Mental Health

                In Part 1, I described the six marriages Carlin and I have had. The first two were with our previous spouses and the last four were with each other. After two marriages and divorces, it became clear to us that making life-long vows didn’t make good sense. We agreed we would evaluate our marriage every fifteen years and make new vows that were alive for us at each new stage we were entering. So, these explorations are titled Love 6.0.

                In the previous article, I described my parents’ early married lives in New York and went into detail about my father’s challenges that led him to take an overdose of sleeping pills when I was five years old. He had become increasingly depressed because he couldn’t support his family doing the work he loved and he came to believe we would be better off without him. “Love Lesson #1: Our Parents Love Lives and Losses Impact Our Own,” has helped me make some sense of my own complex love life.

Love Lesson #2: To Thine Own Self Be True

                After my father was committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital, my mother charged me with the responsibility of going with my uncle every Sunday to visit my father. As a dutiful son, I did what I was told, though I remember being confused and unsettled wondering why she didn’t visit with us.  When I asked why I had to go, she simply said,

                “Because your father needs you.”

                I learned early to be my mother’s brave little man, to try and be a good little man, and to be a successful caregiver for my mother and father. I also learned early that I must suppress my own needs in favor of taking care of others. It took me a long time to realize that I had been given an impossible task and even longer to overcome my feelings of being a failure because I couldn’t make my father healthy and happy.

                My father continued to deteriorate under the “treatment regimen” that was available at a state mental hospital in 1949. On one of our visits, my father turned to my uncle and asked, “Harry, who is the kid you have with you?” I was devastated. I felt all my efforts to help had failed and my father didn’t even know who I was. In my first positive act of selfcare, I told my mother I was no longer willing to visit my father.

                She accepted my decision, though I felt guilty giving up on my father. She gave up herself when the doctors told her he needed ever more treatment even as his mental health deteriorated. Eventually, they told her he might need treatment forever and my mother finally filed for divorce.

                My uncle continued his weekly visits until one day my father escaped. These days, if you leave a mental hospital, staff are happy to have an open space for the next person. Back then, it was like escaping from prison. They went after you and when you were caught, they brought you back and locked you up again. My father never went back and I described his healing journey and my own in my book My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound.

                I grew up raised by a single mother who lived with the sadness of lost loves. When I was 12 years old and just beginning to get interested finding a girlfriend, my mother wrote in my Junior High School yearbook: This above all else to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

                It seemed like an odd quote to give to a young boy. She explained that it was a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It has stuck with me my whole life and its meaning has shifted as I’ve learned more about life, love, and relationships.

                Over the years I’ve learned that this self we need to be true to is an illusive presence. The answer to the questions, what am I, is not simple and seems to have multiple aspects that change through time. For me, I have found that writing helps me sort out my thoughts and feelings about important questions pertaining to love and life.

                In a recent article, “Never Give Up on Love: Embrace the Four Marriages That Make Life Meaningful,” I quoted the author and poet David Whyte who said,

                “Human beings are creatures of belonging, though they may come to that sense of belonging only through long periods of exile and loneliness.”  

                This was certainly true for my father who I wrote about in my first article in the Love 6.0 series and in my book, My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound.

                It was also true for my mother who had a complicated love life which I learned about gradually throughout my life. It was only after she divorced my father that I learned that she had been married once before as a young woman. The marriage was short-lived and she went on to marry my father. I also learned that my father was not the only man in her life during the time they lived in New York between 1929 and 1943 when I was born.  

                My father was an actor. The other man, Milton Bracker, was a young New York Times reporter. It seemed that most were vying for my mother and she was hoping that Milton would propose to her, but he was somewhat nerdy and shy and didn’t pop the question. The next day he was sent to Italy to cover one of the major battles of World War II. My father asked her to marry him and she accepted.

                I was conceived and came into the world but often wondered who I would have been or if I would have been had Milton Bracker been my father. Later in life, my mother remarried again, another marriage that didn’t last. It was only late in life that I learned about my mother’s father, the man I was named after.

                I knew he had died before I was born, but she never talked about him. Once I learned the details about his life and his death, a lot became clear to me about my mother’s love life and my own. The final chapter of my book, My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound, was titled “Finding My Mother’s Lost Father and Healing the Father Wound I Never Knew I Had.”

