Couple therapy can do a lot at difficult times to help with insights into troubling situations. It offers an unbiased and creative space to clarify confused or tangled feelings and habits.
But it is just 50 minutes a week.
Clients sometimes seem surprised that the real work needs to go on between the sessions.
Life gets busy and, once the heady days of early romance become a fading memory, people often allow life’s distractions to get between them. Subsequently, filling the couple gap with ‘other stuff’ is where distance begins and we start to lose sight of that which was once our firm priority.
Closeness and sex cannot exist in a vacuum, but foreplay is more than just pressing the right buttons under the duvet.
Men need sex to feel close; women need to feel close to want sex, is an old cliché, but applies to many of the couples that come for therapy.
When questioned about their day-to-day life, it’s no surprise that for busy people, sex can sometimes become yet another pressure on an already overlong ‘to do’ list. And subsequently it often gets postponed or forgotten altogether until it isn’t even talked about.
Anxieties at work, tiring family duties and individual worries all play their part in allowing what was once a technicolor vibrant couple intensity to fade into, well, certainly not shades of grey, more a faint monochrome memory.
The couple underpins the family and really needs a boost on a regular basis.
This is where Date Night becomes essential. Self conscious and contrived it might appear, but without prioritising each other it’s so easy to stop feeling special and this path leads to disappointment and often an increasing lack of desire.
Make a plan – if possible go out at least once a week. Not with friends or family, but just as a twosome.
If a meal is too complicated or pricey, then just go for a drink or walk.
The vital thing is to switch off those screens, stop fretting the small stuff – to talk and to really listen to each other. To feel important again and to remember when it was the two of you against the world.
If Cameron and Obama can manage this with their hectic schedules, then the rest of us should have no problem. Book your Date Night into those busy diaries without delay.
Christina Fraser