Episode 89. The "Passion Paradox" with Dr. Bruce Chalmer: Why Your Marriage Needs Both Security and Risk
The Passion Paradox: Why Stable Marriages Still Need a Little Chaos
We all crave stability in marriage the comfort of a partner who shows up, follows through, and makes life feel safe. But here’s the twist: too much stability without intimacy can quietly suffocate your relationship. It’s like paving a sidewalk over a sprouting plant it may look neat and tidy, but it blocks the growth underneath. That’s the paradox Dr. Bruce Chalmer calls “The Passion Paradox.” A thriving marriage requires both stability and intimacy. Yet the very skills that build one can work against the other.
Stability: The Safe Ground We Stand On
Stability is built on what Dr. Chalmer calls the boring trifecta being responsible, reliable, and accountable. These qualities keep your home running, your kids fed, and your promises kept. Stability gives your relationship a sense of safety and predictability. But if your marriage is only about stability paying the bills, managing schedules, showing up it can start to feel like a business partnership. Smooth? Yes. Passionate? Not so much. Too much focus on stability can lead couples to avoid conflict, dismiss uncomfortable emotions, or silence desires that might “rock the boat.” Over time, that avoidance builds walls instead of bridges.
Intimacy: The Risky Fuel of Passion
Intimacy, as Dr. Chalmer defines it, is being present and honest with yourself and your partner. It’s not just about sex it’s about showing up emotionally, revealing your fears, sharing your longings, and risking rejection in the name of truth. And here’s the hard truth: intimacy requires tolerating anxiety. It’s uncomfortable to say, “I feel disconnected.” It’s risky to ask, “Can we talk about our sex life?” It’s vulnerable to admit, “I need more from you.” But without these moments, marriages go flat. The plant under the sidewalk starts to crack the concrete through arguments, withdrawal, depression, or even infidelity. Those cracks aren’t signs of failure; they’re signs your relationship is craving intimacy.
The Marriage Muscle You Must Strengthen: Anxiety Tolerance
Most couples think the key to intimacy is communication. But communication alone isn’t enough. What you really need is the courage to stay in the room when things get uncomfortable. Dr. Chalmer calls this the chief skill of intimacy learning to tolerate the anxiety that comes with honesty. To say what’s true, even if your voice shakes. To listen without defending. To stay curious instead of shutting down. That’s when real growth happens. That’s when you reach what he calls the “Oh, shoot!” moment the instant you finally understand your partner’s perspective and realize, “Oh… I didn’t see it that way before.” You haven’t solved everything yet, but you’ve crossed a bridge of empathy. That’s intimacy.
Why You Need Both
A stable marriage without intimacy is safe but stagnant. An intimate marriage without stability is passionate but chaotic. But a marriage that nurtures both becomes a place where love is secure and alive. You need the boring trifecta to be trustworthy and dependable. But you also need brave conversations to stay vulnerable, real, and emotionally connected.
Marriage IQ Challenge: Stretch Toward Intimacy
This week, practice tolerating a little anxiety for the sake of deeper connection.
Name a truth you’ve been avoiding. Maybe it’s a desire, a fear, or a frustration you’ve softened or buried.
Share it with curiosity, not blame. “I’ve realized I’ve been feeling distant lately and I want us to feel close again.”
Stay open when your spouse responds. Listen. Don’t defend. Try to understand before being understood.
It might feel risky but that’s the point. Every time you face discomfort with grace, you water the roots of intimacy.
Final Thought
The healthiest marriages aren’t the ones without conflict they’re the ones where couples embrace the paradox: staying steady while stretching toward growth. So ask yourself today: Am I paving the sidewalk or letting our love grow through the cracks? Because a marriage that’s both stable and intimate doesn’t just survive. It thrives alive, evolving, and endlessly capable of becoming more.
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0:02
Welcome to Marriage IQ, the podcast helping you become an intelligent spouse.
I'm Heidi Hastings.
And I'm Scott Hastings.
We are two doctors, 2 researchers, 2 spouses, 2 lovers, and two incredibly different human beings coming together for one purpose, to change the stinky parts of your marriage into scintillating ones using intelligence mixed with a little fun.
0:32
Welcome back everyone.
Hope you had a great week.
I hope that you're talking with your spouse, discussing some of the things you're learning on marriage IQ and just making that marriage so much more scintillating.
