The 100 Most Asked Questions About Love, Sex and Relationships

Okay, now, back to the fear. I’m going to say something that might sound strange—a little fear isn’t such a bad thing for you and your boyfriend to feel … it will keep you on your toes and force you to pay attention. I’ll bet if you and he look back on your failed marriages, you will notice that you didn’t pay attention to warning signs, problems, conflicts, unmet needs, and all kinds of stuff. Eventually, it was precisely what you weren’t paying attention to that sabotaged your relationships, right? You didn’t treat those relationships carefully enough. So here you are with a new, wonderful partner, and you’re both scared of making mistakes again, and a little reluctant to just blindly trust. I say, that’s great! It’s about time! You should be afraid of making mistakes, all of us should. You should be careful to make sure your needs get met. You should be paying very close attention, because the more you pay attention to your relationship, the better it will be.

Do you get my point? It’s like someone who carelessly used a sharp knife and cut herself badly. The next time you pick up the knife to use it, you are afraid. You respect its power much more, as well you should. A relationship is like that—a powerful tool that can be used to help us or hurt us, and I feel not enough people respect that tool.

Here’s something practical you can do to help. Each of you should make a Relationship Mistake List. Go back and honestly assess your former relationship from the very beginning to the end. Write down every mistake you made. Examples: “Let my ex-husband talk me out of my feelings, and then pushed down my resentment.” “Didn’t ask for what I wanted in bed, and felt dissatisfied.” Don’t be surprised at how long these lists are. Share yours with your partner, and have him share his. Talk about each item. Then, together, come up with a new Relationship Rule for each old mistake, and write these down. Example: “When I disagree with something my partner does or says, I will express my feelings, even if it causes tension between us,” or “I will let my partner know what I enjoy sexually so he doesn’t have to guess.”

The point of this exercise is twofold: First, it will help you understand that your prior relationships didn’t just go bad. There were specific unhealthy behaviors and love habits that caused the relationships to fail. Second, by paying attention to these unhealthy love habits, and committing on paper to new, healthy behavioral choices, you have a great chance of avoiding the old mistakes that would hurt you again. Throw in some good books, tapes, or seminars on making relationships work, and you will have a great foundation to go forward into this new romance with excitement, enthusiasm, and high hopes.

11 What does it mean when your partner won’t introduce you to his family and friends?

I’ve been dating a man for nine months who won’t introduce me to his family or his friends. I know he has children from a former marriage, and I haven’t even met them. Most of the time, we spend alone at my apartment or his condo, and when we do go out, it’s always at the last minute. He claims that he is a private person, and that he doesn’t want to bring other people into our relationship, but something doesn’t feel right to me. What does this mean?

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but this behavior means just what you secretly suspect it means—that your boyfriend is ashamed to be seen with you or associated with you, and is hiding you from the people in his life. It could be that, for some reason, he doesn’t think you’re “good enough” to be an official girlfriend—maybe you don’t look the way he thinks you should or come from a background he thinks is acceptable. This may sound terrible, but it’s nothing compared to the second possibility you need to look at: Your boyfriend may be married or involved with someone else, and is cheating on her with you! Thus, the sneaking around, staying inside, and keeping you isolated from the rest of his life. The signs all add up, don’t they?

I’ll bet you’ve known this deep inside yourself, but haven’t wanted to face it, because it means confronting him and, if you have any self-respect, ending the relationship immediately. And respect is the key word here. He obviously doesn’t respect you—his behavior is totally disrespectful. So once you’ve broken up with him, you need to ask yourself some difficult and confrontational questions: Why did I put up with this kind of treatment for so long? What in my emotional past attracts me to men who treat me like I’m not important? What are some of the ways I kept myself in denial about something so obvious? How can I begin to heal my own emotional wounds so I don’t get hurt like this again?

It’s time for you to love yourself enough to know you don’t deserve to be treated like some awful secret too grotesque for the world to see. The man who is lucky enough to be with you should be proud and honored to have you in his life, and excited about showing you off to everyone he knows. And the sooner you get rid of this character you’re with, the sooner you’ll meet a partner who will treat you like the wonderful human being you are.

