Episode 5. Developing Intimacy in Marriage: Going Beyond Sex
On this episode of Marriage IQ, we dive into one of the most important (and fun) cornerstones for building intimacy in marriage: sex! Now, before you get too excited (or anxious), this conversation goes way beyond just physical or sexual intimacy.
We explore how vulnerability, trust, intentionality, and open communication all play into deepening that intimate connection with your spouse. Some highlights include: why unintentional vs intentional vulnerability matters, how setting expectations and slowing down can transform your sex life, different perspectives on the types of intimacy that lead to better sex, and actionable tips for men to help their wife reach orgasm. Even if you think your marriage is solid, this podcast will give you some scintillating new ideas to try out behind closed doors.
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Welcome to Marriage IQ, the podcast for the intelligent spouse. I'm Dr. Scott Hastings. And I'm Dr. Heidi Hastings. We are two doctors, two researchers, two spouses, two lovers, and two incredibly different human beings coming together for one purpose, to transform the stinky parts of your marriage into scintillating ones, using intelligence mixed with a little fun. All right, all you intelligent lovers out there, welcome back to the marriage IQ classroom.00:00:34
Today we're going to talk about the third foundational cornerstone of an intelligent marriage, and that's insight. All right, but first, a follow up from last week. What are the three best words you can tell your spouse? I don't know. What do you think it is?00:00:51
Hint. It's not what you think. I know it's not what I think. And I would say, probably most people would say, I love you. Yep, that's probably right.00:01:00
But you must have something else in mind. We won't tell you right now what those words are. That would be too easy. Yeah. So we're gonna make you work for it and see if you can figure it out by the end of the podcast.00:01:12
Okay, you may be wondering why on earth, in all of the marriage IQ cornerstones is do we have identity? Like we could think of love or commitment or, you know, loyalty. Why identity? Why intentionality? Insight, intimacy?00:01:31
Well, for one thing, they all start with. I'm sensing a pattern here. Okay, so maybe. Maybe it does. They start with I.00:01:42
And I. Also starts with me, myself and I. That's true. And, yeah, nothing that we say here, it's going to be for other people. It's going to be for ourselves to learn and to grow.00:01:57
And although we do greatly encourage you to share this with your spouse, your significant other, it starts with me, myself, and I. I love that. I remember the very moment when I discovered that I couldn't change you. I could only change me. Yeah, that was insight.00:02:18
Insight. That's awesome. All right, I'm excited about this today. Let's go. Well, what is insight?00:02:25
What on earth does it have to do with marriage? Hang on. Yeah, hang on. We're going to get to it, just like Mister Miyagi and the karate kid. It'll all play out in the end.00:02:35
Okay. Insight is the aha moment when I discover a new perspective within myself and the world around me. Yep, just like I was saying, I remember when that happened for me. So why is Insight foundational? It builds on our identity.00:02:50
We talked a little bit last time about identity. We have to know who we are before we can see the truth of how we interact with others, and insight is a powerful tool. It allows us to quickly assess whether the story that we're telling ourselves is true or not. And you mean I tell myself stories sometimes that aren't true? Well, you know.00:03:12
Yeah, you do. I do, too. So we all do. It's just me going, yeah. It allows us to look objectively at ourselves instead of like a circus mirror.00:03:23
You know, how it kind of distorts you? This is like a full-length bathroom mirror. You know, it shows you exactly, you know, what you are, who you are. And sometimes we don't like what we see. Yeah.00:03:36
And sometimes we don't want to look in the mirror because we're afraid of what we'll see. In order to get to this scintillating marriage for the intelligent spouse, we need to start looking at ourselves in a very realistic mirror in real-time. Okay, well, that sounds great, but it also sounds a little bit simplistic. Just kind of like it's flipping on a switch or something. Yeah.00:03:59
So are you. Are you saying I can't flip a switch like this? What? According to researcher Steven Francois, the development of self-awareness and perspective-taking is vital to developing normal social attachments in couples. Is this really kind of what you're talking about, that we have to become self-aware and take the perspective of our partner?00:04:23
Or are there, is there more to it? There's always more. Right. But this is, this is kind of the foundation of looking at what makes our partner tick, you know, and what makes us tick. And just being like in a little lab, a little experiment, a little laboratory on yourself is really what that is.00:04:46
We're going to talk. We're going to jump in here about internal self awareness versus external self awareness and. Versus self delusion. And we talked a little bit in previous episode about this great book we came across called Insight. Author is Tasha Yurick.00:05:05
She spent many years doing research on what makes us more or less self aware. And it's interesting in her research, she discovered that only about ten to 15% of us are really self aware. Was pretty self aware. I'm surprised it's that high, you know? So let's talk a little bit about what self-awareness is not to help kind of define that and that self-delusion.00:05:33
