So what if you’re good friends with another couple and the wife there is a little too attentive to your husband? Or, another patron is asking: what if both my spouse and I are experiencing PISD (post infidelity stress disorder)?

Today we’re going to be handling two questions from our much-valued listeners of our podcast. This first question from Chewy relates to boundaries with other married couples. Here’s the full question:

Can you talk about boundaries with other married couples? My best friend began to make jokes that were borderline sexually inappropriate. Pun on words type humor that I don't necessarily find humorous but a few times my husband would join in and banter. He is very word-y and so I felt like this was a threat to our relationship.

At times I've felt that my friend envied our relationship and especially my husband's attention to me and his financial provision for our family. I have also felt that my husband has appreciated her attentiveness and appreciation of his actions. I feel that she is just more immature in her faith and Christian walk but have begun to wonder how often we should be in community with her and her husband. I have also seen her be more attentive to another mutual married guy friend. I feel for her because I think her actions come from a hurting place.

My husband seems to be vulnerable to words of affirmation in general because that tends to be his love language and I am more practical. I don't praise as often because I'm busting my butt just as much as he is! Working full-time and managing a lot of household tasks like schooling and budgeting. I want to be more vocal in my appreciation because I think he needs it but I can't manage to do so without feeling fake. I say things like "Thank you" "I really appreciate your help" "I love that you can XYZ to help me" but I feel like he wants more praise in the way of "You are my hero" "I don't know how you can xyz" or more over the top type comments that I can't seem to say without feeling like I'm worshiping him.

My husband and I experienced a difficult few years due to other circumstances (I talked to an old boyfriend via Instagram and it was clear this old flame still felt attentive towards me - my husband went on a revenge track to show me he was attractive too we have since with the help of your podcast worked through this phase) and feel that he may have been vulnerable to her attention more than he normally would.

We have talked these instances through multiple times but now I'm wondering how do we balance a healthy mix of time for just him and I to rebuild our bond and strengthen our marriage with time for our two families to be together. We both have small children and are in very similar phases of life but their family has a dysfunctional marriage at least more so than ours or maybe just different. I've tried encouraging and it seems to help but I can't help but feel that I'm just not sure what healthy in this case should look like. Our kids very much enjoy being together and our families have fun when hanging out.

How can I tell if we have crossed into dangerous territory or if I'm just being over sensitive? I will say that my husband is more passive and isn't necessarily the one instigating shared time, it more comes from my friend and her husband seems to go along with it. We are all Christians and looking to raise our kids with good examples. I have felt a tension between feeling like I need to limit shared time and also being a good friend. I am more of a homebody and prefer to just hang with my husband who also would be okay doing the same but I know we need community time as well. Help!

And here’s question number 2, from MarkyMark, in relation to Post Infidelity Stress Disorder, which we devoted a full episode to back in March:

Can you please discuss how to proceed if both partners are experiencing PISD simultaneously?

Listen to the podcast for Caleb’s answer to these two questions!

This is a question that comes up more often than I would have expected. We’ll address this issue of shared interests but at the end of the post I am going to go a whole layer deeper and tell you what really matters for couples that are focusing on this issue.

Some couples seem to spend all their time together and have exactly the same interests. Others seem to have nothing in common and their leisure time is a constant battle between their individual preferences. If you’re in the latter group you may be wondering to what extent you are expected to join in with your spouse’s interests and hobbies. So we’re going to examine this issue and how it can impact marriages.

Clarifying Shared Leisure or Interests

Whether we’re talking hobbies or shared leisure or shared interests, it’s helpful to clarify that in order for something to truly fall into this category the activities need to be[i]

Expected to be enjoyable by BOTH spouses

Freely chosen by BOTH spouses

That might sound obvious but often the contention comes in right here because either one person is not enjoying it, or one person does not feel like they were part of the decision. This is a challenge for being honest with each other and with ourselves: don’t call it shared if it’s not.

It’s OK if you’re happy to do something with your spouse because he or she enjoys it and you just enjoy being with them. Just make sure it is fair: so that somehow that imbalance is reciprocated even in other ways.

I think it’s also good to point out that shared activities can be joint or parallel. Joint are interactive and undertaken together. Parallel are undertaken together but not interactive. For example, going to a swimming club: you’ll change separately, you won’t interact while swimming etc. But it’s still a joint activity.