We're just so glad to have you back again.
We're really thrilled to have Doctor Bruce Chalmer with us.
0:50
Bruce is a psychologist from Vermont, and I don't think we've ever had a guest from Vermont, so we're really excited about that.
He's been working with couples for decades now, and his wisdom has touched thousands of people through his books, teaching, consulting, podcasting, and videos.
1:08
He's the author of three powerful books, Betrayal and Forgiveness.
It's not about communication and Reigniting the spark.
Each of these books is packed with insights for couples who want to heal, grow and reignite intimacy.
And you'll also hear him regularly on the couple's Therapy in Seven Words podcast, which he Co hosts with his wife, Judy Alexander.
1:31
So we can't wait to dive in today and have this great conversation with Doctor Bruce Chalmer.
Welcome, Bruce.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me on.
I'm looking forward to our conversation.
So what?
One of the things that we talk about, Bruce, that our audience is well aware of, we want to kind of figure out who you are, your identity, what led you to do this?
1:51
Because everyone has their own story and each one is uniquely different and interesting.
And so tell us, who are you?
Yeah, what a great question.
I'm still trying to figure that out.
I'm 74 years old.
I'm still working on that, so I'll let you know when I've got it completely done.
But I think by that I will not be in this life anymore.
2:08
But you know, we we're we're always trying to figure that out professionally.
I'm a psychologist, as you mentioned.
I've been that for over 30 years in private practice in Vermont.
And what inspired me to get into this, I had some if you kind of do the math on I just said I'm in my 70s.
2:23
I didn't get licensed as a psychologist until my mid 40s.
So I was doing some other stuff before then and I would actually got my PhD in psychology, but not on the clinical side.
It was on the research side and was doing some stuff that I was good at, but I didn't really feel a calling, if you will, until I started getting into being a therapist.
2:43
And I got into that because of issues in my own life, especially in my first marriage.
And that was such a powerful experience.
It's funny, I look back on it now and some of the therapy that me and my now ex got was good and some of it wasn't good and whatever, you get a whole range of things.
2:58
But I learned so much from that and I just found there's something in that that I wanted to be part of.
It was something really powerful.
And the more I've done it, the more I found it, among other things, inspiring to work with a couple.
And, you know, over the 30 years I've been in private practice, I've worked with lots of individuals and couples and some families.
3:16
But more and more in the especially past 10 years, I've focused on couples because there's something that seems so immediate.
Well, of course, you do a podcast about marriages, right?
So you know what I'm talking about.
There's something so immediate about helping a couple struggle with things that have such clear impact, not only on each other, but on their kids, on their families, on their communities.
3:38
It's to help a couple heal is sort of helping the world heal in a variety of ways.
It feels very meaningful work.
And I learned so much from the people I work with.
And you know, those books you mentioned that I've written, which why do I write books?
I think I have some good stuff to say and it's a lot of fun.
That's basically why I write books and the stuff that's in there, it's mostly I've learned from working with the people I've worked with.
3:58
You know, you learned a lot in training.
I'm not knocking the training that I got.
I got a lot of really helpful stuff, but mostly I learned by working with people and seeing how they cope with stuff that's really hard to cope with.
We agreed that marriage really does impact our communities.
4:15
Well, I'd like to quote, I think she said this Mother Teresa who was a famous Catholic nun in India for many years.
She said if you want to change the world, go home and love your family or something like that.
And I think that's really great advice as part of the mission that we have is to help people with their marriages, with their families, wherever they are, whatever religion they live or non religion, whatever country they live in.
4:46
We just want to help do our part and we're passionate about that and we love hearing different perspectives.
And so you have a lot after 30 plus years of doing this.
And I love also that you had your own experience with transformation that came through difficulty.
5:04
Yeah.
You know, one of the other reasons I don't think I would have been ready to become a therapist right out of Graduate School, you know, at that age you like in my late 20s or something, I don't think I had enough life experience of going through what I went through to give me a sense of perspective on that.
5:20
It's the fact that you can go through really hard stuff and come out the other side and in ways that you don't know how it's going to turn out and turn out OK anyway.
But it's just very inspiring when I use the word faith.
And I know faith is central to a lot of what you do.
I'm not talking specifically about religious faith.
5:36
It overlaps a lot with most people's conception of religious faith.