So let me get you. Let me see if I understand what you're saying. Okay. If ten to 15% of people are really, truly self-aware, that means 85% of us are using delusion. Delusional, yes.00:05:48
So I would say probably all of us have some delusion you know, that we always have to be working on something. We're not always a finished project. But according to the, you know, to the study that Tasha Yuric did, the categories of that study, the ten to 15% of people met the. What would be construed as self self aware? I want to just talk a little bit about a couple of points of research here.00:06:18
American Society for Nutrition. They did a study on people on their diet, and they asked them over 9700 people about the healthfulness of their diet, h e a lth, how healthy their diet is. They said that 85% of the people overestimated how healthy their diet was. You know, I was kind of shocked that it wasn't higher. Cause, you know, in my practice, I would say that's reaching 100%.00:06:50
Like, give me an example. Well, people who say, well, you know, well, doctor, I eat healthy. Okay, well, you know, what about, you know, soda, desserts? No, no, I don't do any of that. No cookies?00:07:01
Nope. Nope. No bread? Nope. Don't do bread.00:07:04
Okay, so sugar. How about we put on a little hidden camera on you and send you home and see how aware you are right now? And that's why I think 85% is probably a little bit on the low side. But it's astonishing to see this. These are people who are truly fundamentally feel like they're telling the truth, and they are completely unaware.00:07:30
Same thing with amount of time spent on social media. You know, they say one thing, and the actual number is much higher amount of exercise. You know, we have this kind of. This bias built in, the good person bias, the upstanding citizen bias. Right.00:07:50
That we all feel like we have. And it flies completely under the radar. We don't know what we don't know. I would say in my research, I do a lot of research on pornography use. And when they ask, how much pornography have you consumed in the last year, or how often do you view it as compared with a daily diary?00:08:15
Yeah, it goes from, like, 30% to 80%. If they do the daily diary, where they're recording it every single day, it's infinitely higher than thinking back over the last year. So that's a good point. And I think that that just all goes to support this whole idea that we all, to some degree, live in some amount of delusion. Okay?00:08:37
And, you know, it's really freeing for me to recognize that and realize that I live in some level of delusion. That's freeing for you. Okay. That's freeing for me. It's free for me to know that you live in.00:08:50
Yeah. Like, I mean, so. I mean, I don't want to live in delusion. Right. But this is what happens.00:08:56
And I think knowing about it is one step closer to coming out of it. So other problems that may lead to lack of self awareness, depression, anxiety, personality problems. Depression. Anxiety can lead to a lot of rumination that's going over. Going over these negative thoughts and negative actions you've done in the past and beating yourself up.00:09:21
I would say rumination can even be, I'm not good enough. It may not have anything to do with depression or anxiety, but if you failed at something and you keep digging the hole deeper and deeper and deeper, well, rumination will definitely lead to depression if it's not controlled. Well, I talked a little bit about these unknown unknowns, these blind spots. You know, there's known knowns. These are things we know and we're comfortable about and confident about, then the known unknowns, those are things that we know we're doing wrong, but we don't know how to fix it.00:09:54
So if any of you didn't catch all of that, you can rewind about 30 seconds and then slow it down from 1.5 speed to about 0.75 speed.00:10:08
Give a synopsis of that without the word known so many times. Well, if I don't use the word known, how am I supposed to give the synopsis? I don't know. Use your thesaurus.com that you used in the first episode. Well, how about let's move on to away from blind spots.00:10:27
We know about them, and we'll move on to kind of a cult of self. This is what Tasha Urich talked about a little bit in her book where, you know, the culture of taking selfies and social media, Instagram. I am what the image I create is. And that's really crushing for people who want to become self aware, to create something that's not real. Part of knowing who we are, this self awareness, again, goes back to identity.00:11:04
I know who I am. I would say more than just a part. I would say knowing who we are is foundational for it, for understanding how we work, how we think, how we act. So these are people who are capable of identifying our own feelings and emotions and then expressing them verbally, you know, so if you're feeling hot, like, really angry, really upset, just standing back and saying, you know, I feel. I feel.00:11:35
If nothing else, I feel angry right now. Not, I feel like you're making me angry. Or did you say I feel hurt? Yeah, I feel hurt that you're telling the people around you, this is how you're feeling. You're not blaming anyone else or yourself.00:11:48
Okay? You're not saying I feel like you're a jerk or I feel like I'm an idiot. You're saying I feel badly right now. That's just one thing you can do right away to start becoming more self aware. It expresses, you can express your feelings without judgment.00:12:09
And it's something that's a lifelong practice. Another thing is that Tasha talked about in her book and that I wholeheartedly agree with is called mindfulness. And a lot of people have heard of this. This is a very. There's so much research on how mindfulness and meditation impact our lives and our relationships for good.00:12:32