                Following my mother’s death in December 1987, I had an insatiable desire to learn more about my mother’s father, John Kohn. I found out that he died when my mother was five years old, the same age I lost my own father to the mental hospital. When her dad died, my mother, her sister, Florence, and her mother Jenny were forced to leave their home in Toledo, Ohio to move in with relatives in Savannah, Georgia. It was very traumatic for everyone.

                It was clear that my mother never dealt with the loss of her father or the impact it had on her life. It certainly contributed to her own problems with love and intimacy and her placing me in the role of her brave little man, when I was a five-year-old little boy.

                In recent years, Mark Wolynn’s book, It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, helped me see that trauma and its impact on our lives didn’t begin and end with what happened in my own childhood. It could ripple through the generations.

                One of the key language exercises Mark Wolynn describes is to find our “core sentence,” which captures our worst fear. Mine was I’m alone and abandoned and those I love will leave me and die. Even after a lot of therapy, I always believed the origin of these fears was from growing up with a depressed father and an anxious and wounded mother. Now I have come to understand who we are and how our wounding impacts our love lives has even more complicated origins that can go back generations.

Learning to be true to myself has forced me to open doors in rooms that had been closed or hidden for much of my life. Love lives are complicated. There is always more to learn and experience. I invite you to do your own exploring. I’m happy to be offer guidance along the way.

                I look forward to your comments and questions. Drop me a note to Jed@MenAlive.com and put Love 6.0 in the subject line.  

The post Love 6.0: Explorations of an 82-Year-Old Male Healer: Love Lesson #2: To Thine Own Self Be True appeared first on MenAlive.

               I woke up this morning with the words of a song running through my mind: What the world needs now is love sweet love. It was written in 1965 by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and made famous by Dionne Warwick. That was the year I graduated college and began my career as marriage and family counselor.

                If you visit my website, MenAlive.com, you will see my welcome video “Confessions of a Twice-Divorced Marriage Counselor.”  I write an article each week that I hope will help people who, like me, are interested in sex, love, intimacy, and marriage. Let me begin by telling you about the title, “Love 6.0.”

                My wife Carlin and I have both been married twice before. When we met, fell in love, and planned to marry, we wanted this marriage to be our last—”third time’s the charm,” we told each other. Based on our experience, we knew that people change over time and vows that made at the beginning of a marriage might change as each member of the couple changes.

                We decided that we would review our marriage every fifteen years and if we still wanted to be with our partner, we would renew our vows and have another marriage ceremony. We first got married in 1980 and renewed our vows in 1995, and again in 2010, and 2025. So, we’ve had two marriages to previous partners and four marriages to each other. Hence, this is marriage 6.0 where I will share some of the lessons we’ve learned thus far.

Love Lesson #1: Our Parents Love Lives and Losses Impact Our Own

               My parents were both from the south. My father grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. My mother in Savannah, Georgia. They both moved to New York in their 20s, lived in Greenwich Village, and got married in 1934. They both wanted children but they tried for many years, without success, to get pregnant. Finally, they tried an experimental procedure of injecting my father’s sperm into my mother’s womb and I was conceived and came into the world on a cold-winter’s day in December 1943.

                My father had been an actor in New York and he and my mother moved to California shortly after my birth. The first public demonstration of television had occurred at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City and my father was convinced that he was destined for a career in T.V. or the movies.

                My parents bought a small house in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles and I remember sunny days playing in our yard surrounded by Sycamore trees and frolicking in the leaves in the fall. It was a joyful time of our lives, but things were about to change. My father was becoming increasingly depressed because he couldn’t find work and after five years experiencing one rejection after another, he took an overdose of sleeping pills feeling that my mother and I would be better off without him.

                Luckily, he didn’t die. But he was committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital. I grew up wondering what happened to my dad, when it would happen to me, and what I could do to keep the pain and suffering we felt from happening to other families.

                Years later after I had grown up and began my career in the helping profession, I found a series of journals my father had written in the months leading up to the overdose. I wrote about his mental and emotional challenges in my book, My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound. 

                In the last journal, number nine, I found these entries. Reading them was like watching a train wreck about to happen and not being able to stop it. I still feel his pain, and my own, all these years later.

