AFTER [two weeks of using the modified Coué method – every day in every way our marriage and our sexual relationship are getting better and better]:

 

For starters, engaging in a separate but shared activity with my husband drew us closer; it put us back on the same team working on a joint project.  This was an added benefit for us as a couple on top of the other things this practice has enabled us to do pursuing it as individuals.  I also immediately felt like I had some control back in our sexual/romantic relationship, because I had something to DO every day that was contributing to our situation getting better.  I had really struggled in recent months with feeling like I had no power to exert change in my personal life, like our power differential as a couple was all out of whack, because I asked and my husband said no, so where did that leave me?  This was something simple to do that miraculously and almost inexplicably gave that power back to me, and it was like all the anger that had been building inside of me off and on for years – so much anger that I didn’t know if I could contain it anymore, that I couldn’t fathom how I was ever going to offload it bit by bit – just evaporated overnight.  I don’t know where it went – I don’t know if God took it away and this is how people feel when they truly give things over to a higher power, or if it was just that notion of having something to do, some role to play, backed by the self-fulfilling prophecy that things were in fact going to get better, that dissolved all of that anger – but within a day I felt like a new and renewed person in my marriage and in my home. 

 

I could again feel all of the love for my husband that had been getting choked out by my anger toward him.  I didn’t feel out of place in my house anymore when Saturday came.  I felt both like there was new possibility and there was also an optimistic certainty, because really all we’re doing here is committing to something, so we know what the outcome will be.  Knowing where we’re going to end up – and that it’s a place we want to be –  is a tremendously valuable tool for pulling ourselves through what’s between here and there.  But no one tells you when you get married that you need to vow to make together the kind of life you want for yourselves, and that you need to repeat those vows again and again every day you’re living that life.  I knew the first part already because of my brief experience being married before, where there was a complete failure to build a life I had any interest in living.  But I didn’t know we needed to affirm our plans for a great life together every day.  WE DO. 

 

We’ve only been doing this for a month or so now, and while there haven’t been huge, miraculous changes in what we are actually doing with our sex life yet, there have been huge miraculous changes in how I feel, and that allows me to participate in the process of improving our sex life, whereas before I was too mad to participate, I was too distanced.  I feel like things are back to normal, like I can be affectionate toward my husband and have positive expectations.  This approach got us to a shared, neutral space where we can work on our problems together.  And it put him in a space where he is aware that he needs to say ‘yes’ a lot more, and he is less likely to say ‘no’ as a default, because he has reminded himself every morning and every night that he wants things to get and be better.  It is a deceptively simple idea, but a powerful tool for living into whatever commitments we want to make, remaking them and owning them as individuals every day of our lives.  And for me, more so than my husband I think, it took me from the brink of despair – really, the brink of despair about the thing in my life that is most important to me – and dropped me instantly back into a place where our problems were solvable and things were going to be okay.  I don’t understand it, I wouldn’t have believed it could make a difference so quickly, but it worked.