But it's not the same thing.
When I talk about faith, it's a more general concept.
I talk about faith as a mindset that essentially reality is right to be what it is, not merely that you have to accept it, you know, with clenched teeth.
5:52
But there's something right about it, even when it's painful and even when you don't understand it, you know, bad things happen.
Of course people do things they shouldn't have done.
We're all human beings.
There's something about it.
Typically, that is you can't always even find it necessarily.
But if you have a mindset that says, well, there's something right about all this, I'm going to have to try and understand it rather than just insist that it not be real.
6:14
Wait.
Those are the folks that can heal.
Bruce, are you trying to tell me the stories I tell myself may not be true?
Shocking as it is, astonishingly, we sometimes don't always tell ourselves the truth.
It is amazing to know I don't.
Know if I like that, thought Bruce.
6:29
Well, no, most of us don't like that.
I think we're done with this kind.
No, no, this is a great point, Bruce.
I, I'm glad you bring it up because we say it all the time, is that we all tell ourselves stories and we spend a lifetime trying to figure out if they're true or not.
6:46
And a lot of us who are on that path of emotional intelligence can learn that more quickly and, as you say, a more objective view of reality that really is, I think, one of the keys to solving a lot of problems in the world.
7:01
Part of going back to Mother Teresa, if you want to change the world, just changing the way that we tell ourselves these stories and looking at them more objectively.
Yeah, What I find interesting is there is no one story that captures all of reality.
There's always multiple stories.
7:17
They have varying degrees of truth or utility in different situations.
But if I start thinking I've got it all down, then I'm pretending to be God and you know, I keep trying to get Verizon to fix my Direct Line to God and they won't do it.
You know it.
7:32
Just doesn't love that really.
You too.
Dang, it's, it's down.
And I keep trying to get them to fix it so that, you know, all I have to do is I could just call up and say, hey, give me the right answer here.
Doesn't work that way for some bizarre reason.
And so the thing about our understandings, and we all have them, we all live by these various understandings of how the world works.
7:52
Of course we live by them, but we also have to recognize that they're inherently incomplete, which means we can be open to other people's stories even if they're somewhat contradictory.
And it also means that we can be responsible for our own choices without being arrogant about them.
It's like, well, I'm doing the best I can here and I will take a stand, but I have to recognize I may not have it always right.
8:11
I may change my mind on it.
So, you know, you bring up a good point.
I like this, this, this little train of thought.
You know what you said I agree with and to the point where I've made it, one of my life purposes is to practice radical non judgement.
8:29
And So what that means to me is that I don't care who you are or what you have done.
I have to force myself, even if it's so hard to try, at least to look at things from your perspective just for a little bit.
8:45
And it may not, it may I could, I can rule it out saying, OK, that's not true because of this, this and this.
But at least I'm looking at that perspective from a adversarial point of view.
And a lot of times I'm able to very quickly come back to that point of understanding, yeah, from that person's point of view at least, even if I don't agree with it.
9:09
And it may not even be adversarial, it may just be different.
And I, I do want to say one of the reasons that we were really interested in having you on today, Bruce, is because you come from a Jewish faith background.
And that's not something that has been part of the identity of any of the other guests that we've had.
9:26
And I think that really helps expand our perspectives of life and our perspective of marriages.
I know I had some Jewish participants in my DOC program research and it added so much to the whole thing to just be able to look at things from different perspectives.
9:43
So feel free to interweave any of that as we go, if you'd like.
Oh.
Sure.
Yeah, I think it was last week or the week before I was interviewed on a podcast and the the person who was interviewing with me said he didn't think he had ever had much of a conversation with a Jewish person at all.
He just had never had that experience.
10:00
And I think, well, that's of course, you know, when you're in a relative minority.
I've, I've talked with zillions of Christians, but I have been the only Jews some Christians have talked to.
You know, I'll bet you've never been the only Christian somebody's talked to, because that's just there's a lot more of you.
Well, Scott lived in Jerusalem for a few months and our family's been there.
10:19
And so we and then of course, like I said, some of the participants in my research.
I do respect really truly the Jewish tradition, you know, the rituals, the meaning, the symbolism.
That's very deep and it's very meaningful.
I I have to respect that.
10:36
Yeah, and this is true, of course, across the spectrum of pretty much everybody's faith tradition.
