Uncategorized Archives - Jan Denise, author, speaker, relationships & self-worth consultant

Entertain each other first …

We have more entertainment at our fingertips than ever, but are we any less apt to be bored in our relationships?

Most of us carry our own personal entertainment screen around with us — our favorite people, music, reading material, and games. If somebody keeps us waiting, or just bores us, we can escape. Among other things, this promotes zero tolerance for boredom. Ironically it also promotes boredom … because our needs for stimulation are not really met by the little screen. And our needs for intimacy and companionship may be getting buried altogether.

So if you’re bored in your relationship, don’t blame your partner; and don’t jump to the conclusion that you are boring. You’re not boring; you’re merely absent. To know how entertaining you are, you have to show up.

Do it before you grow more complacent or distant from each other. When there’s a moment of silence, choose to be present with your sweetheart — instead of moving on. When there’s a moment of tension, explore and understand what you’re feeling — instead of escaping to a screen, ice cream, or whatever else you keep on hand.

With the upcoming holidays, you want to be warm and inviting as a couple.… More

Remove sex as a substitute, and you also remove it as an obstacle …

We use foolish, hand-me-down notions about sex to figure out who we are, weigh our options, write our own story … and fumble our own life.

Understanding how sex dominates our thinking is critical to understanding how it dominates our society and our quality of life. Sexuality (and what we hold to be true about it) offers a private viewing into love, naked desire, our primal history, the unconscious mind, our woundedness, and our healing; but not if we’re hiding what is raw behind what is “normal.” Even the fiercely independent may forsake their authenticity for all-consuming passion and the epic task of either keeping it alive or abiding a partner without it, based on what they believe to validate them.

Our biological need to be loved is really a need to be understood, to be valued, to be responded to. To be in synch. While this desire seems almost lost to our consciousness, we are smitten by somebody who “gets” us, somebody who is tuned in to us. And if only for a few moments, during sex, we have dropped our boundaries and connected! Thus, sex is a leading substitute for love, making it a leading obstacle to love.

If you want to better understand the role sex is playing in your relationship and your life choices, I can help.… More