12 How do you heal old emotional hurts from the past so you can have a healthy relationship with your partner?

Even though I know that many of the problems in my relationship are caused or aggravated by some past hurts from my childhood and from painful love affairs, I still can’t figure out how to let go of the past. My husband has his own issues, and between the two of us, I wonder how we’ve survived this long! Is there a way to heal the past so it doesn’t sabotage our relationship?

This is one of the most important questions any of us can ask ourselves: How can I identify and heal any unhealthy emotional patterns formed in my past so they don’t sabotage my adult relationships? In fact, you’ve just taken the first step in healing yourself: acknowledging the existence of your emotional baggage and expressing a willingness to get rid of it! Sadly, most people in the world will never even admit that their past experiences are emotionally handicapping them in their present lives, and therefore will never have the opportunity to experience what I call “true emotional freedom.” I define emotional freedom as the freedom to live as the person you want to be, and love as much as you want to love. It’s freedom from the past to be all you can in the present.

In order to heal the past, you have to understand what I call your “emotional programming.” Your emotional programming is simply a set of decisions you made about yourself, others, and the world in general when you were growing up. As an infant, you came into the world like a blank slate. Even though you were born with a certain set of genetic predispositions, you had no experiences yet to affect you either negatively or positively. But each day that you are alive, you collect experiences, and each one teaches you something about yourself and other people. You are either treated well, or treated harshly; you are either loved or neglected; you are either praised or put down.

Each of these experiences helps you form a decision about yourself, about people, and about life. For instance, if your parents had an unhappy, turbulent relationship, and as an infant or small child you heard constant fighting, you might have unconsciously decided: “I have to always be good, so I don’t make people I love unhappy,” or “It’s not safe for me to express angry feelings.” Here’s another example. Let’s say your father was emotionally distant and not there for you. You may have unconsciously decided “I can’t count on the people I love,” or “People who love me abandon me.” Each experience you have as a child helps you make certain decisions, until you have a collection of decisions you have made about life. This collection of decisions or beliefs is called your emotional programming. In the same way you would program a computer with basic information, and the computer would use that information to do tasks or solve problems, so you program your mind with this emotional programming. For the rest of your life, this “program” affects how you think, how you behave, and especially, how you react to circumstances that remind you of your painful childhood experiences.

The majority of this emotional programming occurs when you are still very young. Psychologists estimate that:

 Between the ages of 0-5 years old you receive 50% of your emotional programming

 Between the ages of 5-8 years old you receive 30% of your emotional programming

That means, by the age of 8 you are 80% programmed psychologically. In other words, 80% of the decisions about yourself and others have already been made.

 Between the ages of 8-18 years old you receive 15% more of your emotional programming

So by the time you are eighteen years old, you’re 95 percent complete! That leaves 5 percent for the rest of your life. This may not seem like much, but it’s that 5 percent that I work with when I help people make changes in their lives. And the good news is that you can use that 5 percent to understand and change the other 95 percent!

Perhaps now you can better understand why it’s easy to be so unaware of what motivates you in your relationships. The 5 percent of your mind that is conscious says “I want to be a loving husband to my wife” but the 95 percent of your mind that is unconscious may be programmed to avoid intimacy and keep a wall around your heart.

In my Making Love Work at-home video and audio seminar, I talk about a three-step healing process that you can use to eliminate your emotional programming:

1. Identify, feel, and express the old, unresolved emotions that are trapped inside your heart so that you can “Work them out, not act them out.”

2. Understand your old, unhealthy love choices, and then make new, healthy love choices which will heal your old fear and build new trust.

3. Open up to new, positive experiences of love that will heal the old pain which was caused by some lack of love.

I strongly suggest that you find a system of emotional healing that incorporates both experiential work in releasing old emotions and practical, action-oriented behavioral changes to build healthy new habits.

Now I’ll bet you’re thinking, “Boy, this sounds like a lot of work.” And it can be. But the rewards are worth it—the freedom to give and receive the kind of love you’ve always wanted!

13 How important is sexual chemistry in a relationship? If it’s not there in the beginning, will it develop over time?

People who ask me this question are usually involved in a relationship they wish were different. They feel love for their partner, but don’t feel sexually attracted to them. They don’t want to leave, so they try to rationalize their lack of sexual chemistry and make it “okay.”