I think this is helpful to note because it begs the question: are you wanting more activities together or more interaction? If you only want the latter, it may be that you’re focusing on the wrong problem. More on that later.

Shared Interests and Marriage Satisfaction

Spending free time together and having shared interests is linked to increased marital satisfaction[ii].

Having shared interests is a sign of high levels of intimacy as it shows that the couples are choosing to spend their free time together. Shared leisure also predicts higher self-reported feelings of love for your spouse and less conflict in the marriage[iii]. So, at least initially, this seems to be a good thing, right?

However, it's slightly more complicated than just shared free time equals marital satisfaction. For starters, the interests really do have to be shared: a study from 2002[iv] studied couples over 10 years for changes in shared leisure and its effects on marriage. They found that involvement in interests that the husband liked but the wife disliked was "both a cause and a consequence of wives' dissatisfaction". Forcing or expecting your spouse to care about the same things as you isn’t going to be good for your marriage.

There are a whole range of other factors that play into this other than simply how long you spend on what activity, and who enjoys it. Here are some of them[v]:

Satisfaction with the leisure time (both of you finding it enjoyable) is correlated with marital satisfaction. This satisfaction with the joint leisure time is a more important predictor of marital satisfaction than the amount of time spent in such activities.

Marital satisfaction is linked to the percentage of free time spouses chose to spend with each other, rather than the total number of hours. That’s a very nuanced but interesting detail. It’s saying this: if you have 2 free hours a week, and you spend one of that with your spouse, that’s 50%. If you have 8 free hours a week and you spend 2 of those with your spouse, that’s 25%. Spouse’s with the 50% ratio will be more satisfied with their marriage than the 25% spouse who is getting double t...

What about age difference in marriage? If you marry someone who is quite a bit older than you, does this make your marriage experience different from the experience of couples who are similar in age? Let’s find out!

If you’re struggling with your marriage and may be wondering if the age difference— which is not something you can change — is an issue, the things we go over today should be useful and above all hopeful. Because while the research does identify some challenges faced by couples with large age differences, overall he message is a positive one.

Age Gap Statistics

Let’s start with some facts and stats about age-heterogeneous couples, or those with a bigger than normal age gap. About 10% of marriages have an age difference of more than 10 years[i] and there are more of these kinds of marriages now than in 1980. So these marriages are not uncommon and are on the rise.

As you might imagine, men are more likely to be married to a younger spouse than women[ii] and this percentage increases with age: the percentage of men marrying younger spouses is lowest in the 20-24 age range at 35% and then rises to 67% by age 40 and 73% by age 70.

Interestingly, these effects are observed across all western cultures and most non-western cultures, with a few exceptions, such as The Philippines and Costa Rica, where women marrying younger men is more common[iii]

This pattern of men marrying younger women being the norm has remained stable over the past few decades although the rates of women marrying younger men are increasing. For second marriages and marriages later in life (at age 50+) there is more diversity in age gaps between spouses than in younger couples[iv].

Age-heterogeneous couples are more common in black marriages and in those with lower socioeconomic status[v].

So the statistics are interesting, both for those of us not experiencing such an age gap — Verlynda and I are just over two years apart in age (she’s younger) — and for those who are in a marriage that has a larger age difference. But the real question is, how does age difference impact marital satisfaction?

Age Differences and Marital Satisfaction

Turns out that’s a hard question to answer! Results on the effect of age difference on marriage are very mixed, but overall age-dissimilar marriages are "more alike than dissimilar to coeval marriages[vi]". “Coeval” just means of the same age.

So this researcher is noting that typically a marriage with an age gap doesn’t look much different than a marriage between couples of similar age. But: other research does note some issues. So let’s just go through all this and look at the different conclusions to see what we can learn.

Older research[vii] often finds that marriages with large age gaps have lower marital quality and satisfaction, and are less stable than couples who are of similar ages.

Being similar is normally considered a good thing and predictive of marital satisfaction: particularly similarity in values, upbringing, and socioeconomic status. Values and norms in society change as time goes on, so couples of significantly different ages may have different values, which could lead to lower agreement and lower overall satisfaction[viii]. So this dissimilarity in upbringing and worldview may lead to conflict and communication, although it’s worth noting that, as we saw in our episode on whether opposites attract, the situation is not as black and white as saying that dissimilarity is bad.

