Counseling with Cupid

(A Boulder Psychotherapists’ Guild Relationship Series Article)

by Dr. James  Cayton, Ph.D.

Loving is an art.  It has to be learned and practiced. Your lover deserves to feel well loved and so do you.  In a love affair, in a most unique way, selfishness and altruism are so intertwined that they cannot be separated.  The best thing you can do for yourself is to take care of your lover.  In love, there is only win-win. There is no win-lose; anything else is an illusion. Those who try win-lose find out that there is only lose-lose and the affair is over.

Many couples have never spent significant time with a man and woman who obviously love each.  Very few couples have been able to experience the language of love, and how it is distinctly different from the other communication styles.   The styles they do know, work effectively in a myriad of other situations, but not necessarily in intimate relationships.  All learning starts from observational learning.

So what can a couple do if they have not been able to observe a happy couple,  who have maintained their love, way past the initial infatuation and  idealization of each other?

All arts are learned.  Great chefs, musicians, and visual artists share one thing in common. They have multiplied their learning by studying with others who are more advanced in the art. It is true that we can have relationships without love-but who wants to do that? Why not experience a great love affair?

What about “friends with benefits”?  Well, that is a start.  But intimacy without love creates  an overwhelming experience of loneliness.  Why not be lovers?  You really do have a choice.  You don’t have to remain ignorant or to see what chance might bring.

You might continue to do your own observational learning, if you know loving couples who will let you observe them, and who will share how they communicate. That is very difficult to do beyond childhood, as loving couples have learned, out of necessity, to protect their love affair by creating boundaries of privacy, which protect them as a couple.

Is there a curriculum  for studying the Art of Loving?  There are many places to start learning, thanks to research that has been accumulating over the last fifty years .  It is not hidden, although it is not well known, even among Psychologists.  Many professionals who have heard of it, have never studied becoming a proficient teacher and coach.

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There are many patterns of communication which have been identified and studied for effectiveness. Studies have been done to determine in which specific situations, a particular style would be most effective.  Although there are many styles, most people can, with practice, learn to recognize and engage in four basic styles.

You and your partner may find yourselves becoming “defensive”.  You might say “I don’t want to change who I am!”, as if learning to communicate better was changing your personality.  That is an ignorant excuse.

Actively listening to the most important person of the opposite gender, and reflecting back enough of the essence of what they said, can enable your lover to feel deeply understood.  Sadly, many persons never have that experience.  It does take practice and energy.  But so does lovemaking, and I have never thought of it as “work”.  If you do, something is wrong, and you have some individual work to do first.

Two communication styles can be helpful to loving couples but they are not the language of love.  One style, with its three variants, observed every day in many places, will destroy a love affair.  Blindly using that one style will unwittingly doom the relationship.  It is independent of your personalities or your attraction to each other.  Style is that powerful.  The habits of how we express ourselves can be difficult to modify.

As love is an art, we are attracted to it, not repulsed by it.  Some behavior is repulsive and makes intimacy impossible.  Communication is behavior and what we say to people is how we treat them.  Communication can unwittingly make you repulsive, even though it is not consciously intended.

Loving couples must learn to share five elements of self-knowledge. The 5 Elements can be known initially only by the individual person.  Loving listening can help the individual lover to recognize and articulate this intimate self-knowledge. Ordinarily this intimate self-knowledge cannot and should not be shared indiscriminately because of the vulnerability that it creates. Lovers learn to share this only in committed relationships, which further creates the highest levels of trust and safety.

Loving is about how we treat each other, and how we communicate, is perhaps the most important way we treat each other.  When the inevitable misunderstandings occur in all loving relationships, what do successfully loving couples do?  You can learn the answer to this question.  I would be happy to help guide and coach you as I have done with many loving couples.

Knowledge is power.  We accept that men and women are equal under the law.  That is one of the key concepts underlying our entire society. The legal rights of women have slowly been recognized, and are still evolving.  This is good for lovers as happier women make happier lovers.

We need to include another idea that is equally important to lovers within their intimate world.  Men and women are very different.  They have many  equal but opposite polarities which create mutual satisfaction and happiness. Couples can learn to understand and appreciate these important and wonderful differences.  These differences in polarities can easily become the source of heartache, frustration, and misery.

As if it were not complex enough, individual differences are not a myth.  No two women or men are the same.  We learn to love a unique person, similar to, but different any other person we have known.  If we do not learn to listen well, we will never know them.

Our culture has changed dramatically in an obvious but overlooked way.  One hundred years ago, most of us lived in rural areas, small villages and small towns.  Today we are a mobile society, growing up with people we do not know.  We do not marry the boy or girl next door.

We date and may become intimately involved with strangers who we hope we know well enough.  How well do we know our lover? A loving couple could chose to commit to mutually learning about and studying their similarities and differences.

As a couple you might chose to:

• Identify your strengths as a couple and build new ones.
• Strengthen your communication skills.
• Uncover stressful areas and resolve conflicts.
• Explore your families of origin.
• Comfortably discuss financial issues.
• Establish personal, couple, and family goals.
• Understand and appreciate personality differences.

This will create the knowledge you need to help your committed love affair and marriage to succeed and be sustained. This is the most important relationship that you will ever have.  A successful love affair takes and deserves an investment of time, effort, and commitment to your partner and the relationship.

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There are two very different approaches; both can be vitally important to sustaining your love affair.  1) Learning to attentively listen to and talk with your lover is a critical skill. 2) Developing a substantial basis of shared knowledge, about you as a unique couple, can give you the basis for avoiding misunderstandings, and enhancing your pleasure.

I would be happy to help you with a private and well-researched program, which will explore all of these important aspects of your relationship.  It has been helpful to thousands of couples and it might be a helpful and interesting way for you to explore your unique relationship. And I enjoy helping couples turn a good relationship into a great love affair. Please call me for an appointment at 303-442-7807.

For more information about Dr. Cayton, please click here or visit his website at www.drjamescayton.org.