Married Couples
Mid-Life Madness and other Stressors
As mid-lifers in the midst of working through some of our ‘issues’, we are acutely aware of how easy it would be to let our individual stuff derail our marriage. It’s normal for a person in midlife to be irritable and volatile. Some react with depressive symptoms, others get angry and aggressive, others withdraw or…
Read MoreThe Pill and Partner Choice
It has long been known that hormonal contraceptives diminish a woman’s natural sexual drive (also called ‘libido’). Now there is real life evidence that the Pill also affects a woman’s partner choice. In a study published in Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, the authors speculate that hormonal contraceptive use before marriage could have a long lasting impact…
Read MoreGetting Help
If your marriage is in strife and you need some help, it’s important to make sure you get the right help. Unfortunately, many counsellors and therapists will accept couples for couples counselling without having any specific training. Couples therapy is a unique and one of the most difficult counselling tasks and you deserve a therapist…
Read MoreReconciliation
Love means more than saying “I’m sorry”. There’s a difference between the ‘I’ centred statement “I’m sorry”, and the other centred statement, “Will you please forgive me?” The ‘I’ centred statement simply acknowledges a fact. A person might recognise that they behaved poorly, inconsiderately, insensitively, thoughtlessly or carelessly. They might also just want to move…
Read MoreNew Product: Sexuality as Gift
In a world where sexuality is crassly exploited it can be difficult to connect with its giftedness. Yet gift it is: given by God to each man or woman to draw him or her into love. To be human is to be sexual. Sexuality is fundamental to being human – after all, every single cell…
Read MoreGender Bias in Intimacy
While almost everyone acknowledges that men and women are different, managing these differences is not so easy, especially in the area of intimacy. A woman’s preferred way of achieving intimacy is deep personal conversation, talking and sharing feelings, that is, verbal language. A man’s preferred way of achieving intimacy is physical bonding, touch and love…
Read MoreWhen Sex is Just an Activity
Almost everything around us – movies, magazines, books, even our friends and relatives-approach sex as something you ‘do’. In other words, sex is seen primarily as an activity. Most people never question this attitude and can naturally assume that if it is something that you ‘do’, you should ‘do’ it well. Prowess and performance can…
Read MoreGender Complementarity
Are we from the same planet? The popularity of John Gray’s “Men are from Mars & Women are from Venus” (and titles by other authors), signals the widespread recognition of gender differences in our society. It is now permissible to speak of stereotypical behaviours and gender specific abilities without being accused of putting the clock…
Read MoreHave you got a Smart Relationship?
There’s more to successful relationships than just following your instincts. Do the quiz to find out how you rate A. Love is… 1: A feeling – so I follow my feelings in my marriage 2: More than a feeling, but mostly I let my feelings tell me how to act 3: Hard work…
Read MoreBody Language
Pope John Paul II called marital sex a sacred body language, an act that communicated the total self-giving of husband to wife and wife to husband. This sacred meaning of sexual intercourse is built into the act itself and cannot be simply discarded or altered. The message of sex: “I give myself to you, freely,…
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