You know, there's the saying among Jews, 2 Jews, three opinions.
It's not like we all are going to give you the same opinion any more than Christians are going to give the same opinion of things.
But yes, indeed, I talk about identity.
10:52
That's been something that's been a big part of my life since I was born so.
So Bruce, you talk about this paradox that you're writing on, the passion paradox.
Can you explain that a little bit what that means?
Yes, I'm happy to.
11:08
Yeah, That's that's the book I'm working on now.
Actually, that's the title of the book.
I have the subtitle I'm still working on, but it's going to be something like when you feel miles apart and still love each other.
I think that's the subtitle.
So that's kind of who it's aimed at.
Yeah.
The passion paradox, the paradox part.
11:23
And anybody who's worked with me long enough knows I'm a sucker for a good paradox.
I just like I get into paradoxes.
Guide to.
You and me both.
He's keeping a list of them I'm.
Going to write a book one day on paradoxes.
Our brains work that way.
So there's something sort of interesting about it.
This the particular paradox I'm talking about is there are these two sets of needs and that there's many ways of describing like what do you need to be in a couple relationship that you want to stay in?
11:49
What needs are you trying to fulfill?
You know, a lot of ways of looking at it, but my favorite way is to say, well, there are these two sets of needs and the reason I talk about two sets of needs, and here's where the paradox comes in.
They're both needs.
They're both really important.
You're not, I'm not using the word needs loosely.
12:04
I mean it like if they're not sufficiently fulfilled, something is not working.
It gets sick.
It's like food and water.
You know, you don't get enough of that, you die.
Well, that's what happens to a relationship when these needs aren't fulfilled.
The reason I talk about two sets is that skills you need for one are in conflict with the skills you need for the other.
12:21
And yet they're both needs.
They're both important.
So what do I call the two sets?
I call them stability and intimacy.
There are other people use somewhat different terminology, but that's what I'm talking.
The skills you need for stability.
It's really all about keeping the anxiety level low to keep things stable.
12:36
You know the word stability, I'm using it in in its usual way.
It means things aren't shaky.
You know, I do note that nobody makes a first appointment with me, a couples therapist just to tell me how stable everything.
What do they need a couple therapist for if everything is stable?
Typically that's not the case, but usually the folks who are making that appointment with me, most of them are pretty good at the stability stuff.
12:57
The skills and stability are character traits and I I call them the boring trifecta.
The boring trifecta are being responsible, being reliable, and being accountable.
Those are all good things, by the way.
I'm not knocking them.
I call them them boring, but they're boring.
In other words, if somebody wrote a novel where all the characters were perfectly responsible, perfectly reliable, and perfectly accountable, there would be no novel.
13:21
It's like there's no song.
Call me responsible, you know.
Am I dating myself by that reference?
Wait, is that is that Frank Sinatra?
Yeah, I think not.
Not exactly that.
I think it was a little bit of a variation on that, Yeah.
It just wouldn't be interesting.
Call Me Responsible.
No, Call Me Irresponsible is an interesting song.
13:37
I'd like to think on those things too.
Don't forget the word practical too, right?
Well.
Practical as well, of course, and that that can follow from that, but that's those are the skills of stability.
Intimacy.
I better define my term intimacy because sometimes people, you know, I mean sex, right?
I don't just mean sex, I mean it much more broadly.
13:55
Intimacy is when you are present and honest with yourself and each other.
No couple is intimate 24/7 because I'm not even present with myself 24/7.
You go down a social media rat hole or something, it's like, OK, where was I?
But couples need sufficient intimacy in that sense to feel alive.
14:13
That's what makes you feel alive.
The skills of intimacy aren't boring at all, they're terrifying.
The skills of intimacy are to tolerate anxiety without freaking out.
And people will sometimes look at me funny when I say that and says, wait a minute, I thought you're saying intimacy.
Isn't that supposed to feel good?
Well, sure, when it does, you know, sharing a lovely moment with someone or having great sex or whatever it might be, those, those feel lovely, right?
14:36
That does.
That's not about anxiety, but what about if you want to raise a complaint?
What about if you want to say something to your partner?
You're not sure how they're going to take it in the sexual domain?
What if you want to propose something, to try something and your word, your partner's going to freak out at the very concept or what kind of a person are you that you would even be interested in that, you know, whatever that might be?
