I often tell couples to select a weekend soon, a time when you can go away together and not receive any phone calls. You may not take your watches. This is a trip only for one another and based on the marriage, not the clock. You can ask for wake-up calls and check clocks anywhere, but on this trip, no watch-watching. You must make sure that all of your concerns about home are taken care of. Start planning now, because this trip is difficult. This will be your R&R trip, a trip to recommit to the marriage and celebrate its re-creation. Couples generally appeared eager but confused.

“Do you mean just a weekend away?” asked the husband. “We do that often.”

No, this is not just a weekend away. This is a re-honeymoon trip, a special marital trip of intimacy. A celebration. Each partner should buy a gift for the other that costs a total of less than five dollars and will last forever. You will exchange this special symbolic marital gift with a personal note during the trip. I would like each of you to write out special new vows to one another that you will exchange. The selection of the gift is important and difficult. The price limit will cause you to think about this.

This couple selected Toronto for their trip. They had been there several times, usually with friends. They selected a play to attend and a deluxe hotel. Your own trip could be down the street, just so long as you are alone together away from everyone and everything. When you check in, make love before doing anything else. Sexual intimacy should not be the last thing, but the first thing. Remember your daily walks, remember the posture of the future, and remember to set aside time for your own private ceremony of recommitment.

One wife described the ceremony she shared with her husband.

“We lit a candle, but the damn smoke alarm went off. We decided to turn off all the lights and open the drapes so the city lights would light our room. We got in the posture of the future, naked, but we didn’t touch genitals. We looked at each other. I don’t know how long, we didn’t have a watch. Time just didn’t matter. We shared our vows and we cried. Really cried. We sat closer and held each other. Later we exchanged gifts and little notes.”

Her husband added, “She gave me a picture she had framed. Just a snapshot of us at the beach when we first met. Do you know what I gave her? You would never guess. I gave her two things. First, I gave her a cheap little painting of a light tower. She couldn’t stop laughing. [Remember the sex word game? This was the creative wife who had a new name for the penis and testicles, the light tower on the rocks.] Then you know what? I gave her a little painting I did myself with a plastic frame. Five dollars doesn’t go too far. I painted a picture of our house. Just our house with a big sun behind it. We laughed and cried. We knew we were making memories.”

The wife added, “We just sort of nodded our heads when we shared our vows. The words didn’t seem to matter.” The communication of this couple was on a level beyond words, in a language unique to their marriage, to their love.

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If you are courting now, or if you have accepted my invitation to re-court with your spouse by discussing the issues raised in this chapter, I suggest that the following five systems rules replace the hypocritical, distancing rules that you read at the beginning of this chapter.

Never Lie

Right from the beginning, tell the truth, nothing but the truth, so help your present or future marriage. Give the gift of self-represen-tation. Don’t even tell little white lies; lies of any color are still lies. In courtship, in marriage, and in every religious system in the world, integrity is the key. Remember the material in Chapter One on the “protective insult” and how damaging that can be to love. Some lies may maintain some marriages, keep them surviving, but they never make for a super marriage.

My colleagues suggest that it is unwise to disclose extramarital affairs. They say this is only a “guilt dumping” on the partner, a way of clearing one’s own conscience at the emotional expense of that partner. They say that the affair is irrelevant; just go to work on the marriage.

I say that such an approach is totally without support in the literature. It is opinion, and it helps a marriage survive, but not thrive. It will never work for making a super marriage, for super marital sex. It is just another form of the protective insult that can block the “psychasms” I will describe later. The question is how to deal with major problems in marriage, not how to cover them up and go on. Having sex outside of marriage is not irrelevant; it is a major obstacle to super marital sex, and that applies to extramarital sex of both Types I and II.

“There has never been anything like this in our marriage,” reported the husband. “We seem to be more open than ever. The honesty seems to be arousing, sort of a stimulant. I guess truth is an aphrodisiac. I carried that burden for so long and wondered why I felt incomplete in my marriage. Now I know it was because I was not completely in my marriage. It was a risk, but it was worth it, a risk for love. I took a risk for sex, had sex outside my marriage. At least I should be willing to take this risk for love.”

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