How Midlife Relationships Work

By Philip Alan Belove, Ed.D.  All rights reserved
You need to know this, you really do. I see couples all the time who love each other, and yet they do things to each other that hurt each other and tear their relationship apart. And yet, all the while, every step along the way, they feel that they are doing the right thing, and the only sensible thing. The road to hell really is paved with good intentions.

Somehow, if you can step back from what you are doing and see how it works, why your actions are so tempting and justified and why they are also destructive, you can send things in a different direction. This is useful knowledge.

It’s about how people try to make their relationship better and end up only making it worse. It’s about what you can do instead, how you can protect yourself, your partner, and the relationship, as well as protect your honor and your heart. Useful knowledge I think. I’ve explained to so many people that I finally decided to write it out.

It’s my upgrade of an extremely useful tool originally developed by Dr. Rudolph Dreikurs.

Feelings are Information.

“How do you feel about that?” is the same as saying, “What is your emotional relationship to that?”

Not everyone can put that stuff into words. Baby’s establish very complex relationships with the people around them long before they can talk. Dogs establish very complex emotional relationships and never can name them.

Sometimes people want too much in a romance and just as often they don’t want enough.

In the last 20 years psychological research has systematically investigated the psychology of successful romantic relationships…and rediscovered what many folks simply knew all along. But still, there are a lot of opinions out there and it’s good to know what some folks have found out with rigorous thinking.

A good relationship contains three main elements – technically they are called “behavioral systems.” The term means that our brains are set up to create three different, somewhat independent kinds of relationship conditions. Relationships that live and flourish tend to contain all three.

Last night at the cinefamily theatre, (www.cinefamily.org) we were treated to a live presentation of a tv pilot by Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant. What struck me most was their chemistry, how they overlapped each other when they spoke and egged each other. Thomas was dominant, clearly and Ben supported but it seemed to work both ways that the result was brilliant and insightful comedy.

I thought of those studies of pre-school kids where the dominant one in a group always had on particularly loyal and, in a sense, dominant follower and it was the axis between them that organized the rest of the group.

In the map of the good romantic relationship, we see partners do this for each other. This is one sense of secure base, the one who is present and actively following and appreciating and responding to what has been said and done.

By Philip Belove, Ed.D.

In a New Yorker cartoon by Leo Cullum, the elephant is on the psychoanalyst’s couch and saying with a pained expression, “I’m right there in the room, and no one even acknowledges me.”

Sometimes intimate relationships fail because the partners grow to hate each other’s company. “Hate.”  It’s a strong word.

Hatred is wild and strange.  I’ve counseled people who are dealing with an ex who is intoxicated by hatred.  Such people are willing to use children, the legal system, and vandalism to make a former partner’s life miserable. They do it in a gleeful frenzy. They are scary because they feed off their hatred and there’s no stopping them except by going to war against them and defeating them thoroughly.  Most of us don’t like going to war.

For most of us hatred is  uncomfortable.  For most of us, when we are angry we are angry about a principle, a value, something that seems bigger than the issue at hand.  But when anger shifts to hatred it’s because we’ve made the issue personal. Often people who like to hate are also proud of the fact that their values are so personally held.

Because hatred is a personal matter and because the pain associated with it is often so close to the surface, most folks shift from hatred to disgust.  Disgust is the way we put distance between our self and the thing we hate.  In disgust we don’t have to resolve the hatred. We can simply go past it and seek the more comfortable state of denial.  We resolve to simply never see, speak or think about the person we “used to” hate.  We do this for our protection, and sometimes for their protection. We cut them off.

It’s not the only factor in choosing a mate. Probably you could sort all the reasons why you would want a relationship with someone into three categories.

First, there is just the animal connection. Every creature on earth, bugs, fish, birds, marsupials and mammals comes in two sexes. The animal connection is important and it is deep. But it’s not all.

We are also social animals and we live in tribes and families and communities and cultures, all with intricate demands which we honor. Any mating of two people has to answer to social realities.

And finally, we are spiritual animals. We each believe that our individual lives do matter and we care about how we use this gift of our life.

So in the great scheme of things, as important as physical chemistry is, it is not the whole taco. Even so, it is not to be ignored. Here is a quiz to help you think about some of the aspect of physical chemistry. All the answers are based on psychological research. Answer each question, true or false.

1. Physical Chemistry (PC) develops over time.
False. Relationships can develop over time. Social and spiritual considerations can outweigh matters of physical chemistry. But PC is immediate. It is an animal response. It is connected to immediate sense perception, and it is based on mechanisms which evolved over the million years when humans were just another kind of wild animal.