There Is Someone for Everyone, and What That Should Change at Home

I give a talk called Love In The Brain. One of its core ideas is that there is someone for everyone, which sounds like a greeting card until you understand why it is true. It is true because the range of what human beings actually want is enormous, and because almost nobody says out loud what they want, which is the only reason so many people believe they are alone in it.

After one of those talks a woman came straight up the aisle to tell me her story. She was so eager to get it out that she barely introduced herself. I have retold it a hundred times since, because it does something no framework of mine does. It shows you exactly what shame costs, and exactly what acceptance buys.

The Story She Ran Up the Aisle to Tell Me

She had been married for 10 years and divorced for 3. One daughter, then 12. The marriage had been close to sexless, a few times a year, for most of its run. As she got older she came to understand more about herself, including an attraction to women that she had never acted on inside the marriage.

After the divorce she dated several women. She enjoyed those relationships and something was still missing. What she wanted, it turned out, was a man. So she started looking for one she actually desired, which is a more specific search than most people ever bother to run.

She met him at a drum circle on the beach. They made music together for weeks. He was painfully shy about it and took forever to ask her out. When he finally did, she said yes with both hands.

The Thing He Had Never Told Anyone

It took him a long time to tell her his secret, and you can understand why once you hear what happened the last time.

He had been married more than 8 years and divorced for 2. He is heterosexual. He also enjoys wearing women's lingerie, privately, by himself. He never told his wife in all those years. One afternoon she came home early and found him, and she was shocked and offended. He ran out of the house and called his parents. She called hers, to tell them what she had seen. The story got spread deliberately, as a punishment, because shame travels fast and lands hard.

They divorced quickly. He left the city, moved to South Florida and started over. He had not dated at all in the 2 years since, because he had drawn the only conclusion the experience seemed to offer: nobody will ever love and accept me as I am.

He was not hiding something dangerous. He was hiding something small, and the hiding had cost him his marriage, his city and 2 years of his life.

What Acceptance Actually Did

Eventually he trusted her enough to say it. And something happened that he had never experienced in his adult life. She was not tolerant. She was not gracious about it. She was into it.

What followed is the part that matters. Planning the date, picking out the outfits, dressing him, and then a whole night together became a ritual they both looked forward to. The sex was better than either of them had ever had. She found the soft, tender man she had been looking for, and he found a woman who would take him as he came without trying to correct him.

Nothing about him changed. The exact same fact about the exact same man produced humiliation in one house and the best relationship of his life in another. That is the entire lesson. The problem was never the fact. The problem was the reception, and the assumption he made about receptions in general.

The Great Curse of Long Relationships

Here is where this stops being a story about two strangers and starts being about you.

The longer we are with somebody, the more rigid and fixed our idea of who that person is supposed to be becomes. It happens quietly and with good intentions. You learn them, you get comfortable, and then the picture in your head stops updating. The space to say something new about yourself gets smaller every year. So both people start editing. You filter out the desires you suspect will be a problem, and each filtered thought makes the next one easier to swallow.

Eventually two people are suffocating inside a marriage that neither of them would describe as bad. Nothing happened. Nobody did anything wrong. They just slowly agreed, without ever discussing it, to be the people they were at 28 for the rest of their lives.

And notice what this has to do with desire fading. Desire does not usually die of boredom. It dies of self editing. It is very hard to want somebody who is performing a role for you, and even harder to be wanted while you are performing one. If that describes your bedroom, read this next.

The Alternative Is Not Complicated

Instead of trying to hold your partner exactly as they are, treat them as somebody who is still being built. Because they are. The person you married is not finished, will not be finished, and would be a lot less interesting if they were.

That means encouraging the growing and the exploring even when it is inconvenient for you. It means asking, out loud and more than once a decade, what has changed in there. It means noticing that a marriage which brags about how long two people have gone without changing is bragging about the wrong number. We should be celebrating what our partner has become, not the fact that they have stayed put.

That line is not mine originally. I picked it up years ago and I have never managed to improve on it, so I use it constantly. It is the cleanest test I know. If being married to your partner makes you smaller, quieter and more careful than you were alone, something has gone wrong that no date night will fix. If it makes you bolder, the marriage is doing its actual job.

How to Open the Door in Your Own House

You do not fix this with a dramatic confession over dinner. You fix it with small, low stakes disclosures that teach both of you that the room is safe. Say one true thing that is slightly more revealing than what you usually say. See what comes back. Then do it again next week.

And when your partner offers you one, understand that you are being handed something fragile. Your first reaction is the whole ballgame. You do not have to agree, join in, or be thrilled. You do have to be curious rather than disgusted, because a flinch in that moment can close a door for 20 years. This is also why I am unenthusiastic about reducing a partner to a category or a type, which is the problem with the five love languages. People are not fixed profiles. They are moving targets, and that is good news.

If the picture you hold of your spouse is 10 years out of date, and you can feel that it is, that is a thing you can put down on purpose. Here is how I coach it: how to let go of what no longer serves you.

Talk it through

If you are sitting on something you have never told your partner, or you suspect they are, that is not a scandal. That is the most ordinary thing in my job. Book a free 25 minute consultation and we will work out what is actually true, what needs saying, and how to say it so it lands as information instead of as a bomb.

Questions couples ask