14:55
Or even again, in the non sexual domain, what if you want to say, Gee, I think I want to start a business and your word, your partner's going to make fun of you or put you down or whatever.
Especially if a couples had a history of those conversations kind of going off the rails, they will tend to avoid that and that which is to say they'll suppress intimacy.
15:14
And over time that is not tolerable to a couple.
And my favorite metaphor is if you have a plant that gets planted in fertile soil, a seed that gets planted in fertile soil and germinates and sprouts and someone comes along and paves the sidewalk over it for stability, of course.
15:31
And what's that plant going to do?
Well, it's not just going to sit there.
It's going to try and crack the sidewalk because it can't tolerate that lack of intimacy.
Intimacy is the energy for growth.
And so it'll try and crack the sidewalk.
When a couple is cracking the sidewalk, what does that look like?
Well, often, not always, but often it looks like an affair.
15:48
Someone becomes vulnerable to an affair or it looks like they can't talk about anything without getting into an argument.
You know, anything more deep than pass the salt gets into an argument.
Even that could cause an argument or somebody gets very depressed or both, or somebody just out of the blue says I can't stand it anymore, I'm leaving.
16:08
All of those are often symptoms of intimacy issues.
You know, Bruce, it makes me think here, This is why we have so many atheists, because why would loving God create two people so polar opposite from each other and then make them try to fit together over a lifetime?
16:28
Yeah, that's like a cruel unusual punishment.
You know, I've heard an anthropological answer to that.
It's not exactly from a religious domain, but you can actually fit it easily into a religious context as well.
An anthropological answer to that is, you know, why would we have evolved this?
16:44
Well, we evolved these conflicts.
You know, marriage in particular is just setting you up for some degree of conflict.
It's gonna happen because the person you are, you know, sexual reproduction is only good for the species if there is diversity.
It only works for the fact that we have so many species that reproduce sexually.
17:03
They do a much better job adapting to their environments because they have diversity in the genetic pool.
So that means you're with someone.
And the way I like to put it is the one thing we know for sure is that whoever you're with is going to be annoying.
God knows I'm annoying, you know?
17:19
And so the the well.
That's not fair, Bruce.
Yeah.
Why would a loving God do that?
Well, because the skills you have to develop in dealing with that annoying person are absolutely crucial to the survival of the species.
Our human development.
17:34
Our ability to grow and think critically and logically.
Same thing, only when we're bumping up against things that are different than.
Us, and I look at it this way too.
I agree with everything you said, by the way.
It's like that fire and ice, right?
The Ying and the Yang.
17:50
I love that.
The symbolism of the Ying and the Yang, perfectly opposite to one another, a perfect complement.
And to me, it's so beautiful to think of opposites in that way symbolically.
And it brings a lot of meaning to me when I think about bringing together these seemingly impossible two sides and working it out.
18:15
And not only just working it out, but becoming A1, synergizing into one unit that is far more beautiful, far more powerful than either 1 alone.
Let me ask a clarifying question then, because I hear what Scott's saying and I'm seeing gender more in what you're talking about.
18:39
Is that true?
OK, yes, gender is true.
But I heard Bruce talking, and I think he's talking.
We both have the stability, the intimacy and the stability, and perhaps one gender favors the other a little more than the other.
18:55
But both of those concepts that are bumping up against each other are present in both of us, right?
Oh yeah.
My thesis is that stability and intimacy are necessary for a couple to survive both.
And I think as individuals, we all want both of those things.
19:11
And we, I think men and women, but equally, each in our own way, we crave those.
And of course, people vary to the extent that they can tolerate intimacy or not actually, but I think we all need both.
If you take it on a population level over 50% of men versus over 50% of women, you will find some general behavioral trends that go along with that.
19:38
So men tend to be a little bit more risk taking.
Women tend to want to be a little bit safer, more secure.
That is not stereotyping, that is just simply restating evidence from the literature.
Sure.
If I may add, I mean overwhelmingly there are lots of characteristic differences between men and women, lots of overlap and lots of variation within each.
20:01
But sure, lots of characteristic differences.
And it's it's interesting how when you even talking about things like risk taking depends on the domain, because women are more apt to take emotional risks and men are more apt to take physical risks.
Good point, very good point.
Kind of vice versa.
20:17
One of the things I've I've talked about actually, it's going to be a chapter in this book.
