Marriage

I think making a commitment to yourself to be as honest as you can with yourself is the kindest and most courageous thing you can do. You're still going to be blind. There are just so many things we often just can't see. They're so cohesive in our mind that we don't see our own liabilities, especially if they were played out in our families of origin; they're so normalized that you don't see them as liabilities. Getting married helps you to see more of what you don't yet see about yourself. What's the feedback I get? What are the things I often am trying to get away from? What is it that my spouse or my child or my friend sees in me that I keep thinking I'm sneaking or getting away from? It's not a perfect process, but it's a very valuable process if you have the courage to think that way and to process information that way. Also, going to a good third party, somebody that's wise enough to look at you. I think the best coaching and therapy happens in marriage because the context of the marriage is very exposing about where each person is operating from and how their mind operates, rather than self-report. Because we go and self-report, we often just offer the best interpretation of ourselves that there is. We do it instinctively. We self-dilute in this way. To be able to really see who you are when you're in the crunch, when you're under pressure from somebody that's significant to you, that shows a lot more about how you operate. And so a smart, wise third party that can have a higher view of what is the actual system that's operating, and can often give both people more clarity about who they really are, who their spouse really is, and what the pattern is that they keep repeating. It frees them up to choose otherwise though it takes a ton of courage to do that.

Monica: I just want to start this whole interview off with a thank you. Thank you for the work that you both do, and for being here together, it’s such an honor! Let’s talk about the topic. We see this come up a lot in the women all of us serve together, this power dynamic that we have within partnerships. We’re going to talk specifically about marriages today. We all have dynamics in marriages, but there tends to be one more about power. I've learned so much from both of you about how to increase partnership in marriage, and that is our topic today. But we can’t talk about that without first ...

I think a lot about sex—-although maybe not in the way that some people do. In particular, I think a lot about why people like and don’t like to have sex, what ignites desire and what suffocates it. As a therapist, I meet with people almost daily who are trying to figure out why they don’t like to have sex, why their spouse doesn’t like to have sex, or why their spouse does like to have it. It is an elusive question sometimes as well as a painful one for many couples.   My dissertation research focused on the question of Mormon women’s sexual agency. That is, Mormon women’s capacity to be acto...

Monica Packer: I'm so honored to have Jennifer back. If you don't know her, well, hang tight. You're going to have your mind blown so much. This is who Jennifer is.  Dr. Finlayson-Fife: I'm Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife. I am a psychotherapist that works primarily with couples and individuals around relationship and sexuality issues. I also do a lot of teaching, both online courses and also in workshops around the country. I also do a lot of podcasting and public speaking.  Monica Packer: And my version of your intro is that you changed my life and I think you've changed thousands of...

Cameron Wright: This is Cameron Wright, and I'm the author of The Orphan Keeper. So listeners understand, let me set the scene up for you. The Orphan Keeper is the story of Tag Roeland. Now, Tag was a little boy in India who came from a very poor family. They were living in a thatched hut with a dirt floor and he was always running off getting into trouble and despite his circumstances-- sometimes going hungry, he thought life was actually pretty good. Except then when he was about seven, he was kidnaped. He was sold to an orphanage and then adopted to a family in Utah who thought that he was ...

We are, from birth, sensual creatures, but a lot of us feel like that’s a design flaw - like something’s wrong, as opposed to that being what it is to be human. How much can we really embrace that core sensuality, and how much do we shame it and try to get away from it?

"When the wedding celebration and honeymoon end and we are left to work out a life with another flawed human being, we are often unprepared for the disharmony experienced in those early days. When so many of us anticipate bliss in marriage, what do we do when we find ourselves confronting disappointment and conflict? What meaning should we make of the discord, and what can we do to make our marriage better?"