Ideally, you should be able to rest in the knowledge that your partner loves you, that they’re faithful to you, and that they’re committed to keeping your relationship healthy and alive. In a committed relationship, you certainly should feel as though you’re able to relax and feel safe with your partner. Now that you have “your person” for life, you can relax and feel secure!. Gone are the lonely days of dates with incompatible losers gone is the exhausting quest of trying on other people to see if they fit. Here’s how it works in practice: when you enter into a long term relationship with someone - especially if you marry them! - our default assumption is to assume that that person will bring us a sense of security. She believes that “security” is one of the most harmful and pervasive misconceptions. Give me predictability, give me surprise.Īnd we think it's a given, and toys and lingerie are going to save us with that.But the author asserts that it’s also important to eliminate some other common misconceptions that cause dysfunction in our relationships. Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide: But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long. Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship. So reconciling our need for security and our need for adventure into one relationship, or what we today like to call a passionate marriage, used to be a contradiction in terms. So what sustains desire, and why is it so difficult? And at the heart of sustaining desire in a committed relationship, I think is the reconciliation of two fundamental human needs. This is the first time that we want sex over time about pleasure and connection that is rooted in desire. “.this is the first time in the history of humankind where we are trying to experience sexuality in the long term, not because we want 14 children, for which we need to have even more because many of them won't make it, and not because it is exclusively a woman's marital duty.

Mating and captivity