Age differences could also lead to a power imbalance, which can increase tension and conflict. This is based on Resource Theory, a theory of relationships which states that whichever spouse brings more resources to the marriage will exhibit greater control.

The older spouse is likely to be in a better job and have more life experience etc., and so by "bringing more to the marriage" they naturally tend to make more of the decisions. However, it can also work the other way if youth and attr...

Purpose and meaning. This is that deeper layer in marriage where you get to explore the meaning of having been brought together as a couple. And, how you want to impact the world. How you want to create a legacy: the value that you leave behind as your life comes to a close.

Everyone wants to feel like their life has meaning, and marriage creates a special kind of meaning for couples: shared identity and sense of purpose, and a partner with whom you can impact the world.

Shared purpose starts with finding meaning. Meaning-making is drawn from our individual identities, shaped by nature and nurture. Once we are married and begin to have repeated interactions with our spouse, the interaction formulates a more stable sense of self (of who I am, who you are).

So my relationship to Verlynda, as my spouse, modifies my identity. And then we create this common world together based on our interactions and on the common front we present to the world[i].

Meaning Starts With Your Shared Story

Every couple creates a shared story of their relationship: how they have interpreted the events that led to them coming together and a joint vision for the future. I see this in our lives. Just over a year ago we were preparing to leave on a year-long trip in our travel trailer. Having to create this vision ourselves and then explain it to others confronted us with the need to make meaning or have some sense of shared purpose. Having to explain yourself and rationalize what you’re doing prompts this process.

I think any major life transition for a couple is going to result in this process of creating a vision for yourselves and for others to grab hold of.

But I think particularly at the start of a marriage, in its early stages, couples have to create this shared sense of identity and create a sense of meaning to their relationship. They’re bringing their individuality together, but they are also creating a new, jointly developed meaning. And this helps the couples make sense of their relationship and also it makes the future seem more stable and certain[ii].

So a study my researcher provided looked at the stories that newlywed couples told about how they met and about their experiences dating. The content of these stories and the shared meaning they represented was a strong predictor of marital wellbeing[iii]. Here’s some specific points of interest from this research:

Storytelling Process. Telling the stories in a collaborative way, with high agreement over the details, predicts marital wellbeing as it suggests a strongly held sense of shared meaning to the relationship. Disagreement over the details or conflict during storytelling suggests couples have not formed a strong sense of meaning. This is where we start to see purpose being defined: the couple has a shared, synchronous sense of having been brought together.

Storytelling Style. Telling the story as a narrative, rather than just a list of events, and telling it with a sense of drama are both linked to marital wellbeing as they show that the couple are very invested in their shared history. This animated interest reflects some of the value they place on the process of uniting their lives together.

Story Content: what the couples actually chose to tell in their stories was also significant:

Attributing tensions or difficulties to factors outside the couple, rather than to yourself or your partner, indicates that the couple have a strong sense of cohesion and was linked to high wellbeing

Framing the story as a conflict or focusing on barriers that were overcome, such as overcoming past relationships or dealing with disapproval from parents, was linked to lower satisfaction. If the whole “story” of your relationship is defined as one of conflict and turmoil then it will naturally become less stable.

What I take from this is that couples who have some deep sense of destiny or providence or God’s will in bringing them together have a more me...

Remarriage after bereavement. Maybe I get a little selfish and hope that I’ll never have to face the loss of a spouse. When I’m feeling more noble and altruistic, I hope my spouse will never have to face it. But regardless, nearly 100% of couples face the loss of their significant other during their lifetime. And so if this reality is so common, it’s worth talking about.

Losing your spouse is one of the hardest things any person can go through. Amidst the grief and sadness, you have the question of remarriage: when is it ok to remarry? How will my new marriage compare to my old one? Should I even be comparing them? Today we’re going to be looking at this topic and hopefully offering some hope to those of you in this situation.

Background Info about Remarriage

We’re just talking about remarriage after bereavement today. Not remarriage after divorce- that’s a rather separate issue. But for both of us here at OYF: this is our first marriage. We don’t actually have any close connections in our peer group who have remarried after bereavement. And both sets of our parents are still living. So we’re definitely abstracted from this in terms of experience.

But we do have some research to help frame the issue of remarriage. Here are some stats to get us started:

Men are more likely to remarry across all age groups.

Remarriage rates decline with age for both men and women. Women's likelihood of remarrying declines more sharply with age than it does for men[i]. As they get older they become less likely to remarry.