Chelom. Leavitt is a researcher who does a lot of research on mindfulness in relationships. Yeah. So mindfulness is just being aware in the moment. Okay.00:12:44
So the next time you wake up, take a mindful walk, don't think about anything. Don't think about children. Don't think about spouses. Don't think about work. You're looking.00:12:55
You're looking at the sky, you're looking at the clouds, you're looking at the trees. You're looking at just the moment. You're feeling the breeze on your skin, on your face. You're watching the sunrise, and you're just taking in the moment. There's nothing around you.00:13:12
And you're telling me that doing this will help us gain insight? Yes. Yes, I am. I know people are saying, oh, here's another blowhard talking about meditation and mindfulness. Right?00:13:24
But what it does do, what I've found in my life anyway, is it teaches you to take that pause, to be still, so you're not reacting as quickly, you're not as overreactive. I remember hearing a story about a man who was in the military and he parented his children. By every time they did something wrong, he'd make them do 100 push ups. He'd be like an army sergeant for them. One time he started practicing mindfulness and meditation and he was upset that his kids weren't at dinner on time.00:13:57
And he started heading down the hall to make him do 100 push ups to yell at him. And he remembered pause. Just pause. Just be still. Don't overreact.00:14:07
So he stopped outside their door, did that, took a few deep breaths, opened the door, and his kids were all writing him letters. And I think it was his birthday or something. And he was so grateful that he'd learned that mindfulness practice that allowed him to take that pause and I think in relationships, if we've practiced and practiced and practiced mindfulness and meditation, we're taking the moment to pause instead of overreacting. Yeah. I can hear people saying, you know, that's easy to say, right?00:14:39
Oh, I just stopped and I counted ten, and then everything was fine. And in reality, it's not that way at all. That's exactly what mindfulness, what meditation does. When we practice meditating, we can spend a whole lot of time doing meditation or talking about meditation. We're not going to get into a lot of that today, probably in future podcasts, but I guarantee it.00:15:06
That's a foundational part of having insight. Just pausing the reactivity. Yeah. Just allowing yourself to think to. The easiest way to do this is to just take a few moments in the morning and just to take some big, deep breaths and just focus on your breath.00:15:24
Every time your thought races and goes to something else, you just bring it back. You don't get mad at yourself. You don't get upset at yourself. You just bring it back. Okay.00:15:36
And we do that every morning, don't we? We've been doing that for probably, what, six, seven years now. Every morning. We also want to start with what and not why. If something happens, something bad, let's say you accidentally throw out this.00:15:59
I can give you an example. A couple of weeks ago, we were on a little weekend retreat and kind of butting heads a little bit. Things weren't exactly right. And maybe I said some things that I didn't mean. Maybe your reaction also was not ideal.00:16:18
It might have been. It probably was. It was probably just me, but. Yeah, right. You were able to stop and just say, okay, let's do an autopsy.00:16:29
Let's just look at the facts. What is the what? What happened? Not why. What happened?00:16:35
Not why, not why did it happen? This happened cause you think I'm a jerk and this happened because you're not paying attention. No, none of that. It's like, no, and this happened and then this happened and then this happened and we just go. Went back through just like a.00:16:50
We're rewinding an audiobook. We just went through it and allowed us. With emotion. Yeah, with no emotion. Allowed us to the facts, ma'am.00:16:58
Yeah. To just observe and go, wow, that's powerful. All we did was just rewind and talk about what happened. Yeah. And it did allow a lot of insight.00:17:09
I don't recall the exact scenario, but I do recall, I think, realizing I hadn't gotten more than just a very little sleep the couple of nights before, and maybe that was making me a little edgier than normal. I can't remember what else it was, but I do remember we gained a lot of insight, and we're able to go, okay, now we understand. Let's move on. See, now you're talking about the why now, and that's fine. Because we're outside the situation.00:17:35
Yes. So you're like, well, I didn't get enough sleep. You know, I didn't get enough to eat. That's the whys. And that comes later.00:17:44
Right. That's great. All right, well, Heidi, tell us a little bit about. We talked a little bit about internal self awareness. Yeah, I would love to.00:17:52
To tackle external self awareness, if that's okay. Sure. And that is perspective taking, turning our gaze from inside ourself, like we have with internal self awareness to our partner, trying to understand how they see us, especially how our behavior or things we say or things we do impact them. Because people don't typically tell us the truth about what they think about us. We really may be living in darkness a lot of the time about how our partner perceives us or about our own behaviors or our own thought processes.00:18:30
So, for example, I'll give you an example here. At one point, several years into our marriage, Scott, I remember you mentioning in a conversation we had that you felt like I was very critical of you and that it really hurt your heart very much. This was especially hurtful to you because you don't care what other people think about you, but you really do care what I think about you. And so it felt like kind of clenching and crushing whenever I would make some statements that were rather critical. I could have dismissed it that day, and I don't know why I didn't.00:19:06
