Show Notes
Most of us enter marriage hoping to lock in someone who will love us, support us, and make us feel okay about ourselves — no matter what. So when friction, disagreements, and disconnection show up, it can feel like something has gone terribly wrong.
But marriage wasn't designed to keep us comfortable. It was designed to pressure our growth. And the engine of that growth is conflict — the honest collision of two people who see the world differently learning to love each other and create a shared life that makes room for both of them, in all their difference.
In this conversation, Dr. Finlayson-Fife joins Amy and Greg Langford of the Undressing Intimacy Podcast to explore the ideas at the heart of her book That We Might Have Joy. They discuss what happens when we stop asking marriage to manage our sense of self and start letting it do what it was actually designed to do. The reward is not comfort, Dr. Finlayson-Fife teaches, it's something better — genuine desire, real intimacy, and the gift of two people choosing to share their life with each other.
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More from Conversations with Dr. Jennifer
Sexual fantasy makes many of us anxious, because it often taps into darker aspects of ourselves we don’t always understand, let alone want to disclose. Hearing our partner’s fantasies can be just as unsettling, especially if we assume that they want us to go along with what they share.
**SAVE $200 on our upcoming workshops and retreats (use code JFF200)** An intimate marriage asks us to let our spouse see all of us, not just the good parts. It takes a willingness to be known and the courage to know our spouse as they actually are. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it’s what’s required to create an honest, soulful connection with our partner.
No one hopes for a marital crisis. But it's not uncommon for couples who emerge from one to look back and see it as the catalyst for a more mature, more alive partnership. Adversity and disappointment pressure us to face what's true, and while that rarely feels good, it's what allows us to become more solid, more knowable, and more capable of real intimacy.
Pornography brings up a lot of feelings on both sides, and most of that charge comes from the meanings we attach to it, not the behavior itself. Much of this tension is the result of a culture that taught many of us to treat sexuality with fear rather than understanding. That fear tends to show up as shame, and shame doesn't make porn use go away, it just makes it harder to face honestly, ultimately fueling more anxiety, rigidity, and compulsivity.
Past trauma doesn't just stay in the past. It can show up in our relationship in unexpected, inconvenient, and disheartening ways. Desire can disappear without warning. Old distress can resurface years after we thought we'd made peace with it. Our instinct is often to judge ourselves for the ways that our past trauma impacts us, but judgment only pushes desire further away. Understanding does the opposite. It gives us something to work with instead of something to fight.