Penny Cohen, LCSW

You’re 40 years old and married 15 years. You have two children. Your husband/wife is climbing the corporate ladder or is a stay at home parent and is a nurturing, and attentive, parent to your children. You’re living in a beautiful home, and have a relatively comfortable lifestyle. Then you meet someone – and lookout. The Tinglies!!!.  You feel a connection like never before.

 

This new attraction is empathetic, takes an interest in you, listens closely, gives feedback- something your partner doesn’t do.  This new person helps you feel good about you. You feel a warmth all over your body when you think about this person and crave to be with him/her. You begin to wonder, could this be your soulmate?

 

You do believe you love your partner but you’re not “in love,” anymore because now with this person there’s such a strong connection. 

 

What does this all mean?

 

What it means is with this new person you’re experiencing lust, not necessarily love. There’s no judgment, no criticism, no animosity, no control issues – something that probably didn’t exist either when you first met your partner and had the immediate connection. However, as the years flew by with possible money issues, raising kids who now can be challenging and answer back, and either a two-career household with each of you having business responsibilities or various other stay-at-home parent volunteer positions, husband and wife begin to have strife.

 

So what’s the answer here? Don’t give up your marriage for a dreamed of fling. Work on transforming the emotional charges of strife to tinglies and rejuvenate those you first had with your partner. When you do this you develop a higher tingly of being in touch with the goodness within yourself of doing what’s right for you and your family. That’s when you feel really good internally. And the higher tinglies emerge when you identify and work at what you love – and this comes when each partner is mutually supportive of the other.

 

Morton Hunt, a researcher who wrote many books on marriage in the 1970’s said “A good marriage is mutual psychotherapy.”  If you think about what a therapist does, (excluding sex) a therapist ideally listens, validates feelings, empathizes, and gives constructive, inspirational feedback. If you could do that for each other, then you would always feel connected.

 

The goal, therefore, is to come from strength and love, and give it to your family rather than needing love from them.

 

Invitation:

 

I invite you to think about opening to your own love and giving love rather than looking to get it. That way you’ll feel more love and actually attract it.

 

Keeping in touch and in love,

 

Penny