                July 3, 1948: “Oh, Christ, if I can only give my son a decent education—a college decree with a love for books, a love for people, good, solid knowledge. No guidance was given to me. I slogged and slobbered and blundered through two-thirds of my life.”

                July 24, 1948: “Edie dear, Johnny dear, I love you so much, but how do I get the bread to support you? The seed of despair is part of my heritage. It lies sterile for months and then it gnaws until its bitter fruit chokes my throat and swells in me like a large goiter blacking out room for hopes, dreams, joy, and life itself.”

                August 8, 1948: “I’m tired, hopelessly tired, surrounded by an immense brick wall, a blood-spattered brick world, splattered with my blood, with the blood of my head where I senselessly banged to find an opening, to find one loose brick, so I could feel the cool breeze and could stick out my hand and pluck a handful of wheat, but this brick wall is impregnable, not an ounce of mortar loosens, not a brick gives.”

“December 8, 1948: “Your flesh crawls, your scalp wrinkles when you look around and see good writers, established writers, writers with credits a block long, unable to sell, unable to find work, Yes, it’s enough to make anyone, blanch, turn pale and sicken.”

                February 24, 1949: “Faster, faster, faster, I walk. I plug away looking for work, anything to support my family. I try, try, try, try, try. I always try and never stop.”

                March 12, 1949: “A hundred failures, an endless number of failures, until now, my confidence, my hope, my belief in myself, has run completely out. Middle aged, I stand and gaze ahead, numb, confused, and desperately worried. All around me I see the young in spirit, the young in heart, with ten times my confidence, twice my youth, ten times my fervor, twice my education. I see them all, a whole army of them, battering at the same doors I’m battering, trying in the same field I’m trying. Yes, on a Sunday morning in March, my hope and my life stream are both running desperately low, so low, so stagnant, that I hold my breath in fear, believing that the dark, blank curtain is about to descend.”

             Shortly after this March entry, my father took the pills and was committed to the mental hospital. The treatment available in 1949 was not helpful. He got increasingly worse and the doctors told my mother he needed more treatment and might never be able to leave. Eventually and reluctantly, she filed for divorce.

             I experience tears of grief and joy reading my father’s journals. Grief at feeling his deepening pain and rising fear as he suffers because he can’t support his family financially. I also feel joy to hear and feel the intimate words of my father as he reaches out through the years to tell me what was in his heart and soul and how hard he worked to be there for me.

            Given my parent’s experience, it is not surprising that I eventually became a marriage and family counselor. One of the books I read that helped me make sense of own relationships difficulties was Getting the Love You Want by Harville Hendrix and his wife Helen LaKelly Hunt. Drs. Hendrix and Hunt describe how couples come together and the forces that often pull us apart. They say,

                “When we fall in love, we believe we’ve found the bliss we were born with. Suddenly, we see life in Technicolor.”

                That was certainly how I remember feeling when I married my first wife.

They go on to say,

               “But inevitably—often when we marry or love in together—things just start to go wrong. In some cases, everything falls apart. The veil of illusion falls away, and it seems that our partners are different from what we thought they were. Old hurts are reactivated as we realize our partners cannot or will not love and care for us as they   promised and our dream shatters.”

              Fortunately, there is a way out and Drs. Hendrix and Hunt have developed a wonderful and effective system for helping us all, which Carlin and I have found very helpful in our 46 years of marriage.

“Consciousness is the key; it changes everything,” say Hendrix and Hunt. “When we are unaware of the agenda of love, it is a disaster because our childhood scenarios inevitably repeat themselves with the same devastating consequences.”

                Carlin and I share our own healing journey in our book, The Enlightened Marriage: The 5 Transformative Stages of Relationships and Why the Best is Still to Come. You can learn more about our own marriage in our book and on-line course, “The Five Stages of Love.”

                If you found this article helpful, please let me know. Drop me a note to Jed@MenAlive.com and put “Love 6.0” in the subject line. Perhaps this will be the first in a series of articles.

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                Fifteen years ago, Rebecca D. Costa challenged us all to address the danger we were facing. In her book, The Watchman’s Rattle: A Radical New Theory of Collapse, published in 2010, she said,

                “Today, the issues that threaten human existence are clear: an intractable global recession, powerful pandemic viruses, terrorism, rising crime, climate change, rapid depletion of the earth’s resources, nuclear proliferation, failing education.”