I I had it as a video that I put out a number of years ago.
It's it's aimed at women.
How to get your reluctant guy to try couples there because men are overwhelmingly less interested in doing couples therapy than women.
20:34
Are he again speaking very broadly, Of course, women as a group can talk rings around men when it comes to emotions and it's interesting and curious as to either your reactions to this.
It's it is fascinating.
Women so often are surprised sometimes, like flabbergasted when I note that often men speaking as a man, we don't even have language for how we feel sometimes.
20:57
And women are just shocked at that.
It's like, how could you not know how to say how you feel even you didn't even know how you feel.
And it's like, no, I can tell you we're good at that.
You know, we're bad at that.
However you want to put.
It.
Yeah, we give out a lot of those feeling wheels to help them identify OK which word on this feeling wheel most closely aligns with what you're feeling, right.
21:19
Yeah.
There's physiological differences.
I remember reading this decades ago.
I, I think it's true the women have 25% more connections in the corpus callosum than men.
That's the main bundle of fibers that connects the two hemispheres.
So there's more information flowing between the two hemispheres for women than for men, if you accept that hypothesis.
21:37
And I think that's probably related to the reason or to the phenomenon that men often can't name their emotions the way women just immediately can do.
And so that makes for some really interesting differences, shall we say, along the way.
See, honey, now I have an excuse.
21:53
Well, as I often, so often point out, when we note, when it's US men trying to explain to the women in our lives, well, don't blame us because we're kind of dodos when it comes to this stuff.
That doesn't absolve us of the responsibility for trying to develop some skill.
It doesn't work well as an.
22:09
Excuse and I'll also say women that I've worked with, a lot of them also have difficulty narrowing down those feelings that they're feeling, being able to verbalize those feelings.
So they may to a broader extent understand, but less so to a more narrow, more specific kind of it's a skill.
22:28
It's like what you said, it's a skill that needs to be learned in order to communicate on an emotionally intelligent level.
So.
Speaking of skill, Bruce, back to that paradox.
So you talk about this, the stability versus intimacy, which I love that visual.
And so how do you start kind of leading these people down toward resolution there?
22:48
Yeah.
Well, my first sessions with couples tend to be quite structured.
After that, it's really more like improv theater.
It's really very free form.
But at the first session I actually talk about that specific thing.
Lots of people.
I keep doing it because people keep responding with, oh, I hadn't thought of it that way.
23:05
And then that tends to calm them down right from the get go.
And the more that you can recognize, oh, some of this we can be curious about rather than panic about.
The more they can get there, the more than they are able to recognize possibilities they hadn't considered and they start to understand themselves and each other a lot better.
23:26
There's a moment, I'm not sure what your language code is here, so I'll be careful, but there is a moment I'd like to point to in couples work.
I'm dramatizing it, but calling it a moment because it's really many moments.
But it's the what should I call it, The O shoot moment.
I don't know if I can be more graphic than that.
I'll call it the O shoot moment in deference to your listeners.
23:44
I was interviewed on TV when my book came out and I had to be careful of what I called it.
That's a safe one, All right.
That's.
A safe one, but you can imagine what I'm thinking.
So the the O shoot moment, it's not the O shoot.
You say when you hit your thumb with a hammer.
You know that's that's different.
This is 1 like, oh, this is what's going on.
24:02
It's that moment of dawning, understanding.
Thank you.
The angels are suddenly active.
Yeah, Yeah.
It's that it's except that it's not an aha moment because you haven't solved the problem yet.
So what I call the oh, shoot moment is that moment where you say, oh, oh, I didn't realize that's what you're thinking.
24:22
Oh, that gives me a whole different view of what you're thinking.
Now I see why you've been so nasty and responding to me.
I don't like that, but at least I can understand it.
I still have my point of view, too, which is quite different.
I'm not sure they're compatible.
We better work this out so that you haven't solved it yet, but you stop squabbling at that.
24:38
It's this moment of understanding.
That's that's where growth will happen.
It's a moment of intimacy, really.
I talk about tolerating anxiety as the chief skill of intimacy.
It's a moment of intimacy that can often be really scary because it's like, oh, risky.
Wow.
I didn't risky.
24:53
It is very risky.
Yeah.
And, you know, sometimes what happens when you have moments like that is people realize, oh, no, OK, there's nothing wrong with us here, but this isn't going to work, is it?
