Passionate Marriage Highlights. Part Two

Schnarch, David.  (1997) Passionate Marriage. New York, NY.  Henry Holt and Company.

• "There is no beauty in sex --the beauty is in people...Sex becomes beautiful when we bring our personal beauty to it."
• "If we want kids to delay first intercourse, we have to give them a meaningful reason by helping them understand what sex can be.  Show them there's more involved than techniques--and much of it's developmentally beyond them.  If you want credibility, tell them the truth: adolescents are not potentially missing the best sexual years of their life because they haven't started yet.
  Few parents tell their kids, "Your father (mother) and I have been having sex for twenty years- and we're just starting to get it right.  It takes a long time.  Pay your dues."
  Most people never reach their sexual prime, and those who do, don't reach it until their forties, fities, and sixties. Profoundly meaningful sex is determined more by personal maturation than physiological reflex." (78)
• "Intimacy is often misunderstood as necessarily involving acceptance, validation, and reciprocity of one's partner...but intimacy is not the same as closeness, bonding, or caretaking...
  
  Likewise our understanding of "communication" is similarly distorted.  Communication is about information exchange...Couples who complain of "poor communication" or an inability to communicate are often referring to interactions that make them feel bad rather than to an absence of messages  One "problem" of marriage is that you can't stop communicating..."Good communication" is often mistaken for your partner perceiving you the way you want to be seen or understood." (102)
• "Ironically, intimacy seems to develop through conflict, self-validation, and unilateral disclosure." (103)
• Two types of intimacy:
  Other-validated...expectation of acceptance, empathy, validation, or reciprocal disclosure from one's partner. (106).  Sounds like: "I'll tell you about myself, but only if you then tell me about yourself...it's only fair...and if I go first, you have to make me feel secure..." (107).
  
  Self-validated...a person maintaining his or her own sense of identity and self-worth when disclosing, with no expectation of acceptance or reciprocity from the partner (emphasis added)...directly related to one's level of differentiation...ability to maintain a clear sense of oneself when loved ones pressure for conforming and sameness...tangible product of one's "relationship with oneself"."  Sounds like: "I don't expect you to agree with me; you weren't put on the face of the earth to validate and reinforce me.  But I want you to love me- and you can't really do that if you don't know me.  I don't want your rejection- but I must face that possibility if I'm ever to feel accepted or secure with you.  It's time to show myself to you and confront my separateness and mortality.  One day when we are no longer together on this earth, I want to know you knew me." (107)
• "Differentiation [validating yourself] is the foundation of long-term marital intimacy...Partners who aren't dependent on each other's validation to fell okay about themselves fuel their marriage with their unique strengths, rather than their mutual weaknesses."(107-108, 113)
• "When you realize spouses are always in two separate boats- and could sail in opposite directions...- you're more likely to be kind and friendly to your fellow captain."  (as opposed to being emotional siamese twins or emotionally fused) (109)
• "Differentiation is the ability to soothe your own anxiety and to resist being infected with other people's anxiety." (116)
• "The difference between having feelings vs. your feelings "having you"- being run by your emotions.  When you can modulate your anxiety you're neither driven by your feelings nor afraid of them..." (116)
• Solid self:  your internal identity; person you know yourself to be; composed of thigs you believe and hold dear; deepest truths about yourself; who you are and what you do "when push comes to shove." (117)
• When you no longer expect each other's validation, paradoxically, that's when you get it. (124-5)