It was really quite miraculous, probably, that I didn't just say, will you this or will you that you're critical of me when you do this. Instead of slinging any other comments, I just listened to what you said, and I thought about it, and it took me a while of thinking about it. And then I had to really observe my. Consciously observe my thoughts and my words to you and try to notice if I was being more critical or not. And as it turns out, I did notice that I had more of a pattern of that than I was aware of and more than I was comfortable with.00:19:46
Well, I will say that I don't even remember what you're talking about. I remember it. It's okay. The last thing I wanted to do was to hurt you. So I really started then.00:19:57
So, first was the what. What was I doing? Under what circumstances? And I identified that. Yeah, you had some reason to say what you were saying.00:20:07
I was criticizing, especially what you're driving. I think that that's a big one. Or the way you make the bed or the way you unload the dishwasher, or, you know, there may have been bigger things as well. Wait, he makes the bed? What?00:20:20
Yeah. Last one out makes the bed in our household. So my next thing I had to do was go from the what to the why. Okay, so why am I doing this? Why would I do that?00:20:31
And there were probably a few things that came up, but one thing I remember that came up for me was thinking, why is my brain going there when I'm scanning what's going on all the time? Why does my brain go to the negative? And I came to the conclusion that from my first marriage, where there was betrayal trauma, my brain was kind of on hyper alert, watching for what was out of place, what wasn't happening correctly, because for so long in that first marriage, I was living in what I thought was reality, and it wasn't at all. And so when we talked about that, just having that insight, me having that insight personally, but also sharing that with Scott allowed us to look at things more clearly and be a little bit more understanding of each other. So that was really good insight for me.00:21:18
I'm still not perfect at all with that external insight, looking at how my behaviors are perceived by Scott, but it has improved our relationship to even just work on that one thing, then I was able to think of, okay, how can I do some things that change the way I think? Instead of looking for the negative, how can I implement looking for the positive? So it's kind of a multidimensional step process that takes time over years. But I do have to say there are some people who are really unable to be externally self aware. And part of that is trait narcissism, where it's just part of their personality, it's a disorder.00:22:03
Some is learned narcissism. And you can kind of tell if you are perhaps fitting in this category, if you feel like you're better than your partner, if you seem to be selfish or feel entitled, if you think you deserve things, especially within the marriage, if you're not able to feel empathy, which means you can't see the perspective of your spouse or their needs or their feelings. So those people are really unable, it seems, to them, to develop, to initially at least be externally self aware. So wait a minute here, though. What if I really did something to hurt you.00:22:44
Are you still saying that you need to look at yourself? I mean, isn't that in my research, isn't that harmful? Well, it takes time to be able to do that. In my research, the women that I interviewed had been hurt terribly by their spouse. And it didn't come right away.00:23:04
It wasn't possible right away. But the more they moved through into a healing stage, the more they were able to see things that were part of their role in it or see maybe how they had judged differently than they wish they had or reacted differently. But if you've been hurt terribly by someone, just know it takes time to come to that insight part. For most people, I think there are those who have just that trait, self awareness, that will be able to come to it pretty quickly. But for a lot of people, it takes time to learn, which I'm really glad that you brought up, because one of the best ways to gain insight is through adversity.00:23:47
Being hurt really seems to put us through that growth process and allow us to learn and grow over time. There are also people who are unwilling to, and you mentioned this a little bit, unwilling to move into that space of external self awareness because they don't think they need it. There are also others who are unwilling to confront external self awareness. You know, what they're partner thinks about them because they're so fearful of what it might reveal. This is especially tricky for women, I've got to say.00:24:19
And it requires a really delicate balance of wanting to know what our partner thinks about us or how they perceive our actions or our words or our behaviors. But also not for women. We have to be careful not to lose our sense of self in being so concerned about what our partner thinks. So I might say don't swim in this external self awareness. Don't deep dive into it for extended periods of time, maybe more, wade through it or dip your toe in it, you know, regularly to take a look at that, but don't lose your sense of self.00:24:54
So would you say that this, Heidi, is kind of being practicing a strong, flexible self that we talked about last time? That's exactly what I'm saying. And if we, again, are so worried about what our spouse thinks that we can't be who we are, then that's a reflected sense of self that we also have talked about. Because I'm kind of simple, you know, I like things easy. I like patterns.00:25:18