These patterns are true across cultures.

Remarriage rates decline with age for both genders. This could be due to a lack of availability of potential partners, or may also reflect a reduced interest in remarrying.

Older widows often cite freedom from having to care for their spouse as a reason not to remarry in later life[ii]. Which makes sense — if you see someone caring for a spouse with a long, protracted terminal illness: they are not only learning to become more independent as the illness progresses, but they are also carrying a huge burden of care. And I could definitely see someone coming through that being more reluctant to remarry.

When do people tend to remarry? Rates of remarriage drop just after bereavement and then rise. This is different from the remarriage rates for divorce, where people often remarry quickly.

Clearly, a time of mourning is needed before remarriage after the death of your spouse, but perhaps this finding is also hinting at a social norm or taboo stating that it is inappropriate to remarry too quickly after being widowed[iii].

12 months is sometimes considered the acceptable time to wait before re-marriage, and there is actually a large increase in marriages among bereaved men and women in the 13th month after the bereavement[iv]. This suggests that a good percentage of the bereaved consider a year an appropriate time to wait before moving on with a new partner.

I think if you’re recently bereaved then that alone should offer some hope: right now you may feel like you’ll never recover, but perhaps it’s comforting to know that for some people the healing process moves along to a point they feel ok remarrying after just a year.

Of course, it doesn’t always go that way, and every circumstance is different. Overall rates of remarriage are much lower after bereavement than divorce: 5% of women and 12% of bereaved men remarry, compared to 69% and 78% of divorced women and men, respectively[v].

Interestingly, widowed people often marry other widows, with 45% or bereaved men and 42% of bereaved women doing so[vi]. Perhaps the shared experience of having gone through such a terrible loss makes them uniquely able to comfort and support each other.

Issues Affecting Remarriage

We’re going to cover some interesting factoids here, talking about the influences that come into play.

In a general sense: either post-divorce or post-bereavement,

Perfectionism is not too far from any of our hearts. Certainly, anyone who is on Facebook or Instagram knows that we, just like everybody else, tend to present the perfect image of ourselves on these channels. But: we want to ask the question, how does this affect our marriage?

The topic of perfectionism was suggested by one of our readers, and it’s certainly an interesting one. What is perfectionism? Is it a good thing? How can it impact marriage when one spouse is only satisfied with perfection and the other finds it hard to live up to their standards?

What is Perfectionism?

Perfectionism usually comes in one of three flavors[i]:

Self-oriented perfectionism: requiring yourself to be perfect

Other-oriented perfectionism: requiring other people to be perfect

Socially prescribed perfectionism: belief that others hold unrealistic expectations about you: believing that others require you to be perfect.

A related concept is perfectionistic self-presentation, which is the desire to be seen as perfect by others[ii]. This includes actions such as self-promotion, desire to hide imperfections, and reluctance to talk about your own imperfections. Obviously needing to be seen as perfect is going to impact a marriage in quite a big way, especially if you’re afraid to be vulnerable around your spouse.

I think it’s helpful to take a step back from the role that perfectionism plays in your marriage and ask, “What kind of perfectionism do we each struggle with?” You’ll want to nuance your response based on whether it is self or other-oriented, or if it socially prescribed.

Is Perfectionism a Good Thing?

There are mixed thoughts on this.

When you have these perfectionistic traits, it is inevitable that you would feel unsatisfied or stressed if you do not meet the standards set on you (by yourself or by perceived others).

Some may argue that it is useful or essential for a high-achieving life while others argue that it is unhelpful or detrimental to your wellbeing.

Some researchers have differentiated between adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism, in which adaptive perfectionism is seen as a form of motivation and hard-working attitude, and so is linked to positive outcomes.

Adaptive perfectionism is correlated with higher achievement but neither perfectionism nor achievement are correlated with life satisfaction[iii]. However, both adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism are linked to highly negative outcomes such as anxiety, depression and low self-esteem, as well as a variety of interpersonal problems, which we’ll get to in just a moment[iv]. So even if perfectionism helps drive you to succeed it comes at a steep cost.

So the bottom line is it may help you achieve more but it will cost you. For me, I think perfectionism is contrary to the gospel. Those of us who are born again are all valuable, fallible children of God. So our worth is something instilled in us and given to us but we also acknowledge that we have an innate, undeniable potential to fail.

