Sometimes it can be very difficult to balance your need to satisfy yourself and to satisfy your spouse. In our marriage, we both have a need for some relative privacy and to create our own space. For many years, we shared office space in the home, but in the last couple of years, we’ve had our own offices and that’s allowed us to express ourselves in our own space.
Many times, spouses ask the question: what can I do? Sometimes, it’s not what you can do for your spouse, but what they need to do for themselves. For example, when I went back to college after our daughter was born. This wasn’t about what my husband could do for me, but what I really needed to do for myself. I needed to go back, I needed to study and I needed to be successful and get my degree.
Separate Bedrooms
In his book, With These Rings Doctor Stephen Frueh offers another suggestion for coping with these types of problems. He considers the paradigm of a husband and wife sharing the same bed in the same bedroom, old and constrictive. When spouses share the same room, one or the other feels like that space is not their own.
No married couple’s bedroom looks like a bachelor pad and fewer still look decorated in the frills and accessories some women prefer. I thought about what Dr. Frueh stated and then I took a good look at our shared bedroom. They’re right, it reflects my taste more than my husband’s, but it’s a blend of our favorite colors – by our choice.
Dr, Frueh found that when couples try to hard to match the paradigm that worked for their parents, they are ignoring their own individual needs and desires for those that they feel like they should have – not what they actually have. He suggests, instead, that you embrace exactly who each of you are. If you have separate bedrooms, you create an atmosphere where you are both choosing to spend time together – when intimacy is an act of coming together because you want to – not because you have to or because it’s expected.
Metaphorically
Dr. Frueh also says you don’t have to take that advice literally. You can create spaces in your marriage that reflect your individuality, enhance your privacy and generate mystery that you both ache to delve into. In many ways, this sounds like a plan that lets you both be whom you were when you met and first married. I’m not sure how it would work without alienating your spouse or drawing you away from the people you have become – but it’s an idea worth exploring – to a point.
What do you think of Dr. Frueh’s idea for separate bedrooms, whether literally or metaphorically?
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