                Her mentor, the eminent biologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson, who wrote the foreword to her book summed up our predicament this way:

                “We have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and God-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”

              The problems have gotten even more critical since then. Fortunately, Costa offered practical solutions and other experts have offered ideas about what we can do now.

                When I was an undergraduate at U.C. Santa Barbara I had the good fortune to experience a class with the great philosopher Paul Tillich. His words have guided my life’s work ever since:

               “Every serious thinker must ask and answer three fundamental questions:

1. What is wrong with us? With men? Women? Society? What is the nature of our alienation? Our dis-ease?

2. What would we be like if we were whole? Healed? Actualized? If our potentiality was fulfilled?

3. How do we move from our condition of brokenness to wholeness? What are the means of healing?”

                To heal our brokenness and find our way to more vibrant, long-lasting, and satisfying relationships, we need to understand our history and where we got off track.

For most of human history humans recognized that we were fellow beings in the community of life on planet Earth. We were partners, not dominators. In their book Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future, Riane Eisler and Douglas P. Fry, report research demonstrating that

                “for more than 99 percent of the approximately two million years since the emergence of a recognizable human animal, man has been a hunter and gatherer.” Eisler and Fry call their way of life, “The original partnership societies.”

               As Riane Eisler says in her book, The Chalice & The Blade: Our History, Our Future,

                “Underlying the great surface diversity of human culture are two basic models of society. The first, which I call the dominator model, is what is popularly termed either patriarchy or matriarchy—the ranking of one half of humanity over the other. The second, in which social relations are primarily based on the principle of linking, may best be described as the partnership model.”

                When did domination systems come into being? Some say it began 10,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture. More recent research by environmental scientist Dr. James DeMeo and reported in his book, Saharasia: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence in the Deserts of the Old World, says that it occurred around 6,000 years ago and was caused by a severe climate crisis that lasted for generations. Philosopher and psychologist Sam Keen, author of Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man, describes our situation this way:  

                “The simple truth, which we have conspired to forget during the last century, is that the human species is an integral part of an incomprehensible unity of being in the process of becoming: a single organ in the body of Gaia.” 

               Keen goes on to say:

“The radical vision of the future rests on the belief that the logic that determines either our survival or our destruction is simple:

• We can only know what we touch.”
• The new human vocation is to heal the earth.
• We can only heal what we love.
• We can only love what we know.

               Clearly Keen is referring to our relationships. If humans fail to adapt, life on Earth will go on without us. It is our relationships that must change. There is good news and bad news. The good news is that we have a long history, more than 2,000,000 years, of sustainable partnership practices that can guide us.

The bad news is that many people still refuse to wake up and accept the truth. For those who can handle and embrace the present challenge, this is your time to step up and take action.  It’s time for us to get back in touch with who we truly are. It’s time we woke up from the destructive disconnection from the earth, ourselves, and each other, and return to our partnership roots.

As historian Thomas Berry warned:

               “We never knew enough. Nor were we sufficiently intimate with all our cousins in the great family of the earth. Nor could we listen to the various creatures of the earth, each telling their own story. The time has now come, however, when we will listen or we will die.”

The Sinking of the Ship of Civilization: What I Learned From The Vision I Was Given in 1993

                In 1993, I attended a Men’s Leaders’ Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. One of the activities offered was a traditional Native-American sweat lodge ceremony where we had the opportunity ask for guidance and support for ourselves and our communities. I had a vision where I saw the Sinking Ship of Civilization as well as Lifeboats for the Sustainable Future. I have written about the vision and what I’ve learned in numerous articles. Here is the most recent.  

                I continue to learn and get a better understanding of what we can do including the following:

1. Give “Civilization” its proper name.

As long as we accept the belief that “civilization” is the pinnacle of human achievement we will never take action that can save us. In 1999 world-renowned scientist Dr. Jared Diamond wrote an article, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” in which he said that the advent of agriculture, the first step toward civilization, “may have been our greatest blunder.”  

A more accurate name for this stage of humanity, which we have been living during one-half of one-percent of human history would better be named the “dominator model” as described by Riane Eisler.

