The Nine Rooms of Happiness: Loving Yourself, Finding Your Purpose, and Getting Over Life's Little Imperfections (20 page)

She’s trying to control her life, keep the house clean, keep the husband “tucked in” and not straying, trying to keep everything under her thumb. But Catherine says in fact Elise is “identifying with the aggressor.” Here, she is choosing to emotionally divorce herself from the loving aspects of sex. It’s not an authentic connection if she just does it as a prophylactic act to stave off his cheating. What is going to keep her husband faithful and her marriage intact is a true connection.

She loves her life, her regular tennis game at the club and all that, but she fears she would lose it all if she got divorced. She thinks,
How bad is this, really? It’s not like he hits me. It’s just sex every morning.

We don’t need Catherine to tell us the balance of power is totally wrong in Elise’s marriage. She needs to acknowledge what she’s really feeling and tell him, “This isn’t working for me and we have to talk and make some changes. Hopefully, we can find a way to compromise.” But first she has to understand what is going on. Why does she fantasize about the sweet college boyfriend, and why did she marry a Caveman, whom she lets “take” her whenever he feels like it? She loves her lifestyle but perhaps not her life.

This is another way to think of A + B = C, since she is actually trying to control him instead of working on herself. Elise needs to be honest with her husband, tell him what is and isn’t working for her, and start to connect for real. You can’t control anyone else’s behavior in the long run, or stop a spouse from cheating just by having sex when he wants it. You
can
work on yourself and figure out what works for you in a marriage. Stop worrying about him and live the life you want, from morning to night,
with or without the prophylactic sex. The pearl: Whatever bed you make, remember, now you have to lie in it!

Jean is the mother of two young boys, helps out with the luncheon after church services every Sunday, and visits both her in-laws in their assisted living facility at least once a week. Her to-do list is long—she has unfinished work on her laptop, she forgot to put gas in her car, and her mother is going to be annoyed that she never called back from earlier today. When she does have a spare hour on a weekend, she’d rather sleep than have sex.

Her husband, on the other hand, can flip a switch and be in the mood no matter how tired he is after a long day at the office. In fact, even when he’s sleeping and she quietly slips into bed next to him, he wakes up and wants to do it. “We are so different,” she says. “I need to get in the mood, and he just needs to be breathing to be in the mood.”

And even when she can muster the desire and the energy, there’s another problem: the kids. They roam the house and could walk in at any moment, and this makes her feel inhibited. “I love him, I just don’t feel like making love to him.”

Catherine says “being too tired for sex” is “one of the biggest epidemics facing women today.” These women show up at their doctor’s office, wondering if there is some medical problem that will explain their lack of libido…and is there a pill that can fix it?

A top doctor with a thriving ob-gyn practice in Manhattan says, “They are exhausted, worried they are having a thyroid problem or are low in testosterone, and feel really bad that they don’t want to have sex with their husbands. They would love to find a physical reason why they are feeling this way, but rarely do we find something specific.” That ob-gyn tries to help with the physical symptoms, and Catherine treats the emotional fallout. “Women feel guilty,” she says. “Women think they should be lusting after their husbands. When they don’t, they first think there is something wrong with them or their marriage, but in fact they may just be wiped out, stressed-out, and pulled in too many directions.”

Patients regularly ask Catherine, What’s a normal amount of sex? The question is simple, but the answer is not. There is no right amount. This can be reassuring or not, depending on whether you’re looking for guidance or for permission to want it more…or less. The right amount of sex is whatever
you
want to have, and what works for the two of you.

“The popular idea that married couples are having sex twice a week on average is probably wrong,” Catherine says. “It’s probably closer to once a week. Women often compare their lives to sex scenes in TV shows, movies, and novels, and I have to tell them that those are works of fiction. That can be validating for a woman, because it’s hard not to think something’s wrong with you when every female protagonist on the big screen is frequently enjoying the perfect sexual experience.”

Catherine tells women to feel free to say yes, no, or “if
you
really want to, but don’t expect fireworks from me tonight.” “If you or your partner is interested in having sex more often,” she says, “then create a language that works for you, to express your needs and not fight over it. This is where the rock star sex versus ‘I love you’ sex paradigm becomes useful. One woman told me how liberating it was when she finally accepted the fact that she didn’t have to have rock star sex every time. She said, ‘I would feel bad if I wasn’t that into it or didn’t have an orgasm. I know women who feel so bad about this that they fake orgasms.’”

There’s no need to fake anything. You may not actually be “tired” but upset with your husband for not helping around the house, or not doing the bills. Be honest, with yourself and with him. Get to the kitchen table
and talk about what’s going on. If you really just need sleep, then sleep, and ask him for a rain check until you’re rested. You can also have “I love you” sex if you just want to show him a little appreciation. Think about the kind of sex you want and tell him. He may not be jumping you because every night you push his hand away, but what you really want is for him to “take you” and have a passionate encounter.

You may even want to develop signals for when you really mean “not tonight” and when you don’t. Want to feel like a “rock star” one night? Blast the tunes and start dancing around the living room. Whatever code or language you and your partner use, sometimes it’s okay to tell your significant other: This is “I love you” sex or “I’m doing it for you” sex.

And make sure he knows there will be times when you will initiate sex…and will sometimes want to be the rock star. In other words, it may be healthier for the relationship if you sometimes say, “Tonight, I just need to get some sleep.” Our pearl for Jean, and any woman who wants to say no sometimes: There are two of you in this relationship and you need to communicate. Have a language that you share to signal yes, no, maybe, or throw me down! Whatever your turn-on, or-off switch, you both need to know how to operate it.

