Blog About Health & Medicine

LOVE REACTION: Loss can emphasize the value of the presence of others, and the bereaved spouse may turn to the partner for a renewal of intimacy and love. If the partner is puzzled by such a need, by a request for romance at this time of sadness, or if the partner overtly or covertly rejects such a longing for love and its manifestation through sex, hostility and anger can result, worsening the grief reaction and even jeopardizing general health.

Sometimes the grieving partner “tests” his or her own relationship for love at the time of loss, making sure his or her most important source of social and intimate support is still intact. An unsuspecting partner may “flunk” this love test, never knowing that he or she has been tested, and the grieving partner sinks further into depression at what he or she sees as yet another loss.

SEXUAL WITHDRAWAL: Bereavement Brings with it a range of physical and emotional reactions. Nausea, disequilibrium, muscle and joint pain, chronic headache, sweating and chills, bowel and urinary disruption, and other symptoms of bereavement are not uncommon and may delay return to sexual intimacy.

Emotionally, guilt or self-blame regarding the loss may result in a self-imposed compensatory celibacy, a paying of penance for imaginary or real responsibility for the loss. The partner’s attempts to break through such withdrawal may be perceived as insensitivity, and the partner may become a target for projection of the blame and self-recrimination felt by the bereaved.

Sometimes a compulsive searching is part of the grieving process; searching for the lost person and the feelings lost because of the bereavement. This cognitive and emotional wandering results in a distractability that represents yet another form of sexual withdrawal. It may show in listlessness, lack of attention, fading in and out of attention, failure to listen, and long periods of passivity and for the marital partner.

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Love is an emotional experience, a deep feeling. It just happens. You don’t have to do anything about it, it sort of does everything to you. You have to let it happen.

HUSBAND

I referred earlier to the “smitten” aspect of the mythology of love. We expect love to happen to us, that we are somehow full of pre-planted love seeds that sprout spontaneously in response to a person who stimulates them. We feel that we ourselves have little to do with love, because it overwhelms us. Cartoon characters develop a silly grin, their eyes gloss over, and their heart may grow inside their chest, throbbing to the breaking point. We assume that we are stationary targets for love arrows, targets more than archers.

“I know he was probably the worst thing that could ever have happened to me, but I just could not help myself. Love is blind, and so was I. He turned me inside out.” This report from one of the wives illustrates the assumption of love as an involuntary reflex.

Psychiatrist Scott Peck states, “Of all the misconceptions about love, the most powerful and pervasive is the belief that ‘falling in love’ is love.” We do fall in “limerence,” but love itself, loving, is not a reflex, it is a volitional act. We decide to love. All love is a conscious decision, not a helpless mammalian legacy.

One of the key steps in helping couples discover super marital sex was to re-teach them about the voluntary nature of love. If they clung to the assumption of love as a helpless, “willing victim” state, then they were trapped into the conclusion that once the reflex mysteriously “went away,” it was gone for good. At best they had to wait for it to return again, to be rekindled by some mysterious evolutionary biochemical spark. You “do” love, you do not get it, for “it” is not a thing. Love is a dynamic, volitional process that takes place within a system.

“I lost it, and I don’t remember really when. Love just went out of our life,” stated one of the wives.

“Yes,” said the husband, “We sort of became brother and sister one day. It was probably gradual, but the light went out.”

Our “love light” is not automatic.

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