And so that kind of goes back to, yeah, strong, flexible self. It's being this and that at the same time, and learning how to be good at it, right? That's exactly right. There's one other type of insight that I would like to briefly just talk about, and that's awareness of an interpersonal nature. And that is being aware of what might be going on with our spouse, with our partner.00:25:47
Why? Possibly after we've talked about the what, I guess, why are they doing what they're doing and just being aware, having the insight of, oh, my gosh, it's that time of the month for my wife. I can see why she's maybe a little more emotional, why she's a little more hangry or less easy to converse with. It might be, for either one, a stressful day at work, pregnancy. Oh, I remember some days of feeling like I was actually possessed or something during pregnancy.00:26:20
Why am I responding this way? This isn't how I feel, but I'm feeling out of control. Childhood trauma can do that to people, too. So what I'm hearing you saying then is the why is important. It is, but it comes after the what, because the whys tend to get pointed and perhaps maybe a little sensitive if we address it right in the moment.00:26:43
Well, and it really does need to be addressed sensitively. If you're doing it through conversation, it's important to not do it by pointing fingers or attacking, just using curiosity. Curiosity is one of my favorite words. Our favorite words, I would say. I'm trying to get to the bottom of understanding that interpersonal awareness and then leading to insight.00:27:09
Yeah, I like that. Let's talk about gaining that. Let's kind of sum everything up here. Okay. First of all, we've got to understand the thoughts in our head are not necessarily reality.00:27:21
And they're usually not. And they're usually not. We have a practice in our family where we talk about. We have a very formal practice that we'll share with you at another time. But when you do this, the story I tell myself is this.00:27:35
I don't know if we've ever had, if we've ever had an experience with that, where whoever is expressing what they were thinking is if it was the same as what everybody else was thinking. It's typically never, right? Yep, that's true. And then we also talk about asking the what first. When you have an explosion, what happens?00:27:55
Not why. Autopsy. Yep. What happened? And then down the road, we talk about the why so we can make those big changes.00:28:03
And then feedback. Right. Being able to handle feedback, like look in that mirror, that full length mirror. And that often takes preparing yourself. If you know that you're going to have a formal kind of a conversation on.00:28:17
Okay, can you tell me where you think some of my blind spots are, or can you tell me what you see that I'm not seeing? Knowing that it's coming and being able to prepare yourself ahead of time to be open and receiving of it without melting down. Yeah, I really like journaling. I think that's a great way to gain insight. I love that you journal things that are patterns.00:28:43
We have five year journals, and then you can see patterns over from year to year, from time of year. Oh. During this time, I typically get really stressed with work, or I get kind of depressed because there's no sunshine or whatever it is. And so those help us have some really great opportunities for insight. All right, well, let's kind of put this all together here.00:29:06
Okay. And so we talked about insight today as one of the four pillars of a scintillating marriage for the intelligent spouse. We talked about internal self awareness. That's knowing who we are from the inside and what makes us tick. External self awareness, how we come across to others, insight gained from interrelational awareness and other ways that we gain insight and ways that really keep us from gaining insight so that we talked before, the delusions that we all have, we all have them.00:29:44
I think it takes away the weight of the meaning of the term delusional if we all are swimming in the same pool. So, here's one more thing that I hadn't thought of till just now, and that's when we talk to people that don't think like we do, that really is a good way to gain some insight. If you are constantly surrounding yourself with people that think exactly the same as you, then it really doesn't give an opportunity for insight. But when you're having a conversation with someone that politically or religiously or on a number of different issues, thinks differently, education wise, all kinds of things, it can just give you some moments to pause and go, oh, I wouldn't have thought of that before. That just gives me a little bit different way to think of things.00:30:37
Yes. Echo chambers. That's what we want to try to get away from. The three words that we talked about in the beginning, what are they? Not, I love you, but am I wrong?00:30:50
Yeah. The three best words that you can ask your spouse or tell your spouse. Yep, that's it. Am I wrong? So, I think this podcast is a great way to introduce that.00:31:02
Am I wrong? That's great, because it's not saying I am wrong. It's just asking the question and inviting. Yeah, you're being curious that external self awareness. So for next week we wanna ask you, what is the meaning of life?00:31:17
We are going to tell you. Ooh, you're so full of wisdom. I can't wait to hear. I hope you'll join us next week as we start to explore the fourth foundational cornerstone of an intelligent marriage, intimacy. We love that one.00:31:30
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