Sarah thinks she is the “victim” of infidelity. Victim is in quotes here, since, when she’s not fuming, she knows she somehow participated in the dynamic that led to the demise of their marriage. Beyond the initial
emotional shock, she is also wondering, “How are we going to pay our bills, now that we are going to have to pay for two homes and two of everything else? I work so hard, but he’s always made more money than me, and now I won’t ever be able to retire, much less take nice vacations or afford things for my kids that I think they deserve. Our lives are literally in financial ruins, and it’s all because the asshole had to sleep with his secretary. What did I do to deserve this?”

Sarah works in marketing, and though she never made it to management level she has a good, secure job and is proud of being a diligent worker and a great mother who makes sure all the homework is done and the school lunches are packed. In other words, everyone’s needs are met except her own. She thinks her husband stopped being aroused by her because she was always too tired to have sex, and she’s always had body image issues as well. He wants to go on a kid-free cruise, or to Vegas, but that doesn’t interest her. She would rather be with the kids, even if it means a vacation at some family theme park. Sarah and her husband never spend a night alone together, which means they rarely have rock star or vacation sex.

They live in a bedroom community, and he works late, sometimes missing dinner, but she knows he has an enormous amount of work, often on deadline. She never thought they were unhappy until she was looking through the bills and saw one for a midtown hotel across from his firm’s office, and she just knew he was having an affair. She wanted to throw up.

She then went through the cell phone bills, the e-mail trail, his text messages, and the history on his computer, and she found everything she needed to confront him. “He wasn’t even trying to hide it. He’d gotten so casual about it that I don’t think he bothered to cover his tracks anymore. It’s like he wanted me to find out.”

That night she had the bills all lined up on the kitchen table like a prosecutor’s evidence, and the minute he walked in the door she said, “I know everything. How could you? Don’t you love me, the boys, or our life?” And he dropped into a chair, his coat still on, clutching his briefcase. He said, “Do you want me to move out?” No denial and no apology.
He’s too good a lawyer to even try to plead not guilty—he went straight to the bargaining table. “What do you want me to do?”

This upset her even more, because she wanted him to fight for her and say he was sorry. But instead he was ready to walk. That is when she burst into tears. Now she had no bargaining chips, because she couldn’t even use his remorse to get him back. He was already gone. It seemed to her that he didn’t care.

He said he’d earned his freedom. He worked all the time to support everyone around him, and who supports him? Not his wife. She doesn’t show the least bit of interest in him, or in sex, so he thought he was doing her a favor by getting it elsewhere and leaving her alone. At least that is what he had convinced himself of before that confrontation at the kitchen table.

Sarah knew, deep down, that she had been neglecting her marriage for years. She never listened when he suggested they spend time alone or make a regular Saturday night date. And what sex they did have was uninspired—for her, it was just going through the motions, like taking a shower.

Catherine points out that though Sarah can take some of the blame herself for neglecting the marriage, she isn’t responsible for her husband’s affair. He chose to cheat instead of talk. Sarah had unconsciously checked out, and so he did the same, physically and emotionally. The question is, Did they ever truly connect and talk and share intimacies? They were coexisting for years, and in the Venn diagram of their marriage their circles barely touched. The kids were their only real connection.

Can they pull their circles together? It’s not so clear. They have to decide whether to try to put the marriage back together or let it go. This is going to take work, and they both have to want to engage in the process. To Sarah’s surprise, her husband decides he doesn’t want to lose the life they have together, even if it’s not perfect, and they start talking.

Each of them has issues. One of the biggest problems: Sarah needs to build up her self-respect before she can be a whole person, or full circle, in the Venn diagram. A healthy marriage has two whole circles overlapping,
not two halves of a circle making a whole. Sarah, like many women, doubts she can be independent outside the identity of marriage.

Though she works, her emotional identity is wrapped up in her family life, and being a mother comes first for her. She can’t imagine a life outside of her marriage and has no desire to start over. She took for granted she would always be married, without ever paying attention to the state of her relationship with her husband. She realizes that she now has to focus on herself as well as rebuild her life, including interests outside of parenting.

Catherine would tell Sarah to ask herself why she couldn’t see the signs that things were falling apart. There were clues along the way, but she “chose” to ignore them to maintain the semblance of normalcy. What did she need from her marriage? Just for it to continue? He was asking for time alone with her and never got it. What did she want? She didn’t have the self-esteem to ask or even know what she needed. Once she can answer that for herself, she can have a successful relationship. But it may be too late to have it with her husband. Still, she won’t be able to have a successful relationship later if she doesn’t figure out what went wrong in this one. Only then can she be fully present, her own complete circle, in any marriage. Here is the sometimes painful truth: It takes two people to create a marriage and two people to allow it to wither and die. You have to question how you participated in your own life outcome. Only then can you determine your next move and ultimately be the master of your own destiny.

Fiona’s twins keep her busy every minute she isn’t working as an administrative assistant in a large law firm. She never would even look at one of the lawyers. It’s not that she wants to have an affair, but when she is online she is the person she can’t be at work or at home. She loves her family, loves her life and her twin girls (now approaching two), but this secret flirtation is her way of escaping it all. She feels she deserves it, since the rest of the time—covered in baby spit-up and taking little ones to the playground or the doctor—her life is not her own. She doesn’t recognize herself—the tall, lean, confident, and powerful working woman is now wearing sweats and hating how she looks most of the time.