Marriage Is Dead, Long Live Marriage | Infinite Devotion Episode 157
Why does passion fade in marriage? Why do two people who still love each other stop wanting each other? In this episode I answer both questions, and the answer is not what you've been told.
The passion didn't fade because of time, familiarity, or the kids. It faded because two people slowly went into hiding from each other. What was buried can be dug back out, and when it is, the sex and desire you had at the beginning come back on their own. You cannot force it, and you don't have to fix the relationship. This episode is for anyone in a sexless marriage, a dead bedroom, or a long-term relationship where the love is still there and the fire is gone.
This episode marks the release of my book, Infinite Devotion: How Love and Desire Grow Together for a Lifetime. It's out now, in paperback, hardcover and Kindle:
https://infinitedevotion.com/book
First, I pronounce the old marriage dead. For most of history, marriage was an arrangement with jobs to do: survival, property, a woman's only economy, the one approved place for sex and children, standing in the community, a promise to God. Every one of those jobs has been made irrelevant in a couple of generations. Then we tried building marriage on a feeling, and that version is dying right in front of us. If you grew up watching your parents and decided no thanks, you were reading the situation correctly.
Then I hand marriage back with a new purpose. You can have deep love and intense passion with the same person, in the same marriage, and it can keep getting better for the rest of your life. I've been with my wife, Dawn, for seventeen years. We went from a dead bedroom to a marriage that's hotter now than it was in our first months, and this episode is what we found on the way.
In this episode:
- What marriage used to be for, and why every one of those reasons is gone
- Why marrying for a feeling turns into two people abandoning themselves
- The assumption that passion has to fade in a long relationship, and why counselors, date nights and scheduled sex don't bring it back
- Our dead bedroom years: Dawn running to the door at the beginning, and the night I argued my case for her desire
- The one question the old marriages never asked
- Why the fire went underground, and why familiarity was never what killed it
- The sex you want comes naturally, and you can't force it now any more than you could at the beginning
- What seventeen years in looks like: more desire than the honeymoon, and still growing
- Why commitment turned out to be the thing that made freedom possible
- A word to the man whose wife doesn't want him, and the woman who thinks she has a low libido
Chapters:
00:00 Marriage is dead
02:35 What marriage was for
08:02 Marriage as a feeling, and why it fails
13:38 Our dead bedroom years
19:06 What the new marriage is for
22:44 The sex you want comes naturally
27:54 Long live marriage
38:15 To the man whose wife doesn't want him, and the woman told she has a low libido
40:01 Commitment, freedom and devotion
43:55 To three people
45:47 Where to get the book
Links:
Get the book:
https://infinitedevotion.com/book
Read the full post:
https://www.infinitedevotion.com/blog/marriage-is-dead-long-live-marriage
The Infinite Devotion Podcast:
https://infinitedevotion.com/podcasts/infinite-devotion
Apple Podcasts:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/infinite-devotion/id1703653891
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/3NOiUF8kMERd52klxIrr1w
YouTube:
https://youtube.com/@infinitedevotion
Instagram:
https://instagram.com/_infinitedevotion
Blog:
https://infinitedevotion.com/blog
Free resources:
https://infinitedevotion.com/free-resources
About Infinite Devotion:
I'm Andrew, author of Infinite Devotion: How Love and Desire Grow Together for a Lifetime, and a coach and teacher who works with men, women, and couples on love, desire, and conscious relationship. My wife, Dawn, and I have been together seventeen years. Each week on this podcast we talk about masculine and feminine energy, polarity, embodiment, and how to keep both love and desire alive for a lifetime.
