The Secret of Happy Parents: How to Stay in Love as a Couple and True to Yourself. Steve Biddulph

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Love can be expressed in words, but it is not about words. The human heart aches, it sings and it soars, but it doesn’t talk much! Loving actually causes alarm in some people because it is part of a domain that is unfamiliar – the domain of emotion. Don’t panic – feelings are simple!

      With increasing honesty as you voice your feelings, a couple can begin to understand and clear up the obstacles to closeness one by one. Love grows through the vulnerability you show, as well as the strength of feelings you admit to. Your real self comes out more and more – and guess what? They still like you! You begin to feel that you can say anything, discuss anything, be completely yourself. It’s a great feeling. (Though there’s always something new, dark and murky arising from deep down, to make you start all over again.)

      The good news is that love between two people may take decades to reach its fullest peak, so you have plenty to look forward to.

      So in a growing relationship, men and women find attraction growing from head to head, and also from heart to heart. But there’s another level too, so let’s rock on down to the basement.

      Lust: The fire down below

      Sexual attraction is a lifelong, powerful tide which either adds energy and magnetism to relationships, or constantly blasts us apart, depending on our skill and awareness in navigating it. You will often hear sex denigrated as the ‘animal’ part of our make-up, a Stone Age leftover which disturbs our rational mind. In fact human beings are more dedicatedly and enduringly sexual than any other animal species. (With the possible exception of pygmy chimpanzees, who make us look positively inhibited. But this is a family book, so we won’t go into detail.)

      In human beings, the original purpose of the sex drive – to motivate reproduction – has been partly diverted to serve an equally important role, that of social connection. Although sex often seems to be a disrupting influence on our social fabric, it is nonetheless the force that creates and holds families and therefore communities together. Obligation and duty wear thin very quickly; they are recent and advanced concepts in evolution: nature counts on much stronger glues to cement us. Our biology has ensured that we will not rely on abstract ideas of loyalty and love, but that commitment will be deeply felt, that these feelings will give us more pleasure and reward than any other path in the long run. Therefore sex, love, communication and long-term bonding are all deeply intertwined in human beings. We make love with our brains, which is why sex is so special and important – and difficult.

       Sex and bonding

      Let’s explore the subject of sexual bonding in more depth. Our sexuality is much more than a simple animal urge to procreate, it is connected to our emotions and our thoughts, and has a magnetic way of drawing people into relationships which can then develop far beyond simply lusty desire. In this way it builds between two people an accumulating reserve of pleasure, security, release and openness.

      Lifelong pair-bonds are common in the animal world (and so is promiscuity, but few species combine the two). The unique nature of human sexuality – the intense female orgasm which only humans seem to experience and the absence of the distinct ‘on heat’ cycle experienced by other mammals – means that (for reasons we do not yet understand) sex is constantly present in our social lives. In evolutionary terms, pair-bonding meant that the whole fabric of family and clan was made more secure and trustworthy. People could spend time away hunting, children could be raised in relative safety, because the sexually forged bond between partner-parents meant that they would yearn for the specific company of that one person, above any other.

      This carries a risk though. Put in simple terms, if you have sex with someone, you are very likely to fall in love with them. So clearly, it is not a good idea to get bonded to someone whom your heart and head have huge reservations about. This is why all human cultures are very careful about adolescent sexuality, and why young people themselves, in spite of what adults believe, СКАЧАТЬ