Rocky Romance Tip #1

Whether you're alone cruising for passion, or careening through an exciting new relationship, there's bound to come a time when your love machine hits the proverbial rocky road. Most of us aren't too proactive about these things. We let the little irritations in a relationship slide until we're really miserable. By then, the negative sludge (resentment, for example) could bury a house. Though the scale and the duration may vary, the way we let this sludge build up is the same for short relationships as it is for marriage.

Our Rocky Romance tips can be practiced to enrich a relationship now or can be saved for a rainy day, to shed light on problems in the future.

And here's Tip #1. The Interface Moment.

Let's take any average couple: they know each other pretty well. For a day or a week they've been apart, working, living separate lives. Maybe he's been thinking, "Damn, my co-worker is trying to pass my work off as his own." And she's been thinking, "Damn, my presentation seemed flat and no one gave me any feedback afterward, was it really that bad?" If they live together, he may be thinking, "I'll get home, take a shower, and we'll have a quickie before dinner . . ." while she's thinking, "He'll get home, I'll let him watch junior while I catch a quick shower. . ." You get the picture. Each person has a different expectation for how things will go when they meet up.
We've already heard that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. We forget that when these two planets first get together, they're also coming from completely different galaxies. And they still have a good bit of momentum going in their respective galaxies when they meet up.
She may be tense and angry and processing backwards through what happened that day, while he may be upbeat and enthusiastic, imagining forward to what they might do that evening. They meet. Their different trajectories slam together. Ouch.

This is the fatal moment of interface.

After living separate lives for eight hours or two days or three weeks, the way this couple spends those interface moments could be the most important part of their time together. But few people take the time to stand back, open up, and slowly blend, in order to ease the process of two worlds becoming one. This process can make the difference between an easy waterbirth and suspension from your heels with a rough slap to the ass. Couples usually work this out all unconsciously. One person emerges as the receiver, the listener, the one to put on the heavy brakes at the interface as they try to sync up with their partner's orbit. But when a major change occurs in this automatic lifestyle, the couple may not be prepared to handle it. This happens in marriages, for example, when a child is born. It happens in relationships when one of the partners becomes either more or less invested in their job -- say a promotion, requiring more time, or a job loss, requiring encouragement. It can happen around a loss, around grief, around a disability.

Whatever the cause for the change, the couple continues on, expecting their old lifestyle patterns to hold up, patterns that were never planned in the first place. Suddenly, aspects of the relationship that used to function on automatic get tested. Some of them fail. They were not strategies; they were conveniences. And conveniences don't hold up well under stress.

This brings us back to the moment of interface. Say he's unemployed, spends the day looking at want ads and sees lists of valuable skills he doesn't have. Meanwhile, she's had a hard day at the office. Right away, their moment of interface has great potential for conflagration. Let's not go there.

The way to avoid this mine field is for the couple to:
--be very sensitive to and aware of this moment of interface
--have a stress-busting strategy in place for that moment before the stress hits the structure

This two-step program might just help a couple avoid bad feelings that could spiral into layers of resentment. So what is the stress-busting strategy to keep relationship rifts from creeping up on you?

Easy. Do something together.
--It should be something neutral, not sexually or emotionally demanding.
--It should be something of mutual importance or of shared interest.
--It should be treated almost as a ritual, so that it serves to mark your interface moment as something special.
--It should also give partners something in the mutual environment they can expect or count on as they re-orient to each other.
--The right ritual should ease the partners out of their isolated worlds and into the mutual world of the couple.
--Men especially relate to doing, not speaking. And speaking is not always the best strategy for bonding.

It is up to each couple to design their own interface ritual. One couple jogs together or takes a brisk walk together. Another meets at the gym. In the process, each partner is doing something that benefits him or herself while celebrating togetherness. Exercise gets the blood pumping and endorphins flowing -- it's a mood elevator. And finally, the time spent alone together helps the two to reconnect with the mutual world they've created. Other couples may have a hot tub ritual; a mutual hobby; put on the music and take a few romantic dance tours around the home. For new couples, it may be going out to dinner; for married couples it may be a small home improvement project or changing the baby's diapers. Or why not folding the laundry together -- simply save that laundry for your special time! (Think of all the movies and TV ads where two lovers meet over small conversation at the Laundromat.) Even doing dishes can be pleasant, if you make it so. The only requirement is that the project or activity be of mutual importance, or of shared interest. Neither partner should think, "I'm doing this for him/her." Both should be committed to the fact that they're doing it for the relationship.
Your interface ritual also serves as a relationship barometer. When a couple finds this ritual falling by the wayside, it often signals some trouble within the relationship. But just as easily, committing yourselves to getting back to your ritual can be the first step on the path back to relationship bliss.
It can be fun to make up your own private ritual. Try it. Be creative with it. Invent a ritual that is flexible, while able to evolve over time and withstand the life changes you'll share together. And have fun.