My honest response to this question is:

“NO, I DON’T BELIEVE IT IS POSSIBLE TO HAVE A HEALTHY, LASTING, ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP WITH SOMEONE WHOM YOU AREN’T ATTRACTED TO, at least for me or anyone else who wants to include sexuality as a part of our lives.” After all, it is sex that distinguishes an intimate relationship from a friendship. Perhaps if a couple met when they were both quite elderly and no longer had an interest in sex, they wouldn’t need more than a strong friendship as a foundation to live together happily. But there is no reason people in their seventies and even older can’t enjoy active and fulfilling sex lives, so I don’t even like to use this example. Besides, it’s not sixty or seventy-year-olds who usually ask me about love without attraction—it’s men and women in their twenties, thirties, and forties.

If you’re not attracted to a partner, can the sexual chemistry develop over time? That depends. For instance, if you have an issue like the woman in Question 15, where she isn’t normally sexually attracted to nice guys, you could develop sexual attraction over time by doing some emotional healing. However, if this pattern or any kind of sexual dysfunction or abuse hasn’t been a problem for you, and you simply haven’t felt sexually attracted to your partner from the beginning of your relationship, you’ll be unlikely to develop it over time.

If you’re in a relationship with someone you’ve never been sexually attracted to, here are some things to think about:

1. You are avoiding true intimacy. A sexual connection binds a couple together in a very special way. There is nothing more intimate than taking someone inside your own body, if you are a woman, or putting a part of yourself into someone else, if you are a man. Especially when you are making love, and not just having sex, you create tremendous intimacy between yourself and your partner. Although it may look like you are avoiding sex, becoming involved with someone to whom you aren’t attracted may actually be a way you are unconsciously avoiding intimacy in your life. Since you know you aren’t going to have a strong sexual relationship, you are naturally protected from feeling too vulnerable with your partner.

2. You are avoiding sex. Some people aren’t just avoiding intimacy by selecting mates they aren’t attracted to—they are avoiding sex. If …

 You have experienced any form of sexual molestation or abuse

 You have been raped

 You have felt sexually controlled by previous partners

 You were brought up with negative sexual programming

… then you may unconsciously fall in love with people who don’t turn you on sexually. This way you get to avoid sex. You may not be aware that you have these sexual issues. You may even bemoan the fact that you keep attracting partners in whom you’re not sexually interested. But if lack of chemistry is a recurring theme in your relationships, you may need to do some work on healing your sexuality.

3. You are trying to maintain a position of control. When you feel sexually attracted to someone, you are, in a sense, giving them some control over you. It’s as if your mind is saying “You affect me so strongly that you make me want to lose control around you.” If you have issues with needing to be in control, or being afraid of being controlled by others, you may choose partners toward whom you feel no or little sexual attraction in order to keep yourself “safe.” Because you don’t feel a strong sexual pull toward them, you get to maintain a certain emotional distance, creating the illusion that you hold more of the power in the relationship.

This is one of the most difficult, yet most important issues a couple should face before getting seriously involved. As painful as it may be, think carefully about everything I’ve said, and make your decision based on what you know in your heart to be true.

14 How do you motivate someone to want to change and open up emotionally?

Every time I try to talk to my husband about working on our relationship, he says he’s “happy with the way things are.” I’m not happy, but no matter what I do, he shows no interest in changing or growing. How can I motivate him to want to open up more?

I’m going to give you an answer you don’t want to hear: You can’t motivate another person to grow and change. He has to motivate himself. That may sound logical, but I know how painful it is to accept when you really love someone, and know that if he doesn’t open up and grow, your relationship probably won’t make it. In my own life, I’ve faced this same dilemma several times, and understand how much it hurts to see your partner resisting the very kinds of help that would ultimately save your marriage. It’s like watching someone you love drowning in the ocean, and wanting to save him, but when you throw him a life preserver, he pushes it away, claiming he doesn’t need it. You know that if he doesn’t reach out, you will lose him, so you plead with him to grab hold. Stubbornly, he refuses, and you are forced to see him slip away

Here’s one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned about love: Some people just aren’t capable of loving you the way you want to be loved, or capable of having the kind of relationship you need. It’s not that they are trying to be difficult, or stubborn, or deliberately trying to make you unhappy. They simply cannot operate on the same emotional level you operate on, nor do they want to. Unfortunately, most couples don’t discuss these issues sufficiently in the beginning of the relationship so they can determine whether they have enough emotional compatibility to live happily together. They fall in love, have a family, and then realize they are two very different people with very conflicting pictures of what they want and need from an intimate relationship. One partner isn’t right, and the other wrong—the problem is that their love styles are incompatible.

