%80%99re-addicted-to-what/

He goes on to argue that this condition of wanting certain things sexually and not wanting to take responsibility for the consequences is made more troublesome by a sex-negative culture which punishes people for wanting any kind of sex or relationship that isn't socially sanctioned. 

“...the diagnosis of sex addiction is in many ways a diagnosis of discomfort with one’s own sexuality, or of being at odds with cultural definitions of normal sex, and struggling with that contrast...”

The culture today communicates two out-of-sync messages about sex pretty strongly; one, that we should be ecstatically sexually fulfilled all the time and two, that non-socially-sanctioned sex is highly dangerous and scary (gay, non-monogamous, kinky).  And there is the meta-message which says that commenting on the discrepancy between these two messages -- "Everybody may not be sexually and romantically fulfilled with one, opposite-sex partner for the rest of their lives" -- is not allowed.  A million romcoms have taught us that everyone will end up in a monogamous, same-sex couple and will never feel the desire to masturbate or fantasize about other people or look at pornography because they are so fulfilled.  According to Marty Klein, the label "sex addiction" leaves us stuck in that double bind rather than helping us step out of it.