2. There is a better way of life beyond “civilization.”

                In 1992, I was given the book Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. It offered a clear vision of the two worlds that are competing for our attention: A world where hierarchy and dominance rule (Quinn calls it the world of the Takers) and a world where equality and connection rule (Quinn calls it the world of the Leavers. In his book, Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure, published in 1999, Quinn says,

                “Beyond civilization isn’t a geographical space up in the mountains or on some remote isle. It’s a cultural space that opens up among people with new minds.”

3.   Changing our minds is not easy, but there are guides that can help us.

Dr. Eric Maisel is a long-term friend and colleague. He is an internationally respected diplomat coach who specializes in creativity coaching, existential wellness coaching, and relationship coaching. He is the author of more than fifty books including Brave New Mind: The Art of Serene Readiness. Maisel begins by telling us why a brave new mind is absolutely crucial today:

                “We’ve all been rushing about with no chance of catching up. We desperately need a brave new mind that can take into account our brave new world, a world at once strange and inhuman, awash with material good and loneliness, orchestrated by feckless billionaires more powerful than governments, where our conversations are with AI chat boxes and our thinking is reduced to refining the questions that we ask AI.”

                Kyra Bobinet, M.D., MPH, author of The Unstoppable Brain: The New Science of Tranquility, Transformation, and Healing” says,

                “There’s a newly discovered, but little known, secret to your brain that is robbing you of y our freedom and power to live the life you long for. It is also causing you to lose your motivation to do what you know is best for you or others, leaving you stuck.”

She goes on to say, “What is this secret? The habenula, an area of the brain that has two superpowers over your behavior. First, it acts as a failure detector anytime you think you failed, even in some tiny way, even subconsciously without your knowing. Second, and more impactful, it is a kill switch for your motivation. This means that whenever you think you have failed at something, you will suddenly find yourself unmotivated to keep going.”

I had never heard of the habenula before, but I reached out to Dr. Bobinet, interviewed her, and wrote the following article. “The Unstoppable Brain: The New Science of Tranquility, Transformation, and Healing.”

What I learned from my sweat-lodge vision is that most people will remain in denial and go down with the ship. We can’t change people until they are ready to change. No one articulates this wisdom better than Mel Robbins in her podcasts and #1 New York Times bestselling book, The Let Them Theory. She says,

               “If you’re struggling to change your life, achieve your goals, or feel happier, I want you to hear this: The problem isn’t you. The problem is the power you unknowingly give to other people.”

                There is no one who has offered greater guidance for a return to our partnership roots than Dr. Harville Hendrix and his wife Dr. Helen LaKelly Hunt. They are internationally respected couple’s therapists, speakers, and New York Times bestselling authors. Together, they have written twelve books with more than four million copies sold, including the timeless classic, Getting the Love You Want,  which was on the NYTimes best seller list eleven times. The book caught the attention of Oprah Winfrey and they were guests on her show 17 times over a twenty-year period. 

In their most recent book, How to Talk with Anyone About Anything: The Practice of Safe Conversations, Harville and Helen describe their audacious global social movement to shift from an individualistic civilization that embodies values like competition, control, domination and winning to a relational civilization that embodies the values of personal freedom, total equality, radical inclusiveness and celebration of diversity.

They propose that the engine of this transformation in civilization is to shift from monological talking that leads to tension, conflict, violence and war to dialogical conversations where people experience safety and connecting. In a relational civilization, the process of social interaction are collaboration, co-creation and cooperation that leads to connecting beyond difference.

Such social cohesion and cooperation transform conflict into safety and facilitates and sustains local and global peace. They estimate that by 2050, the world will contain 9.8 billion people. By then, if they can train the tipping point, which is 30% or 2.4 billion people, in dialogue, the entire world will change the way they relate and replace conflict with peace everywhere. Come join the movement.

                I would like to hear from you. My articles appear every week on my website, www.MenAlive.com. Drop me a note at Jed@MenAlive.com.

The post The Secret For Saving Humanity: What We Must Do Now appeared first on MenAlive.

                As a marriage and family counselor for more than fifty years, I know that everyone believes in love, though not everyone practices what we know. Many of us also believe in love and marriage. For those who visit my website, you have seen my welcome video, “Confessions of a Twice-Divorced Marriage Counselor.”     I am very open about the challenges I faced and why my first two marriages ended in divorce.