This is what I suggest: Without blaming him, and without making him feel like the bad guy, sit down with your husband and share something like the following … “I love you very much, and have tried for ‘X’ years to make this relationship work. I know you’re aware that I’ve been begging you to open up, to work on our marriage, to talk about issues we have. I’ve been doing this for one reason—to try and save our marriage, because I’m not happy with the way things are. You’ve always told me you’re satisfied with this kind of relationship, that you aren’t interested in growing or changing in the way I am, and I haven’t respected what you’ve said, and have tried to get you to change. Now I realize that I was wrong in doing this. You have the right to live just the way you want to, and so do I. My way isn’t better than yours—it’s just different.

“So, honey, I need you to take as much time as you need, days or a few weeks, to ask yourself one last time if you are happy living as the person you are, and do not want a relationship where your partner needs you to open up or work on yourself. If you come to me and tell me this is definitely how you feel, then I will know it’s time for me to go on without you. See, I do want a relationship in which I and my partner are always growing and changing together, and actively working on becoming more intimate and more loving. That is one of the most important things in my life. I would love to have that kind of marriage with you, but if that’s not what you want, I will understand, and free myself to one day find someone who shares my vision of love, and free you to find someone who loves you just the way you are.”

Find the emotional courage to have this conversation with your husband. It will be one of the most difficult yet loving things you’ve ever done, not just for you, but for him. I’ve had people tell me that, after hearing it put this way, their partner miraculously went through a total change and dedicated himself or herself to tremendous personal growth, so it’s possible. Whatever the outcome, know that it’s time to turn the corner in your life, one way or the other, and experience the kind of relationship you’ve always dreamed of.

Compatibility

15 Why am I only attracted to the wrong, “bad boy” type of man, and feel no sexual chemistry with the “nice guys”?

For years I have had a series of very painful, dramatic relationships with men who don’t give me what I need or treat me the way I deserve to be treated. Some cheated, others were very critical, or simply emotionally distant. Finally, I met a really nice guy who is crazy about me. He’s everything I ever wanted—respectful, considerate, and really sweet. But there’s one big thing missing: I don’t feel the sexual chemistry with him that I used to feel with my ex-boyfriends. Lately I’ve been feeling I should break up with him, because I miss that passion and excitement. Help!!

You’ve come to the right place for help—not only is this one of the questions I’m asked most often, but I used to suffer from this same pattern and wonder what was wrong with me. Why did men who didn’t love me the way I wanted to be loved appeal to me so much? Why did I get “bored” in calm, peaceful relationships? Why did the phrase “nice guy” turn off every sexual impulse in my body? It took me years to understand and finally break this unhealthy love habit, but I did it, so I know you can do it too.

Okay, here’s what’s happening. You’ve obviously already figured out that it’s no accident that you happen to attract (or be attracted to) men who, in some way, make you feel unloved, and you’re right … there’s a reason it feels “right” when you’re with a man who withholds his love, and a reason it feels “wrong” when a man gives you all the love you’ve ever wanted. This reason has nothing to do with what your conscious mind tells you about those unloving partners: “You know he is wrong for you. He’s just going to hurt you like the last one. Run in the other direction as fast as you can!!” You may know this is true, but something makes that kind of man so appealing, and that something has to do with your unconscious mind and what I call the “Going Home Syndrome.”

I came up with the phrase “Going Home Syndrome” to describe how our emotional programming (see Question 12) can cause us to seek out emotional situations that are similar to those we experienced in childhood, regardless of whether those experiences were positive or negative. As human beings, we gravitate toward the familiar. I’ll bet you like to sleep on the same side of the bed each night, park in the same space at work, and go back to your favorite vacation spot. Returning to the familiar is a basic instinct that gives our lives a sense of continuity and safety in a very chaotic and changing universe. Unfortunately, this instinct can work against us when it comes to relationships, in that we may tend to unconsciously seek out emotional situations that are familiar to us.