The 100 Most Asked Questions About Love, Sex and Relationships

It sounds to me like you are both not only numb to one another, but numb period. You aren’t interested in dating or starting your love life over again, and I’ll bet you feel kind of tired and blasé about everything. This could be a major turning point in your life, a moment where you look at one another and say, “I’m tired of feeling this tired of everything …-I’m tired of feeling numb … I’m ready to make some changes.”

The first step is to break through that numbness by confronting some of the issues that are sure to be lurking beneath the surface. You won’t be able to do this on your own—you’ll need help, and I suggest you find a well-trained therapist or marriage counselor who has an excellent reputation for helping couples in trouble. If you don’t get the results you want, try someone else, read books, attend seminars, etc. You won’t be able to tell if your marriage can be saved until you try everything. Then, if you decide it’s over, you can do so knowing you made every attempt to resurrect the relationship.

Here’s something to give you some hope: I’ve personally worked with thousands of couples who believed they were on the verge of divorce, who, after giving their relationship the attention it needed, fell back in love again; every week I receive letters from couples I’ve never even met, but who share this same kind of success story with me. So it’s not just possible—it’s happening all the time, and I pray it can happen for you too.

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8 How can I get my husband to pay as much attention to me as he does to our children? (#ulink_d0f68b25-bd37-5655-b119-7ec1b52b0dd7)

I consider myself lucky to have a husband who is my best friend, and two healthy young daughters. So I feel even more guilty to admit that I’m jealous of my girls! The truth is, my husband gives them more attention and affection than he gives me. I always brag about what a great dad he is, but I need more physical and emotional closeness with him. I’ve tried to talk about this, but he ends up feeling criticized and pulls even farther away. Am I expecting too much?

Guess what? Millions of wives and mothers feel the same secret envy you do about how much love their husband shows the kids, so be assured that you’re not “bad,” “selfish,” or “weird”—you’re just not getting everything you need from your partner. (I hear this same complaint from men, too, by the way, about their wife showing the kids more affection.) So the first step is to stop making yourself wrong for longing to be the recipient of the tenderness and caring your husband showers on your daughters. Of course you’re jealous: the little girl inside of you is hungry for the intimacy you know your mate is capable of, since you see him share this with your girls. I know it feels awful to see your own daughters, whom you adore, as rivals, but that’s what’s happening.

It might help you to understand where your husband is coming from. You see, it’s easy for him to be so emotionally generous with his children. They don’t nag him, criticize what he says or does, or see his faults!! In other words, they still love him unconditionally. That feeling of being loved purely and completely allows him to feel safe enough to open his heart and share the most giving part of himself with them. With you, it’s a different story. You don’t have him on a pedestal, like the girls do; you don’t think everything he says is so smart; you see him as he really is. So it’s much more difficult for your husband to feel as safe and loved with you as he does with his daughters. This is true for all parents—it’s a lot more challenging to be as consistently loving with our mates as we are with our kids, but that’s the whole point of marriage—ideally, to learn how to love another person in spite of their imperfections.

That’s the compassionate part of the answer, but the second part is more practical: Your relationship with your husband must be placed first, before your relationship as parents to the kids.I believe strongly that, as a wife, you need to feel you are Number One to your husband, and not that you get the emotional leftovers, if there are any, after your daughters are loved. If your marriage isn’t healthy, it won’t matter how much your children feel loved … you will end up feeling resentment toward them, and they will not grow up with a positive example of how a woman should be treated. The stronger your relationship with your husband is, the better both of you will be as parents to your kids. Keeping you happy and well loved should be your husband’s first responsibility to the family, because that ensures a stable and lasting home life for your children. And the happier you and he are together, the happier your girls will be. Tell him I said so!!!!

9 How should you handle a partner who smothers you with too much love and affection and is too possessive? (#ulink_d034ae5f-e09e-5e8b-a1f0-2932a71b7c69)

I have the opposite problem than most women have—my boyfriend loves me too much. He wants to be with me every second; he never takes his hands off me; and when we aren’t together, he calls me every few hours. I’ve asked him to back off, to give me some space, but he gets really hurt and rejected, and I end up comforting him. I really care about this man, but I’m starting to turn off, and even feel scared of him. How can I make him see that I need him to love me less?

Your problem isn’t that your boyfriend loves you too much—it’s that he doesn’t love himself enough.He’s what I call an “emotional vampire.” His heart is like an emotional container that’s empty, and he desperately needs you to fill him up, only there’s a hole in the bottom, so no matter how much you give him, it will never be enough, and he’ll always crave more. No wonder you feel uncomfortable: although he appears to be giving in his desire to be with you, touch you, and call you, he’s actually taking. He’s feeding off your attention, your presence, your energy.

People like your boyfriend who seem to “love too much” are almost always desperately needy, seeking to distract themselves from their pain with a temporary dose of love, sex, or affection. They can fall in love instantly, and become easily compulsive and obsessed, sucking their partners in by sweeping them off their feet, and, eventually, keeping them around with guilt and pity. Your boyfriend probably has been very hurt in his life, perhaps by a family member, and he has an emotional wound that will not heal until he deals with it at its source. Your relationship and all the others he has had are like Band-Aids, temporary solutions for a deep and chronic problem.

What am I telling you? Probably to end this relationship now, before things get worse, and they inevitably will. The only circumstances under which you should keep seeing him would be if he admitted to the problem and sought help immediately. There’s a chance that, if your boyfriend receives some intensive counseling, you could work things out together. However, I sense that you’ve already had enough. And don’t forget to take a look at why you got sucked in by this kind of person. (Hint: He begs for your love—you withhold it … Are you punishing Mom or Dad? Are you staying in control?)

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10 How can a couple learn to trust love when they’ve both been badly hurt in past relationships? (#ulink_a4dfee05-1e8c-5ca3-868d-5b28e0988bce)

After surviving a very bitter divorce and custody battle for my children, I finally met a wonderful man who is everything my ex-husband wasn’t. He’s kind, open, and willing to talk about everything. Our problem is that his ex-wife left him for his best friend, so he’s afraid to trust love again, and so am I. How can we leave the past behind us and make this new relationship work?

First of all, congratulations!! You are faced with what I call a “high-class problem,” a problem that looks like a problem, but is really a great situation with some challenges attached to it. In essence, what you’re asking is, “How can my partner and I get rid of the fear in our relationship so we can love fully?” That’s a wonderful question to be able to ask. So the first step is for you and your sweetie to remind yourselves that you’ve worked very hard to get to this place. Before you get too intense about climbing your next mountain, take a moment to stop and really celebrate how far you’ve both come to finally have found a healthy relationship.

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.

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11 What does it mean when your partner won’t introduce you to his family and friends? (#ulink_cf61f36f-924f-5837-b160-b46deee50f26)

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? (#ulink_f8f8507d-f610-5795-a328-839690b30da1)

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? (#ulink_8b169670-fd9a-521a-8d01-695e580c33b1)

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: