The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance. Download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com

Right now, I want to turn to the phones. What would you do in this situation if your husband wanted to force you to have sex with other men and you don’t want to go there?

Hey, Dr. Kenner, I was wondering, how do I ask my husband to stop trying to force me to have sex with other men? That can be pretty hard on me. He lives down in Pennsylvania. He moved over there, and I was gonna fly over there this weekend. I was wondering if I can take some advice. He sometimes can be controlling.

Okay, it sounds like you've got a much bigger problem than just having sex with other men. You've got a man who moved away from you. I don't know why. He lives in Pennsylvania, and you're married, and you're going to fly down with him. He can be controlling. I’ll bet that if you gave me all the visuals of how controlling he is, you would be in tears just recognizing how bad the relationship is. Now, the fantasy of having sex with other men or having more than one woman is a very common romantic, erotic fantasy, so just having it as a fantasy to heighten one another's pleasure in bed is not a problem. But do you act on every fantasy? Absolutely not. You need to know what’s fantasy and what’s reality.

If he thinks that it’s going to be fun for the two of you and enhance his pleasure if you have sex with other men, I can tell you from having been a clinical psychologist and having dealt with these types of situations that the reverse happens. You’re going to feel like you've been used, like you've been manipulated. You may feel attracted to one of the other men, and then that causes all sorts of convoluted problems. Your husband may get aroused the first time, but then wonders whether you like the other man. Pretty soon, your thoughts are all over the place, and you feel like, “What is romance anyway, if I can just make love with anyone?”

This is not a healthy romantic situation. Fantasies are okay. You can fantasize all you want, and as long as you're fantasizing to heighten one another's pleasure and your own pleasure, that's fine. But it’s disastrous in reality. So it doesn’t sound like you have any kids. You didn’t mention that, and you can leave this partner if you want. Consider, “Am I happy with him?” If this is a relationship breaker, then it’s a relationship breaker. If it’s the tip of the iceberg—he’s not just forcing you here, but as you say, he’s controlling elsewhere—then he may be making you feel guilty, pushing you into decisions, maybe abusing your trust, breaking promises, criticizing you, calling you names, swearing, not listening to you, making light of things that are important to you, or shifting the blame to you.

These are all signs of an abusive spouse. Forcing sex on you is another sign of an abusive spouse, demanding sexual acts you don’t want. I’m getting some of this from a website, CrescentLife.com, so you could go there and look up signs of domestic abuse. All you have to do is Google “signs of domestic abuse” and see if the shoe fits. If the shoe fits, you want to get out of this relationship. This is not a good relationship, even if he is your husband. It’s perfectly legitimate and moral to divorce when you are not a good match and you feel like it’s suffocating you as an individual. But learn how to stand up for yourself.

I mentioned the book earlier, The Fountainhead, and also the book Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. It talks about psychological independence, how never to let anybody step on you the way your husband appears to be doing. So again, you may be a victim of domestic violence. You don’t want to be a victim; you want to be a survivor. Stand up for yourself and get yourself some help. You can find some therapy, maybe to try to disentangle yourself, or couples therapy if your husband isn’t as bad as I've imagined him to be.

And here’s a little more from Dr. Kenner.

Here’s a question I got from a young guy who is learning how to date, and he doesn’t know when exactly to pop the question, “Will you be my girlfriend? Can we go steady?” And he says he does it at all the wrong times. He’ll be on some fantastic dates, and she loves being with him, and then he’ll do something real jerky. Like, at the movie theater, while the girl’s totally engrossed in the movie, he’s totally engrossed with her, and he looks at her and pops the question, “Will you be my girlfriend?” She says, “Shut up,” because he’s making noise in the theater, and it’s the wrong time, wrong place, and he loses her. They both turn red.

So this is from Jason. Jason, first give yourself some credit for having the courage to ask, even if it’s awkward at first. Yes, there were guys I dated who I would have gone steady with, but they never asked me, and of course, I never asked them, so nothing happened. The first point you need to get is that you can’t just go by your feelings. You may feel she’s fantastic, she’s the woman for you, she’s the girl that you’d like to go steady with, but you need to be able to read her feedback to you.

How is she feeling about you? Is she head over heels about you too? Well, how do you find out that information? You don’t do a questionnaire, “Do you like me as much as I like you?” You just look—Is she shopping around? Is she still dating other people? Are you communicating on multiple levels that you're getting closer and closer to an exclusive relationship with one another? You call one another and only one another in the evenings; there are all those wonderful small caresses, hand holdings, or smiles that you exchange. You’ve built a trust and a confidence, and you start to share some of the most important information about yourselves: What’s most important to you in your life, your hobbies, your interests, your ideas, and does she feel similarly to you?

Are you connecting that way? Do you feel like you like yourself? If you don’t have self-esteem, all of this is out the window anyway. Do you spend more time text messaging, emailing, or talking with one another? So you need to learn the skills to monitor whether a potentially fantastic woman is mutually interested in you and how to read those emotional cues. If you move too quickly, she will move away. That’s called the distancer-pursuer relationship.

Now, what’s the right time to ask her? Well, there are wrong times. I just mentioned Atlas Shrugged. One of the poignant scenes from Atlas Shrugged has a young girl attracted to a guy, but something’s off. He says to her at one point, “What would you say if I asked you to marry me?” She looked at him; she was at the stoop of her dingy apartment. There’s a filthy mattress hanging on someone’s windowsill, a pawn shop across the street, a garbage pail at the stoop beside them. She thought, “One doesn’t ask such a question in such a place. I don’t know what it means.” She just looks at him and says, “I guess I don’t have any sense of humor.” He goes, “This is a proposal, my dear.” They reached their first kiss, and she thought to herself that this should be happiness, but she felt a low, desolate voice telling her that this was not the way she wanted it to happen.

You don’t want to make that mistake. You want to learn how to pick the right time and the right place. Give some thought to it. It doesn’t take that much thought. This man who is proposing romance makes a mockery of it. You want to value romance, to take it seriously, to be able to handle rejection well. You can put yourself on the line—that’s great—just do it with more skill. So I hope that helps you, and try to find out if she thinks you’re as fantastic as she is before you get into a committed relationship.

And here’s a little more from Dr. Kenner.

I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life, nor to any part of my energy, nor to any achievement of mine, no matter who makes the claim.

That is from my favorite author’s book, The Fountainhead. That’s the hero standing up for his life, his right to his own life. Think about the people you know who are doormats, who always live for other people, and they look like do-gooders, but inside they’re real bitter, they’re sarcastic, or they’re depressed because there’s no time for “me.” They say, “I do everything for everyone else. No one pays attention to me, and I’m fed up with it, but I feel guilty feeling fed up with it, and okay, I’ll be the good person again.” People go through their lives like that.

If you want to wake up and figure out how to be self-valuing without being mean, without being a bulldozer or what people typically think of as a selfish brute—just doing everything for yourself without a thought for anyone else—self-valuing people, ones that stand up for themselves, speak their own mind clearly, pursue their own dreams, are the best friends. They’re not envious, they’re not clingy; they have a self