Perfectionism is incapable of helping with either point, although it attempts to. It cannot provide worth because when is perfect ever perfect enough? And it cannot preserve us from proving that we have a fallen nature: that we sin, we act in ways that are not congruent with our values or with God’s values, we let our spouses down from time to time.

So in my mind, perfectionism just becomes a breeding ground for shame. For that reason, it is unhelpful.

The Effect of Perfectionism on Marriage

So let’s look at how this touches marriage specifically.

The reality is that perfectionism in marriage is more likely to help us get our ugly on than anything else. Let’s break this down according to the three kinds of perfectionism: self-oriented, other-oriented and socially prescribed.

Self-Oriented Effects

The fear of being seen as imperfect may prompt you to hide parts of yourself from your spouse. Physically, yes,

A while back, I completed 4 and a half days of training on the assessment and treatment of sex addiction. You might be thinking “I’m not a sex addict so this isn’t relevant”, but I’d encourage you to listen to this week’s podcast regardless because we’ll also talk a lot about what healthy sexuality looks like in this show. There’ll be plenty of food for thought whether this is an issue in your marriage or not.

What Sex Addiction Is and Is Not

To begin with, let’s clarify what we’re talking about with “sex addiction”. It is not:

A high desire or couples that enjoy a lot of sex. We need to differentiate compulsive vs. healthy sex:

Compulsive: using genitals to avoid feelings. Intimacy: closeness and affection are enhanced through sex

Compulsive relationships are marked by loneliness, possessiveness, jealousy, anger, and alienation. Healthy intimacy affects the growth of both individuals

Healthy courting and bonding is an honest, slow process. There’s no ‘game’ in the courting process.

I’ve never heard mention of a couple who are sexually addicted to each other

Sex addiction is not necessarily porn addiction.

Sex addiction is not necessarily sex offending — although a lot of sex offenders are also sex addicts.

So what IS sex addiction? There are 10 criteria:

Loss of control over your actions

Compulsive behavior

Efforts to stop

Loss of time to your addiction

Preoccupation with sex and sexual thoughts

Inability to fulfill obligations due to your addiction

Continuation in the addiction despite negative consequences

Escalation- behavior continually getting more extreme to satisfy cravings

Losses due to the negative consequences of addiction

Withdrawal

Differences between Addictive and Healthy Sexuality

Addictive Sexuality

Healthy Sexuality

Feels shameful

Fosters positive self-worth

Is illicit, stolen or exploitative

Has no victims

Compromises values

Operates within a value system

Draws on fear for excitement

Uses intimacy for excitement

Reenacts childhood abuse

Cultivates a sense of being an adult

Disconnects from oneself

Fosters a sense of self

Creates a world of unreality

Expands reality through being in touch with the present

Is self-destructive and dangerous

Relies on safety

Uses conquest or power

Is mutual, consensual, and equal

Serves to medicate and kill pain

Fosters self-regulation of emotions

Is dishonest or requires a double life

Originates in integrity and authenticity

Becomes routine, grim or joyless

Is spontaneous, fun and playful

Demands perfection

Accepts the imperfect

Suffocating, demanding, clinging or disengaged

Is respectful of boundaries, accepting and intimate

Causes of Sex Addiction

Family backgrounds:

Families of origin for sex addicts are characteristically rigid (77% of addicts) and disengaged (87%)

Addicts in the family (87%)

Childhood issues

Emotional abuse: 97%

Sexual abuse: 81%

Physical abuse: 72%

So the family and upbringing play a huge part in almost all cases. A lot of the recovery work involves addressing childhood trauma.

Pornography is a catalyst or portal to amplify sex addiction.

I like to see it as a very broken way of coping with pain from trauma, abuse, neglect, etc. The addict absolutely must take responsibility for all of their choices — but there are significant, tragic things that have happened in their lives that have made them vulnerable to these choices in a way that those of use without those experiences are not going to be nearly as vulnerable.

Treatment for Sex Addiction

Is there hope for sex addicts?

Yup. It’s amazing to hear stories of very broken lives and marriages. So much destruction and pain. Now they are whole and their lives are manageable and they are pursuing healthy courtship and healthy intimacy.

In our previous show, we talked about the neuroscience of romantic love. Today we’re going to address the behavioral side of things to help you rekindle the passion in your marriage.

