During the chapters which follow, a couple may explore, in a series of structured sessions of work together, the emotional dynamics of their personalities and their relationship. The book is for men and women who want to know more about each other's emotional nature but who are self-sufficient enough and value their privacy enough not to need outside help most of the time.

Marriage counselors and psychotherapists are used to being handed the task of resolving couples' problems. Too many counselors take the bait, try to solve the problems, and wreck the marriage in doing so. There is a place for marriage counseling, but I believe it can only work when a couple is strong enough to go in concert to a counselor for consultation, not for miracles or exorcism. Guidelines for this approach appear in the last chapter.

The majority of guidelines here, however, are methods of exploration for the couple to work on together without the need of a counselor. You may find it useful just to read the book. You and your partner may try some or all of the explorations in chapters 2 through 6. Or you may want to do the explorations repeatedly and systematically. The needs of your relationship will determine the use you make of this book. If your relationship or marriage is really cracking up, this book can promise no help: but it may uncover accumulated blocks to contact or bottled-up resentment and these may, after all, be reparable. If your relationship is in excellent shape, you may simply enjoy doing some of the explorations or discussing some of the points I try to make. Almost certainly your marriage will fall between these two extremes. You may feel ready to undertake some of the work on clearing up your emotional contact so that problems can be dealt with reasonably, without hidden tensions.

The word marriage is used in this book not merely to describe the legal state of being married, but in the sense of the natural marriage which exists between any committed couple. The term "relationship" seems to me inadequate to express the intensity and seriousness of a couple's life together. We can have relationships with friends, co-workers, and our pets. Whether legally married or not, if a couple love each other enough to live together, they are emotionally committed to a natural marriage which they want to work.

In such a marriage we tend to share our childhoods, to discuss our past, to notice when our partner seems to be close to us and to encourage him or her to open up with troubles. We are constantly trying to reach through to a more intense expression of this love we feel, and if it fades we fight instinctively to revive it. We sometimes fail. If a marriage does break up, our needs and our life forces assert themselves after a while, whatever the pain has been, and we begin again in a search for a new partner. If we find ourselves repeating the same mistakes or stuck in a familiar pattern of frustration, we may resign ourselves and begin to die inside or we may fight to work the problem through with our partner. Very often we find ourselves experiencing at least some moments of intense contact and fusion with our partner, and also some areas of conflict.

Sometimes we may even hate the person we love. Or, wanting to love them, we find something is in the way. If we can identify this something we tend to work on it.

The work is seldom easy. But when people come to me for psychotherapy I am often struck by the energy they are putting into their marriages. This is not work in the sense of drudgery or obeying orders, it follows a real urge to solve problems, in turn based on a real drive to fulfill basic needs. The healthier people are, the more they are able to acknowledge this drive and to face the difficulties in fulfilling it with the partner they have chosen.

I am also struck by the urge people have to know each other and themselves. This knowing in a marriage is partly conscious, as when a person knows something of a partner's character traits or preferences, and partly a kind of bodily knowing which the Bible recognizes in the phrase "he knew her," meaning they made love. This book offers help in this process of knowing each other physically and emotionally.

In it I will be presenting some simple methods from intensive psychotherapy which may be used safely within a marriage between people who are already functioning fairly well. To discover a partner's functioning in such basics as how they breathe, how they feel and express various emotions, and where their main anxieties lie, can be part of the general process of knowing in the sense of loving. It is not dangerous to know in this sense. It may be dangerous to try and change too much, to try and play therapist on a partner. But I hope to make the borderline clear between working with each other to know more and trying to manipulate or change each other. The best attitude to positive change is to accept it as a free gift, rather than to try and promote it. A good therapist does not tell people what to do, or try and show them how to experience an emotion. Instead the therapy attempts to put the client so intensely in contact with the internal defenses and obstacles against emotion that the defenses begin to dissolve. Then life knows perfectly well how to assert itself. Similarly when a couple work on their marriage, they are most successful when they try first to feel and understand what barriers exist between them before setting these barriers aside. This is why this book is for people who love each other: the love has to exist first in order for it to grow as barriers are removed. No book, and no work can create the love.

The physical experience of emotion and sexuality is the focus of this book, and in this sense the approach is scientific. But this is not to deny the poetic or even the magical basis of love. The more-than-coincidences, the uncanny reciprocity, the apparent dissolving of boundaries that can occur between a couple are not therapy's business. They are unique. By comparison, most people (and most therapists) in this society have blocks against clear emotional and sexual functioning. There are many books for muddled people: there are reams of pornography, of sex mixed with violence, of sexual activities for people who have lost all sense of a connection between orgasm and emotion. At the other extreme are books on how to control the impulses, meditate or pray feelings away, and channel animal urges into duty and obedience. This is a book for people who already have a sense of love and its bodily expression, but who know it is not easy in this world to maintain honesty and openness, even with the person they love, and are ready to work on opening themselves, even painfully, to another.

Time And Set-Up

Alternate one-hour sessions. In each session of approximately one hour, one person will "explore," the other will help, or guide. You should alternate explorer and guide roles from session to session. One or two sessions each week is enough and you should not exceed one hour per session. If you decide to stop early in an hour, do not switch roles and continue: wait for the next session. (This prevents the guide from being impatient for his or her own turn.) Pre-arrange times so that each of you has a definite time to work; thus you can remain emotionally honest and not be drawn by anxiety into competition.

Quiet well-aired space. Work in a place where you can make as much noise as you want and which has an openable window. Sometimes after emotional expression, especially of rage or fear, it feels good to be able to clear the air in the room. Do not use a room with fluorescent lights: research with schoolchildren has demonstrated that fluorescents are emotionally disturbing, first making the children hyperactive, then sluggish. The same is true for most adults, though over a narrower range.

Equipment. You will need a mattress or bed, large enough and sol id enough for a person to lie on and kick their feet without injury (watch for hard floors or bed-boards). You also need a towel and a cushion of strong enough cloth that you can twist it or bang it.

Clothing. Shorts or undershorts for men; shorts and tee-shirt or underclothes, for women. The idea is to have maximum freedom of movement and breathing with no tight belts or tight buttons at the neck. You can work unclothed if you want, but my own feeling is that, even with a couple who have a physical relationship, it is best to differentiate this kind of exploration work from that of making love; otherwise there will be an overlap.