I also share what I’ve learned since marrying Carlin forty-six years ago. I describe the seven secrets that she and I learned along the way and how our relationship has grown closer and more intimate through the years. You can read about them here. The poet-philosopher David Whyte expands the concept of marriage. In his book The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationships he says,

                “Human beings are creatures of belonging, though they may come to that sense of belonging only through long periods of exile and loneliness.”

                Most of us have experienced the feelings of exile and loneliness that Whyte describes. I found Whyte’s description of the three marriages to be very helpful.

                “This sense of belonging or not belonging” says Whyte, “is lived out by most people through three principal dynamics:

• First through our relationship to other people and other living things (particularly and very personally, to one other living, breathing person in relationship or marriage);

• Second, through work,

• Third, through an understanding of what it means to be themselves, discrete individuals alive and seemingly separate from everyone and everything else.”

              Following my two divorces, and after the initial shock, loss, and confusion, I looked back over my relationship life and realized the love I had for my work rivaled the love I had for my wives and I worried and wondered if my time spend involved with my work had caused by two previous marriages to fail. It was only years later, deep into my third marriage with Carlin, that I came to understand the importance of all three marriages.

David Whyte says,

               “To neglect any one of the three marriages, is to impoverish them all, because they are not actually separate commitments but different expressions of the way each individual belongs to the world.”

                This one sentence forever changed my views of love and marriage forever.

In recent years I have come to believe that there is a fourth marriage that has been invisible to most of us. It is like water for fish who are immersed in from the beginning of life, so are never aware of their deeper connection. I believe that our connection to the human tribe is a fourth marriage. 

I first became aware of this marriage from Daniel Quinn, the author of the book Ishmael. In his book, Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure, he says,

                “The tribal life and no other is the gift of natural selection to humanity. It is to humanity what pack life is to wolves, pod life is to whales, and hive life is to bees.”

                He goes on to say,

                “People are fascinated to learn why a pride of lions works, why a troop of baboons works, or why a flock of geese works, but they often resist learning why a tribe of human works. Tribal humans were successful on this planet for three million years before our agricultural revolution, and they’re no less successful today.”

                However, humans have become disconnected from what works for all our fellow travelers in the community of life on planet Earth. Thomas Berry, was a “geologian, and a historian of religions. He spoke eloquently about our connection to the Earth and the consequences of our failure to remember who we are. 

                “We never knew enough. Nor were we sufficiently intimate with all our cousins in the great family of the earth. Nor could we listen to the various creatures of the earth, each telling its own story. The time has now come, however, when we will listen or we will die.”

                This fourth marriage connects us to the reality of our human tribe and is our lifeline to the community of life on planet Earth. Like many people who are blind-sided when a seemingly solid marriage ends in divorce, our human survival is under threat, but most of us don’t see it.

According to scientist Gregg Braden,

“Scientists, engineers, and philosophers warn us that without a radical shift in our thinking, we are on track to be the last generation of pure humans that the world will know. Within a single generation we will devolve into a hybrid species of synthetic bodies, Artificial intelligence (AI), and computer chips that limit our ability to think, to love, and to adapt to the conditions of the emerging world in a healthy way.”

                David Whyte’s recognition of the importance of embracing the first three marriages, I believe, is also true of the fourth one.

                “Each of these marriages is, at its heart, nonnegotiable,” says Whyte. “We should give up the attempt to balance one marriage against another, of, for instance taking away from work to give more time to a partner, or vice versa, and start thinking of each marriage conversing with, questioning or emboldening each of the other two.”

Understanding Our Marriage to an Intimate Partner and Our Marriage to Our Work

                The great psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud said,

                “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.”

                I know in my own life, my work helping men and women who love them is truly nonnegotiable as is my love for my wife, Carlin. David Whyte offers us additional insights.

                “We can fall in love with a work as easily or as accidentally as we can with a person.”

                For me, the seeds of my work in the world came to me early. As a five-year-old boy I watched my father slip into depression when he couldn’t make a living supporting me and my mother as a playwright. After he was hospitalized after taking an overdose of sleeping pills, I knew I wanted to be a healer and eventually went to medical school to begin my career.                

Whyte says,

                “To glimpse our vocation, we must learn how to be sought out and found by a work as much as we strive to identify it ourselves. Finding and being found is like mutual falling in love.” 

It was similar to the feeling I had as Carlin and I found each other.

