Tag: desire

There is something about the word "needy," a desperate quality that we shy away from.

Unfortunately, that desperate quality also gets attached to the word "need," so when you have a need you’d like from your spouse like, "I need more loving," it’s tempting to think; "I’m being too clingy, I shouldn’t need so much from him/her, I should be happy with what I’ve got."

More often than not, when we find ourselves thinking "I need more affection;" "I need you to be more supportive;" "I need you to be more considerate," we discount that need and push it aside while we wonder why we feel so unfulfilled.

It is too easy to get stuck in habituated patterns in a marriage that become rote and uninspiring. As we get too familiar with our partner we can become more like siblings, lacking desire. Fear not, there are so many ways to make your marriage juicy. You have to decide it is what you want your marriage to feel like and live it out consciously.

If you had passion for your spouse in the beginning there is no other reason than laziness if that passion goes away. Remember, familiarity breeds boredom. Step outside the comfort zone of your routine and use these eight ways to make your marriage juicy!

We are all blessed with two wonderful tools to help us through this exciting, sometimes frustrating journey called "marriage," which is a head and a heart. Each has a different function: your heart lets you know what you want—as in the phrase "your heart's desire," while your head helps you figure out how to get what you want.

When you use your head and your heart together and appropriately, it all works out great. Problems arise when:

A lack of sexual desire—the thoughts you have around sex—is the number one reason couples in North America stop having sex.

What that means for you is: if you have negative thoughts towards sex before, during and after the sexual encounter, it will profoundly dampen your desire to have sex.

To get back your sexual desire, you need to start having positive thoughts towards sex. Think about something that is an indulgence—a bath, a professional massage, reading a book uninterrupted for an hour. You look forward to these times because it’s all about you as it is a nurturing space.

We all have an area of our life where we want to experience change? Whether you want to better your marriage, get physically fit, change careers, move to a new home or learn a new skill, there are three simple steps you can follow that will absolutely guarantee new results!

Shift Your Perspective

At any given moment we are either looking at life through the lens of fear or love. Wherever you are not experiencing life the way you want, it is being viewed through fear.

Throughout my career I have, many times, found myself in the middle of husbands and wives who couldn't agree on whether to sell their family home for something smaller—an apartment, condo, or cottage. They also couldn't agree to settle in the city, near grandchildren or somewhere else. I have learned to embrace this role of middleman, helping couples reconcile what they both want so everyone wins.

I tell couples they can have it all. All they have to do is figure out what having it all means to them and what compromises they are willing to make in the wishes that aren't really important.

Sexual desire, when strong, seems indestructible. However, desire is easy to kill. Inhibited desire—as we therapists call it—is the main problem in marital sexual disorders and probably the number one complaint in most marriage counseling sessions.

Sexual desire is quite fragile and many feelings whether relational, emotional or sexual can slowly start to poison it. The core issue is identifying, understanding and addressing these factors. I like to think of these as the poisons a couple needs to understand about one another in order for them to move on.