Dating can be one of the most exciting times in any relationship: it’s when you’re constantly thinking about each other, finding out so much about each other and forming that deep connection. But what makes dating so awesome? How do men and women come at it differently? And how can a married couple make this come alive in their marriage again?

What Makes Dating & the Early Stages of Love so Enjoyable?

Last time we looked at our brains and how there are pleasure and reward systems built right into them. You’ll recall we talked about romantic love (which is out front during the courtship or dating phase of a relationship) and partner attachment (which is the steady, committed love of lasting marriages)

Romantic love is linked to systems in the brain which "reward" you with strong feelings of pleasure whenever you think about or spend time with your spouse[i]. This motivates you to want to spend time with your spouse or girl/boyfriend at the start of a relationship. Typically this phase of love lasts 12-18 months[ii], but can last an entire lifetime[iii]. We talked about extending that last time.

Self-expansion theory, developed by husband and wife researchers Arthur and Elaine Aron, speaks to this situation[iv]. In their view, romantic love is a period of rapid self-expansion by including the beloved in your sense of who you are.

During the very early stages of the relationship, you learn a lot about your beloved and get to grow as a person and experience new things by integrating aspects of your spouse into your own life. The rate at which you can do this declines after the initial period of the relationship: you start to run out of new things to learn about your spouse.

So dating is the most exciting phase of a relationship because you’re getting to grow as a person by getting to know your spouse, and this inevitably starts to taper off the longer a relationship lasts. The other side of the coin is the concept of habituation: the longer you do something/spend time with someone, the more you get used to it/them, and the less rewarding the time becomes[v]. Sniff.

Intimacy and sex then play into these early stages of love and then marriage. For those that are new to our podcast, we speak out of a Christian worldview and we practice and hold the value that extramarital sex is not only wrong, but it’s also unhelpful. On the ‘unhelpful’ point, we’ve noted before that the best sex is happening inside of marriage so we not only have moral reasons for asserting this value, but research-based evidence to support the benefits as well.

Back to our point. Let’s talk about how intimacy works. Remember that when we look at intimacy, we mean the whole enchilada, not just sex.

This is interesting. According to a study by Baumeister et al in 1999[vi], passion is a function of changes in intimacy.

So when intimacy is stable (either low or high), passion is low. But when intimacy is increasing, passion is high.

Intimacy is often increasing fastest at the start of the relationship, as you become more comfortable disclosing information about yourself and generally become closer. "As relationship partners gain an understanding of each other’s innermost thoughts and feelings, the rate of intimacy growth may taper off over time as they have less to learn about each other and the rate of engagement in novel relationship activities diminishes[vii]."

This intimacy growth during dating makes the start of a relationship a lot of fun. But sex comes into the equation once we get married too.

The frequency of sex (although not necessarily the quality of sex) is highest at the start of the relationship. In later years it becomes less frequent, and as the research, this points out this is often due to less interest,

Who knew your brain was doing so much when you were falling in love? Well, we want to help you fall in love again (or, more deeply) by helping you get those brain circuits working in support of keeping the romance in your marriage!

When most people talk about love over the course of a lifetime they say that it begins with a fiery, passionate love at the start of a relationship, which slowly dwindles to be replaced by a more stable, less exciting, companionate sort of love. This is actually mirrored in the different brain systems involved in love, but as we look through the research we’ll see that a loss in passion over time is far from inevitable.

The Neuroscience of Love & Relationships

There are 3 distinct brain systems involved in intimate relationships[i]:

Sex drive

Courtship attraction, aka romantic love

Partner attachment

Each has a separate set of associated emotions, behaviours and brain systems. What we’re going to do is look at courtship attraction (or, romantic love) and then partner attachment. And then we’re going to look at the changes in romantic love over time to see if we can actually keep some of that heat going in marriage.

Romantic Love

Romantic love is observed in all cultures worldwide and can be felt even at a young age before puberty & sex drive develop[ii]. For example, your kindergarten teacher crush.

When you begin a romantic relationship as an adult, intensely romantic love typically lasts up to 18 months[iii], after which partner attachment becomes the main driving force of the relationship. One way to describe this is you have a lot of heat at the start of your relationship, then as you’re married and settle in for the long haul, your brain chemistry changes to support a steady burn which is more sustainable.

So romantic love, therefore, provides motivation to find a single long-term spouse, and attachment provides to motivation to stay together over the years. You need both.