               “What of love’s first glimpse for a woman?” asks Whyte. “It brings to mind the old saying that a man falls in love with what he sees and a woman falls in love with what she hears.” Whyte goes on to say, “Most recent scientific research seems to reinforce the woman’s attentive emphasis on verbal and relational rather than visual clues: clues to sincerity, clues, perhaps, as to whether the man is really capable of seeing her.”

Understanding Our Marriage to Ourselves and Our Human Tribe

                In my previous article, “Never Give Up on Love: Seven Secrets for a Love That Lasts Forever,” I described my marriage to Carlin evolving through time and our decision to reassess our marriage every fifteen years since who we are as individuals changes dramatically over time.

              “Perhaps the most difficult marriage of all,” says David Whyte, beneath the two visible, all-too-public marriages of work and relationship—is the internal and often secret marriage to that tricky movable frontier called ourselves. It is the marriage to the one who keeps changing at the center of all the outer relationships while making promises it hopes to God it can keep.”

               We often neglect this internal marriage and as a result we can easily make ourselves hostage to the externals of work and the demands of our relationship partner. We find ourselves unable to be successful in our outer marriages because we have no inner foundation from which to connect from a place of self-confidence. We fling ourselves in all directions in our outer lives, looking for love in all the wrong places (the title of one of my best-selling books.)   

              “We spend so much time attempting to put bread on the table or holding a relationships together,” says Whyte, “that we often neglect the necessary internal skills which help us pursue, come to know, and then sustain a marriage with the person we find on the inside.”

Further, if we don’t have a deep and abiding connection with that person on the inside, we will find it much easier to feel that humanity has made a hopeless mess of the world and the world would be a better place without us.                

In his book, Pure Human: The Hidden Truth of Our Divinity, Power, and Destiny, Gregg Braden predicts that we are on the brink of two irreversible choices.

              “If we continue on the current technological path, guided by the current trends in thinking, by the year 2030 we will have made the ultimate choice. We will either be locked into a ‘futuristic’ society of human-machine hybrids where we’ve traded our cherished qualities of intuition, empathy, creativity, and the soul-stirring bonds of love, intimacy, and sexual conception for the convenience of AI that creates our music, poetry, art, and virtual realties that replace relationships and human contact.”  

Weaving the Four Marriages Together

                I learned an important lesson about how these four marriages can be integrated in our lives from a Native American basket weaver. She described our life as a basket woven from many different strands, each essential for a strong container. Each part of our life is one strand in this basket. In this case think of each of the four marriages as a strand, each equally important for making a beautiful life basket.

She explained to me that it is impossible to weave multiple strands at the same time; we need to attend to the strand that requires our attention without losing awareness of the others. Every strand will get our attention—just not all at the same time. My friend and colleague Eric Maisel calls this, “doing the next right thing.”

                These are challenging times we are living in today. I believe we should never give up on love and the kind of marriages that only humans can have. I look forward to your responses. Come visit me at MenAlive.com. You can sign up for my free newsletter and read my weekly articles here.

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                My connection with Taylor Swift goes back a long way. It began with my passion for a certain pair of shoes. When I was three years old, I decided I was tired of my white “baby” shoes. I wanted “big boy” shoes and my mother took me to the shoe store. I was amazed with the variety and colors available and was entranced by a pair of red Keds.

                After measuring my little feet, the salesman went to the back and returned with a box which he carefully opened and proudly brought out a pair of shoes. But they were blue, not red. He explained to me and my mother that blue was for boys, red was for girls. I hadn’t realized that sexual identity was color coded, but knew what I liked and demanded the red Keds. The salesman looked to my mother for support. “Give the boy what he wants,” she said. I danced out of the store in my new red shoes.

                Over the years I began working in the emerging field of gender-specific medicine and men’s mental, emotional, and relational health. I was writing an article and wanted to show that sex and gender stereotypes had changed. I did a Google Images search for “red Keds,” expecting to find pictures of males and females, but saw only females and most were of Taylor Swift.

                I first felt an identification with her choice of footwear, then began listening to her music, and finally came to appreciate Taylor Swift’s savvy as a business woman. When I learned about a new book, Swiftynomics: How Women Mastermind and Redine Our Economy, I knew I wanted to interview the author, Dr. Misty L. Heggeness.

