Many couples who ask me if they’re incompatible ARE. But they don’t want to hear it, certainly not that directly.
These people often love each other, and think that “love” is enough to make a relationship work. But it isn’t. Shared values are crucial, and many loving couples lack these.
Sexual discrepancies–desire, frequency, variety, etc.–are among the hardest to navigate. Therapy may be of only limited help in such a situation.
Sex therapy, first developed by Masters & Johnson in the early 1960s, can be wonderful—life-changing, cost-effective, marriage- (and therefore family-) saving.
But we can’t do everything that people want or need. Here are some things I’m asked to do periodically, which I just don’t know how to do—and I doubt that my colleagues, can, either.
Is non-monogamy a viable option? Of course—but not for everyone. It is NOT a good way to fix a broken relationship. And it takes lots of thoughtful communication.
And is poly really a sexual orientation?
Many therapists are not sexually literate—and they can harm people unintentionally. If your therapist seems uncomfortable talking about sex, challenge them—and perhaps replace them.
In a word, no. The problem is, I see a lot of couples in which one partner is caught using Match, or Tinder, or Ashley Madison, or some other dating/hookup website. Partner B flips out, accusing partner A of cheating, or wanting to cheat. Partner A denies it, but doesn’t sound convincing: “Uh, I was um, you know, just looking around.” Sometimes that’s nonsense—A is cheating, just as B suspects. But frequently, A is window shopping. We all do it—we look at ads for things we can’t afford, look in shops at things we’ll never buy, look on EBay at…