You know, classic deal Breakers.
It'd be amazed how many couples I'll meet, like a couple in their, let's say in their 20s or maybe early 30s, and they've been together for five years and they haven't talked about whether or not they want to have kids.
25:16
It's astonishing how often that happens.
Or maybe they hinted at it, but they never really, you know, whichever 1 was the one who didn't, the other one was thinking, oh, they'll come around.
You know, after a while they'll come around and sometimes they do.
But that's a classic deal breaker.
And that's one of those moments they'll realize, oh, we've been fighting about everything else and realizing we're really terrified that this isn't going to work.
25:36
And sometimes they find out, oh, not you want such different things in your life, it's just not going to work.
But sometimes the happier times are when those moments lead people to say, oh, and they can relax.
They can just say, oh, I don't have to fight with you about this.
Let's figure this out.
25:52
Maybe we're not as far apart as we thought.
Or maybe I don't have to insist on this as much as I thought I did.
That's what therapy can do for you if it's going well.
Yeah, I was just thinking Heidi and I just had a week of non emotional intimacy.
I'm being really, really vulnerable right here.
26:11
What do you mean emotional?
Non into the sea.
Yes, emotional non into the sea.
You, you know what I mean.
Yes, I think I do.
It lasted a whole week.
Ouch.
Which is not typical for us.
But people may say, well, heck, you, you've hosted this podcast.
What, what are you doing?
26:27
But I I just reminded this is normal I think.
It's just go through waves it.
Is normal because we repaired and when we repaired it, it was really awesome and we repaired like once the repair started, it was very quick.
26:44
It was maybe an hour or less even, I don't know.
It was not that long.
And it started because we're going in the gym together.
We had walls up, both of us for about a week.
And he said, can we go back to this thing that happened?
27:00
And can you just tell me again from your perspective?
Can you just walk me through and me knowing that I was being listened to, him hearing again.
And then he did the same.
And we were reminded of things that we'd left out of the stories that we were telling ourselves.
27:18
Well, and, and like you were saying too, I think the difference though, here is we knew going into it or at some point it's like, look, this happens, this happens, great marriages.
And how I interpret this will determine the trajectory of my marriage.
27:39
Like, Oh my gosh, I can't have any problems whatsoever or, Oh my gosh, you guys are marriage experts and you have these problems.
No, no, not at all.
It's called being human, right?
27:55
It's not an excuse, it is an explanation.
And it is an opportunity.
For I'm still a human, last time I checked, you know, still human.
So but we repaired quickly because of the tools we had.
And I think what you're saying too at least at least acknowledge like this is going to happen in any marriage.
28:15
I do.
You were saying this.
It's a growth opportunity.
You know that phenomenon that you bump into stuff like this.
And I will confidently predict for you, if I may, the next time something like that happens.
It won't take a week.
Perhaps you learn from something like that, that, oh, you don't have to panic about this panic, you know, you don't admit a panic.
28:34
You know it.
Just doesn't usually take that long, but there.
Were this was unusual, It's usually not a week, but I mean it did it sucked.
I'll tell you right now, it sucked for a whole week.
I felt really actually, I felt depressed.
I was depressed.
28:50
Life freaking sucked.
But now it doesn't.
So it, it's usually very scintillating, like the vast majority of the time, but I I love that we can use those experiences to spring forward.
29:06
Yeah.
And I think that really works into what you're saying.
Intimacy is right, Taking the risk.
Yeah.
And it's scary to even to initiate a conversation about let let me see if I can really understand what you're saying because you don't know what's on the other end of that.
You just don't know.
29:21
But of course you hope that it will result in as you're feeling and feeling a lot better and it often does.
And you know, but it is a risk.
All right, everyone, that ends Part 1 with our very fascinating interview with Doctor Bruce Chalmer, a Jewish psychologist who lives in Vermont and has his own podcast and book.
29:43
Very insightful.
Yeah, this has been a great interview.
Make sure and check out the end Part 2 of our great interview with Doctor Chalmer that comes out on this Friday and we look forward to seeing you then.
In the meantime, remember that the intelligence spouse knows that the change from a stinky to a scintillating marriage first requires a change in themselves.
30:07
And we'll see you next week on another exciting episode of Marriage iQ.
Thank you.
