To Love: The Greatest Human Need

Twenty-two years ago a client we’ll call Marie was crying about how painfully absent her sex life was. She said angrily that she had lost interest in her husband Clem because they could not talk about what was most important in their marriage. 
When I asked her if she thought sex could improve for her she thought for a moment before becoming animated. Her hands began to move and her eyes twinkled as she said, “Sex used to be terrific. Sex was one of the reasons we got together.”
I did not need to ask what had spoiled it for them. I knew that deep disappointments in one another as marriage partners had created seemingly irreparable distance between them and that in the last years while Clem had been out of work, they rarely even hugged.  
Marie had taken on both child rearing and full-time career involvement and had become bitter that Clem would not even put away his folded laundry from the basket she carefully left on the steps for him. Nor did reminders help him to clean up dirty drinking glasses from the living room.
I asked what it would take to improve sex. This was perfectly clear to her. She shot back, “If we can improve what is so wrong in this relationship between us, the sex will improve.” How did she know?  “I just know.”
Marie speaks for many of the lonely and despondent couples I work with. They desperately want to resolve emotional issues between them but are clueless how to proceed. They yearn to feel cherished and to feel loved by and connected to their partner at the deepest level of their being.   
How do we speak of love? Many people consider intimacy to be primarily sexual but it is much broader in scope. Feeling intimate can mean we feel closeness, rapport, friendship, affection, sexual attraction, and warmth. When we make love with a partner, caress a loved one, hug a friend, nourish a newborn, or snuggle with a loving dog, the activity sends waves of emotional connection through our physical and emotional receptors. We physically and emotionally benefit from feeling cherished by another. For most of us, this is the greatest gift of all.
Skillful intimacy takes a lifetime to learn and is worth every minute of the investment. Life is both terrifying and empty unless we take the time to grow ever closer towards intimacy each day of our lives. 
The fields of human development, clinical psychology, couples therapy, and positive psychology all agree that our most powerful life experience is loving another being like a child, a parent, a sibling, a lover, a friend, or a pet. 
Most of my clients are otherwise successful individuals, couples, and families. Career and financial success do not buffer the chronic ache of emotionally-isolated adults.
The necessity of love in each human life knows no boundaries: children and adults with mental illness, physical illnesses and deformities, personality disorders, and intellectual handicaps all need and deserve to love and be loved.
My challenge is to help clients who feel unable to relate successfully to key people. To do this, I think of myself as an interpersonal architect who helps clients rebuild their most wrenching relationships.
We start with cognitive tools to help rethink anxiety and depression. This step is necessary but rarely sufficient so I take clients deep inside to the center of their self so that they can change dysfunctional habits from the inside out.
The work is as grueling for them as it is satisfying. They accomplish a series of tiny emotional and behavioral shifts which build momentum and facilitate deep improvements. Clients beam as they report their hard-won success in intimate relationships.   
In the following five-part series, we track true stories of clients who have transformed unhappy lives into joyful, intimately-partnered relationships. They no longer long for love; they give and receive the passion of another with appreciation and delight.
Learning lifelong intimacy is an ultimately teachable skill worth every minute it takes to learn. As the late Positive Psychologist Dr. Christopher Peterson said, “Other people matter. And we are among the people that matter the most.”
In the following three columns, I will introduce you to one couple who has transformed their lives by transforming their marriages and to some extent, their individual style of being intimate. Through their stories, we gather knowledge about what it takes to love skillfully.
In the fifth and final column, I will gather our learnings so that you can apply these principles to your own lives.
To consider: How much happier would you be if you could resolve painful issues with a loved one? What are you willing to do to make that happen?
To read: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/magazine/12cples.html?mcubz=0
Laurie Abraham. New York Time Magazine, August 2007, Can this Marriage Be Saved.
Find Dr. Coche working with clients at Rittenhouse Square and Stone Harbor. Reach her through The Coche Center, LLC, www.cochecenter.com.