Romantic Love in the Brain

How does romantic love affect the brain? A study by A. Aron from 2005[iv] used fMRI scans to monitor brain activity in 17 people who had been "intensely in love" for a short period of time (1-17 months) when looking at a photo of their beloved.

The areas of the brain that were activated were linked to the dopamine "reward system", associated with pleasure (through the release of dopamine), general arousal, focused attention and motivation to pursue and acquire rewards. Romantic love is therefore considered a motivational force as well as just a feeling: you feel motivated to spend time together by the pleasure and arousal you experience. Think of love as driving the couple together with a very specific focus on one another.

As a sidebar: this system is separate from the sex drive, although they are correlated and often activated together since dopamine is also linked to sexual arousal. So, speaking from a Biblical values perspective you don’t need to have sex before marriage to really create a strong basis for marriage. By refraining from pre-marital sex you’re not taking anything away from the future of your marriage; contrary to the idea that you need to be sexually intimate before marriage as part of testing things out, research shows that the best sex happens inside marriage.

Higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine are also linked to feelings of love in that it creates a sense of alertness and attention as well as the increased heart rate, blushing and trembling often experienced in the early stages of love[v]. These bodily sensations are reflective of a 'love storm' going on in your brain!

And here’s another fascinating piece: the early stages of romantic love shows a similar brain pattern to obsessive-compulsive disorder: both show significantly higher levels of the serotonin transporter 5-HT. This is thought to produce the obsessive thoughts and tendency to place a very high value on a specific thing/person that is found i...

Fear is a frightening thing. In marriage, it is usually an invisible force. Like the winds of a storm: invisible itself but threatening and destructive. However, fear is always extinguished by the steady flame of committed love.

I think we all carry some fear in our hearts, at some level. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the more confidence you see in a person, the more likely they have fear issues. So this episode may be particularly relevant to those of us who feel that we really don’t need to hear it. I may just burst your bubble gently. Often confidence is a protective coping stance against the insecurity and fear that deeply troubles us. And nowhere are you more vulnerable to the effects of these fears than in your most intimate relationship: your marriage.

Fears About Me or Fears About You?

Most of us carry one or two kinds of fear. Either we have some level of fear that is really about ourselves: fear of rejection or fear of abandonment or fear of not being good enough, or fear of being unworthy of love and affection. These point at concerns within me and about me.

The other kind is fear about our spouse or significant people in our lives: fears of intimacy (afraid of letting people get too close to you) or fear of dependency (afraid to trust or afraid to count on other people). These are also fears that we carry within ourselves, but they are different from the previous in that they are indicative of our models of others.

So we all carry these models of self and models of others. Those are basic, nearly instinctive ways of relating to the humans around us based either on how we see ourselves or how we see other people. On the ‘other people’ part it’s about: are others reliable, are they trustworthy, can I depend on them. On the ‘self’ side it’s about am I worthy, am I lovable.

These are very deep but often when folks talk about them they use very simple language. For example, for me, I struggle most with the part of myself that asks the question: “if you saw me for who I am, would you still accept me?” The language is simple but the impact of that question touches the way I present myself in every social context of my life.

Another person may just say “I cannot trust others” or “people are just going to let me down”. Again: simple language, but this touches all of their social contexts and all their relationships too. We’ve looked before at issues of trust and why people may be unable to trust their spouse, and this attachment issue is often at the heart of it.

These deep fear constructs are indicators of our attachment style. Our attachment style is the way that we have learned to relate to the significant others in our life. Primarily our spouse, but it also impacts our children, our closest friends, and then to a lesser degree, our social network as well.

About half of the people are securely attached. That means they are secure in both themselves and their spouse: they believe themselves to be worthy of love and believe they can count on their spouse to love them and be there for them when they are needed.

The rest fall into three categories but we’re going to focus mainly on what we call avoidant attachment.

Those with avoidant attachment are insecure about the intentions of their spouse and they prefer to keep emotional distance in order to keep themselves safe. Often this comes across as coolness or distance or can even be interpreted as rejection. Usually, where one spouse is avoidant in their attachment style you’re going to see lower levels of intimacy[i]. If you aren’t sure your spouse is going to respond well to you, better to keep the really deep emotional stuff to yourself. See how this attachment style is about your view of yourself?

There’s also anxious-ambivalent attachment style which is more now about your view of your spouse — whether your spouse is actually like that or not. In this case, because of your view of others,