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This question was asked by a client of mine named Sue:

Sue told me she was feeling lonely and not happy in her relationship with her husband.  She felt he spent too much time working or doing other activities he likes to do.  And often when he was with her, he wasn’t really focused on her, although he was sometimes.  She wanted him to spend more time with her, really focused on her, but didn’t want to stop him from doing the things he enjoys doing, and wondered what she should do.

My response: I think what you’re really wanting is intimacy.  And the lack of intimacy in your life is what is resulting in you feeling lonely.  The particular amount of time with your husband focusing his attention on you, is just a symbol of that for you.  But you not receiving intimacy, has to do with you not having the channels open for receiving it, in other words, an inability to receive it.  Intimacy can’t be gotten by controlling another person’s behavior.

This is actually an interlocking issue between you and your husband, because he also doesn’t have the channels for intimacy open.  And so the solution is not to have him stop doing what he likes to do and focus his attention on you.  Approaching this by trying to get him to focus more time on you is an attempt to control what can’t be controlled in reality, and it is a backwards approach to the problem.  The problem is not about what each of you wants being in conflict, but it’s about your unhealed issues distorting each of your experience of reality in a way that proves your limiting decisions to be true.  When people make a limiting decision, the unconscious mind gets invested in proving that it is true.  That’s what causes people to keep repeating dysfunctional patterns in their lives, doing things over and over again that they know isn’t good for them, or getting into the same kind of dysfunctional type of relationship.  In this case, the limiting decision, and what your unconscious is invested in proving, has to do with believing you are not lovable.  And so the solution is to transform the unhealed issue.

When the limiting decisions in both of you that are closing the channels for you being able to have intimacy in relationships are cleared, than the issue of how much and in what way you spend time with each other will natural flow in a way that creates intimacy.  The truth is that intimacy is something you both want, as it’s inherent in intimate relationships.  When you get to the real issue, you find that what each of you wants is not actually in conflict with the other.

*Limiting decisions are decisions made usually before the age of 6 or 7 years old, that are some form of deciding that there is something inherently wrong with you, and/or some form of that life doesn’t work — Such as “I am bad,” “I am worthless,” “People can’t be trusted.”

“My particular perspective on the question of marriage (or any committed relationship) is to find out what is really true, the truth between you and the other person.  The commitment is about being true to yourself, being true to what really matters to you, which means being true to your emotions in relation to the other person as well, true to what you want in relation to the other person.

It’s not a matter of conforming to ‘This is what marriage is, and now I have to conform to it.’  I believe the reason there is so much divorce right now, is because people have been trying to conform to some external ideal of what marriage is supposed to be, rather than find out what’s really true between the two people.  Women, probably more than men, have stayed in unhappy relationships because they thought they were supposed to, and also because they didn’t think they could support themselves on their own.  But this is changing, with fewer people willing to stay in unhappy relationships, and women becoming more empowered.  People are less willing to compromise who they are in to conform to an old ideal.

That frame-of-reference can work because of the truth that life is meant to work.  If you follow what is really true between people who are right for each other, there will be a coming together.  If you are true to yourself and doing what’s right for you to do, doing what you’re here on earth to do, and following your own guidance; and your partner is being true to his or her self as well, there will be a way for your paths to join together.  And the two of you can be fully empowered, fully true to who you are, and be together in loving connection.

This generally requires personal transformation for it to work.  Relying on what’s really true between people, rather than some ideal form, will only work if the unhealed issues that are distorting how each partner relates to each other are worked through.  It’s people trying to avoid and manipulate what is true, because of limiting decisions* and the emotional defense systems protecting the limiting decisions, which cause problems in relationships.

This also means working on yourself so that you become more and more true to who you really are.  That’s the commitment that enables you to be truly together with someone else.  Whatever would cause you to be untrue to yourself, would cause the relationship to not work.  People think they have to be untrue to themselves in order to make relationships work, but that’s what actually cause them to dissolve down the line.  And the older you get the less patience you tend to have for being untrue to yourself.”

* For a definition of “limiting decisions,” click here.