A Case of Date Rape (Part 1)

She had a lot of rape fantasies. OK, not rape exactly. More like forcefulness against ... More like wild animal power overtaking delicate shyness. Taking it by force. It should go like this: "Please, could we go a little more slowly?" Or "I've never done this before." But there would be no waiting. She dreamed about breaking into a place where emotions were soft and unprotected. He'd just slowly put his hand over hers and hold it with a tentative strength. She would try to unbutton his shirt -- no, his fly. He'd hesitate, as if he had an embarrassing mark on his chest, right near his left nipple, or just under his pubic hair that he wouldn't want her to see right away. A scarlet letter; a yellow arm band. He'd give her a kind of frightened look. No, a vulnerable look ... like, if she did what she was planning -- reached into his pants, slid her hand down his moist belly, followed the hairline and felt around, softly, and took hold -- his whole inner planet might go meteor and disintegrate.
Yeah, right.
Guys are not coy; "can't rape a guy, bla, bla," she thought as she smoothed her hands across her stomach. She was wet. The stretchy band of her lace-patterned underwear made a firm bridge across her navel. She pulled up her nylons. And as she rose, the band of her undies slid down to where her pubic line would have been -- before she shaved it into a neat little triangle. Oh, she knew how to play the vixen, the hot tart, the ripened fruit ready for picking. She was planning to be all that for Marco. Of course, he would take the lead. She did think he was the bomb -- otherwise she wouldn't be going through this contorted dressing ritual. Painting her toe nails; smoothing oils up and down her long legs and feeling ever so carefully for any missed stub of hair that might spoil the silky feel of her legs against his skin when they wrapped around him. Still, sometimes she just wished she could feel like the brute instead of the doll; like the occupier instead of the oil-rich territory.

The wining and dining of her first date with Marco was all she'd expected from the way he had wooed her -- confident, forward. They worked together at the magazine. He was in layout; she in editing. When he spoke to her, he had the air of a recording artist speaking to his band. She didn't mind it. She knew --they were equals. They spoke two different dialects in the land of Magazine, but they had each earned the same degree of respect and position in their departments. So though he could have talked to her as one artist to another, the fact that he didn't, that he came at her all cock-sure, didn't bother her. She knew deep down that he felt out of place in editorial. That was enough. No need to rub his nose in it. Never need to rub anyone's nose in their weaknesses.

He asked her out just after he'd told her she'd have to cut the cumulative word count of her columns down by about a thousand words. Not good news. The order had come from Advertising; he was just the messenger, not the ax weilder. And he could simply have forwarded the email from Advertising. But he was giving her the heads up, as a favor. When he showed her the mock-ups, he stood very close over her shoulder, pointing. She wished she'd been wearing a silky low cut blouse in which every slight movement of her body came across as a shimmer of breasts. She smelled his cologne -- very subtle. She liked subtlety.

"I did everything I could do to save your space," he said, pointing at she-cared-not-what in layout symbols.

"What was that again?" she asked. No. She hadn't decided to care about the layout symbols. She just wanted to watch the veins in his brown fingers as he pointed. They flickered when a finger moved. And she liked the line of his fingers.

"Does that mean I take your breath away?" he was in the middle of saying.

"What?" she tried to remember what he was saying. Who gets that distracted over fingers?

"Did the idea of having dinner at La Paz with me take your breath away or are you trying to think of a way out of it?" he said.

Some part of her had heard it, dinner at LaPaz. Marco's expression was open, warm, and he wasn't doing the rejection shuffle -- looking away or busying himself.

"Dinner at LaPaz?" she repeated, dumbly. How do you miss a babe asking you to dinner? Uh, dumb blonde, she scolded herself. But really, it was that she'd always just known he'd get around to asking her out.

"You and me," she clarified, not meaning for it to come out sounding like a challenge -- but it did.

"Uh, yeah. You do eat dinner on occasion?"

A nasty comeback popped into her head and she thought how easy it would be for her to throw him off balance, him and his cockiness. But that was only because she'd spied his underbelly once or twice and knew he wasn't as cocky as all that. She didn't want to make him feel off-balance, but she did want to yank his head back by the sandy brown hair of his quasi-Euro hair cut, and force his mouth open with her tongue, and pry and lick the soft, parts as they recoiled reflexively.

"C'mon. My treat," he said. He hadn't lost the cockiness. She was glad. He could probably smell her hunger. And that hunger wasn't about dinner, either.

"Yeah, sure," she said. "Dinner sounds good to me."

And that was it. Simple. Like they'd both already known.

When he picked her up, he wasn't dressed for the office. The suit was Italian, pants all about fluid movement. The jacket fell, swirled, and swooned over his chest and hips, but under it a gray broad-necked sweater said, I'm not a stuffed shirt; I'm so, so warm.

He ordered the wine; he knew the waiter, asked for special seats, made recommendations. All the stuff the urbane guide, "the man" would do.
Of course, she was enjoying all that. She knew he approved of her bare shoulders, the amount of exposed leg, the extra glimpse of thigh peeking from a slight slit up the side of her black dress, which hugged her breasts so that if the air grew chill he could see her nipples.

She tried to stay with the enjoyment of it all, but her mind slipped off to where she would unbuckle his belt, whip it dramatically through the loops and drop it on the floor. She would push him back, then, against the wall, one hand firmly cupping him between the legs, the other pressed against his chest.
Nah, she thought. How it would really go: He would push her dress up and pull her panties down. She'd be exposed, but also free. He'd stand back for just a click to take it all in, the pale, nude skin where she had shaved, the small triangle of fur, the patient slit. He would put his fingers there. Heat would be coming from his neck; desire would blanch his face. And cool air would tickle her where she was wet and a little opened by his touch.

To be continued...