The Remarriage Manual by Terry Gaspard

Author:Terry Gaspard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781683644088
Publisher: Sounds True
Published: 2020-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

THE PURSUER-DISTANCER DYNAMIC

According to experts, the most common reason couples fall out of love and stop being sexually intimate is because of a pursuer-distancer dynamic that develops over time. Sue Johnson identifies this pattern as the “protest polka,” and says it is one of three “demon dialogues.” She explains that when one partner becomes critical and aggressive, the other often becomes defensive and distant. John Gottman’s research on thousands of couples reveals that partners who get stuck in this pattern in the first few years of marriage have more than an 80 percent chance of divorcing in the first four or five years.

Why is this relationship pattern so common? Gottman found that men tend to withdraw and women tend to pursue when they are in intimate relationships. Further, he explains that these tendencies are wired into our physiology and reflect a basic gender difference. In his classic “Love Lab” observations, he notes that this dynamic is extremely common and is a major contributor to marital breakdown. He also warns us that if it’s not changed, the pursuer-distancer dynamic will persist into a second marriage or subsequent intimate relationships.

Partners in intimate relationships tend to blame the other person when their needs are not being met. A pursuer-distancer dance follows, which intensifies the dynamic. Couples report having the same fights repeatedly. After a while, they’re no longer addressing the issue at hand and a vicious cycle of resentment, frustration, and anger develops and never gets resolved.

While all couples need autonomy and closeness, many partners struggle with the pursuer-distancer dance and feel chronically dissatisfied with their degree of intimacy. When the pattern of pursuing and distancing becomes ingrained, the behavior of one partner provokes and maintains the behavior of the other. It’s normal to feel a sense of disappointment when your desire for emotional and sexual intimacy doesn’t match your partner’s, and a pursuer-distancer dynamic can develop in the bedroom. While this dynamic is one of the most common causes of divorce, don’t panic! Lacking sexual intimacy is a common struggle for hard-working couples balancing jobs, parenting, and intimacy.

In Wanting Sex Again: How to Rediscover Your Desire and Heal a Sexless Marriage, sex therapist Laurie J. Watson writes, “Most sexual concerns stem from an interpersonal struggle in the marriage.” She describes the tug-of-war between being too close and too distant from a partner as a repetitive pattern of one person being the pursuer and another being the distancer.

In many cases, the distancer retreats and seeks out alone time when under stress, and this intensifies their partner’s need for closeness, thus their desire to pursue. The problem is that if this pattern becomes deeply entrenched, neither person gets their needs met. Sometimes a distancer realizes too late that their partner is severely distressed and they have already started making plans to end their relationship.

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