Emotional Intimacy in Relationships

Love, conflict and why we fall in love

"At some point in their relationship, couples often find themselves struggling with anger and shock, despair and sadness. Some are newlyweds, and can’t understand how they have plummeted from the heights of love and glory into a swamp of hopelessness and conflict. Others have been married for many years, and though they have been slogging along – in calm or storm – their days of wine and roses are a dim memory. Even if life at home is relatively peaceful, couples lament that they have “nothing in common anymore.” And so they lead a disappointed or angry co-existence, each with their own friends and interests, in a marriage of convenience, or an arrangement they endure “for the sake of the children.”

Shattered dreams, whatever form they take, are painful. But there is hope. In fact, the pain and conflict of committed relationships arise not out of lack of love for our partners, but from a misunderstanding of what love relationships are about. Your conflict can be the very fuel for the fulfillment you seek."

Read full article from http://gettingtheloveyouwant.com/articles/imago_into.html

What is Imago?

Establishing and maintaining emotional intimacy

John Gottman is one of the leading researchers on the quality of marriage relationships. He is the founder of the Family Research Laboratory which is also known as the "Love Lab" in the this field of study.

From his studies, Gottman concluded that for a couple to experience a successful relationship, there must be at least five times as many positive interactions or communications that generate positive emotions for every one that results in some negative feelings.

More information may be found in John Gottman's book, Why Marriages Succeed or Fail: And How You Can Make Yours Last.

Other books by John Gottman are:

• The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country's Foremost Relationship Expert
  
• The Relationship Cure: A 5 Step Guide to Strengthening Your Marriage, Family, and Friendships
  
• Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage: America's Love Lab Experts Share Their Strategies for Strengthening Your Relationship
   
• A Couple's Guide to Communication
  

Contempt

Important Questions:

Feelings of Being in Love can be very Confusing

In his book, How to Avoid Marrying a Jerk, Dr John Van Epp discusses how new evidence points to how love truly renders it's victims "blind."

"Through brain-imaging studies, researches at University College London found that 'feelings of love lead to suppression of activity in the areas of the brain controlling critical thought. It seems that once we get close to a person, the brain decides the need to assess their character and personality is reduced."

Dr Van Epp then goes on to say that, "Romantic love suppresses the neural activity associated with your ability to judge correctly a partner whom you have negative feelings about. In addition, massive releases of oxytocin, dopamine, and other hormones and neuropeptides in the brain create euphoric feelings that further cloud judgements, masking those repeating offences that should be obvious warning signals of problems to come".

It is important to take the time needed to really get to know someone before making a committment

Dr Van Epp proposes that it takes at least three months for dysfunctional relationship patterns to start to become evident. He stresses the importance of taking the time needed to observe a potential partner's behaviour. In particular he recommends noticing how a person behaves around family and friends compared to how they behave in the relationship.

He also warns that "the good doesn't always last, but the bad usually gets worse". Studies have shown that "couples who marry after knowing each other less than two years have close to twice the divorce rate than the couples who date longer than two years." Time taken to really get to know someone, is therefore a very important component of establishing a healthy relationship.

Take the time to notice whether what a partner says is what he or shes actually does. There is often a discrepency between the two which may signal TROUBLED times ahead. It is very important to not only TALK, but also spend time together engaging in a variety of activities. This enables a couple to really get to know one another in different contexts while assessing compatibility.

Dr Van Epp suggests creating experiences together to "help answer the critical questions:

• Do you have similar interests?

• Are your energy levels comparable?

• Do you build good memories when you are together?

• How are stresses, frustrations, and obstacles handled?"
  
  

Resources on the Web

Love on the Mind

Recent research suggests romantic attraction is a primitive, biologically based drive, like hunger or sex. While lust makes our eye wander, it's the drive for romance that allows us to focus on one person, though we often can't explain why. The biology of romance helps account for how we think about passionate love and explain its insanity: why we might travel cross-country for a single kiss and plunge into blackest despair if our beloved turns away.

What is LOVE, actually? The be-all and end-all for so many people turns out to be something quite mundane, really.

Sex chemistry 'lasts two years '.Couples should not worry when the first flush of passion dims - scientists have identified the hormone changes which cause the switch from lust to cuddles.

I get a Kick Out of You - Love as a Chemical Addiction

Scientists are finding that, after all, love really is down to a chemical addiction between people.

The Brain in Love and Lust

Romantic love, Dr Helen Fisher explains in a lecture at the 2004 American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting, is not an emotion. Rather, it’s "a motivation system, it’s a drive, it’s part of the reward system of the brain." It’s a need that compels the lover to seek a specific mating partner. Then the brain links this drive to all kinds of specific emotions depending on how the relationship is going. All the while, she went on to say, the prefrontal cortex is assembling data, putting information into patterns, making strategies, and monitoring the progress toward "life’s greatest prize."

Your Dopamine or Mine?

Romance junkies will not be surprised by the finding that falling in love is akin to a cocaine hit.

When it strikes, romantic love can feel like a kind of madness. Infatuated people act irrationally. They lose concentration. They feel giddy, wretched and wonderful. It is one of life's most powerful experiences. Emily Dickinson described it as "a perfect - paralysing bliss - contented as despair".

Behind the alpha-achiever, a clumsy desperate soul - Opinion, smh.com.au, 17 March 2008

An interesting and informative article discussing how professionally successfull men are pathetic when it comes to relating on an intiimate basis in romantic relationships. The article also makes sense as to why these alpha males have a propensity to visit prostitutes.

Quoting David Brooks, "gradually, some cruel cosmic joke gets played on them. They realise in middle-age that their grandeur is not enough and they are lonely. The ordinariness of their intimate lives is made more painful by the exhilaration of their public success. If they were used to limits in public life, maybe it would be easier to accept the everydayness of middle-aged passion. But they are not.

And so the crisis comes. Perhaps alpha-male gorillas don't wake up in the middle of the night feeling sorry for themselves because "nobody knows the real me". But those of us in the business of covering the great and the powerful know that human leaders have an almost limitless capacity for self-pity.

They seek to heal the hurt. Maybe they frequent prostitutes because transactional relationships are something they understand. But in other cases, they just act like complete idiots. I don't know if you have seen a successful politician or business tycoon get drunk and make a pass at a woman. It's like watching a St Bernard try to French kiss. It's all overbearing, slobbering, desperate wanting. There's no self-control, no dignity.

These Type A men are not equipped to have normal relationships. All their lives they have been a walking Asperger's convention, the kings of the emotionally avoidant. Their sensitivity synapses are still performing at preschool levels.

So when they decide that they do, in fact, have an inner soul and it's time to take it out for a romp … Well, let's just say they've just bought a ticket on the self-immolation express. Some desperate lunge toward intimacy is sure to follow, some sad attempt at bonding.

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