Couples staying together

Submitted by crownfire on
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Okay, I totally agree with the premise of having non orgasmic sex, having cruised through several Taoist and Tantric texts as well as having personal experience of non orgasmic lovemaking albeit only over a few weeks time but noticing the benefits of that. Wow.
And, I just know truth when I hear it.
However, there must also be something at work with couples to keep them together when they are having 'conventional' sex, even if the ride is not a smooth one, there seems to be something else that helps to balance the chemical repercusions of blowing our energy out instead of up.
Would Love translate as a chemical balancer, or honest desire to live to a particular set of values, like marriage is good, perhaps.
We are spirit wedded to flesh, is there any evidence to support that our force of will will override our neural negativity...?
There are people who stay together. Is it fear of being alone, habit, social pressure? Have we adapted in some way to having biologically driven sex, or at least some people have, to account to the staying together of certain couples, less and less these days, of course...
Kind of like someone once told me that children these days are adapted to eating junk food and can thrive on it to a certain degree? (I did not believe this one, for the record...)
I don't really know what I am really searching for here, but these are my thoughts...
Perhaps, even though I am totally determined to experience fully what Peace'''Sheets suggests, I would also like to believe that Love is the wild card and ??

Couples Staying Together

I used to spend a lot of time with this question, thinking that those people must have a secret we're missing. Ultimately, I discovered there were so few of them, that my time was better spent trying to find solutions for the rest of us.

Many people are married, but when I got to know my married friends better, even those whose marriages looked fine on the outside, there were big gaps in their relationship: separate bedrooms or low libido, ticking bombs (one spouse suddenly leaving for another mate), sexual addiction that looked like intimacy but didn't feel like it to the other partner, etc., etc.

I'm not saying there aren't happy couples having sex a lot somewhere, but they're far fewer than we think. And all of the things you mention may be playing a role in their success: societal pressures, fear of being alone, selflessness (which increases bonding, and is produced by both father and mother while they're focused on their kids), etc.

In any case, I think the problem of alienation between the sexes (related to the brain chemistry of conventional sex) will get worse. This is just a theory, but research Gary has found shows that prolactin levels are higher in women whose fathers were absent or alcoholics. I suspect this makes them more reactive to the post-orgasmic prolactin hangover. (High levels of prolactin are associated with anxiety and hostility in women.) And children who haven't been nurtured enough have fewer oxytocin receptors on their nerve cells. This also means more anxiety and less capacity for bonding. Happily they can grow more, if they engage in lots of affectionate exchange. But the point I'm trying to make is that with more and more single, working parents, more and more kids are growing up with less than ideal brain chemistry. This means the split between the sexes has increasing potential to grow wider...especially with the current emphasis on "hot" sex in the media.

Finally, I sometimes wonder if some of us "fail" at relationships because its a natural part of human evolution. By that I mean, our distress causes us to look more deeply for answers...beyond the insular discover that sex has a sacred purpose more lofty than procreation. Echoes of this idea, that we have the potential to conceive of a "divine fetus" that is not physical by using controlled intercourse, appear in Taoist literature, The Gospel of Philip (Gnostic) and in the Karezza literature. Some refer to a link between this mystical oneness and enlightenment.

That calls to me now much more than a bumpy ride in a conventional relationship. That's what I hope this forum will help us all learn more about. What are our true options before we settle????