                Dr. Heggeness is codirector of the Kansas Population Center, Associate Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at the University of Kansas, and former Principal Economist and Senior Advisor at the US Census Bureau. You can read my exclusive interview here. For Dr. Heggeness, her book reflects both her professional and personal interest in Taylor Swift, her music and her work.

                “When I first started paying attention to Taylor Swift, she was already well past her Reputation era and immersed in promoting her album Lover,” says Dr. Heggeness. “She seemed to have layers of self-confience, ambition, and wisdom beyond her years.”

                That was my own feeling after connecting with Taylor Swift’s music and professional skills and experience.

                “She was unique and unusual in her ability to speak her truth, from her vantage point, and her fans soaked it up,” says Heggeness. “Tall, gangly, awkward, sparkly, and girly — she had all the characteristics that society so easily dismisses in women. At first blush, one might wonder what she might possibly teach me, a professional economist who studies women and work.”

                One might also wonder why a psychotherapist with a PhD in International Health and a sixty-year career helpling men and their families would find important about Taylor Swift and what she can teach us all about love, life, and success.  I hope you take time to explore with me. I believe it will be well worth your time.

                I agree with Dr. Heggenness when she says,

                “Some may believe Taylor Swift has beaten men at their game, but I think she is simply playing her own game. Challenged by a society, culture, and industry not made to benefit her, she used her best mastermind strategies to create a path forward.”

                I believe that resonates with me and I feel it will resonate with millions of men as well as women. Dr. Heggenness concludes,

                “She perfected the art of escaping confines. She leaned into the power of women’s experience and voices. In so doing, she developed a movement, a ‘Swiftynomics” movement, if you will. She focused on providing art and experiences that other women (and men) who are shriving as economic belings want.”

                Swiftynomics assesses the complex economic lives of everyday American women through stories of groundbreakers like Taylor Swift. Dr. Misty L. Heggeness digs into the data, revealing women’s overlooked contributions and aspirations — the unexamined value by create by pursuing their ambitions. Dr. Heggeness emphasizes that the book is not just for women, but for men as well.

                She says, “Taylor will continue to reinvent herself in a new era, continue to thrive and live her best life. Perhaps even more important is your next reinvention. I have no doubt that you are up to the challenge.”

                We can all learn a lot from his engaging and practical book.

Riane Eisler and Our Partnership Roots

                Another powerful and successful woman who has influenced my life and my work is Riane Eisler. I first met Riane in 1987 shortly after the publication of her book, The Chalice & the Blade: Our History, Our Future. I remember discussing our views on the future of humanity and the healing that needed to occur between men and women. My first book, Inside Out: Becoming My Own Man had been published in 1983, where I described my own healing journey. At a time when many female writers were blaming men for the problems in the world, I appreciated that Riane understood that the problem was not men, but the system of domination that harmed both women and men. 

                When I first read these words in The Chalice & the Blade, I was moved by their simplicity, vision, and truth:

                “Underlying the great surface diversity of human culture are two basic models of society. The first, which I call the dominator model, is what is popularly termed either patriarchy or matriarchy — the ranking of one half of humanity over the other. The second, in which social relations are primarily based on the principle of linking rather than ranking, may best be described as the partnership model. In this model — beginning with the most fundamental difference in our species, between male and female — diversity is not equated with either inferiority or superiority.”

                In her more recent book, Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future, written with anthropologist Douglas P. Fry, they say,

                “The central features of partnership systems include:

• overall egalitarianism;
• equality, respect, and partnership between women and men;
• a nonacceptance of violence, war, abuse, cruelty, and exploitation; and
• ethics that support human caring, prosocial cooperation, and flourishing.”

                These are the values, I believe, we recognize in the music, life, love, and the values and practices of Taylor Swift.

Women and Men, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, Me and You: Together We Can Change the World for Good

                My wife, Carlin, and I recently celebrated our 45^th anniversary. Like Taylor and Travis, we had numerous relationship breakups and heartaches before we met. I share the things Carlin and I have learned in my book, The Enlightened Marriage: The 5 Tranformative Stages of Relationships and Why the Best is Still to Come and offer an on-line course for couples, “Navigating the 5 Stages of Love.”

                The famous psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, once said,

                “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.”

                We can learn a great deal about these twin pillars of life from Taylor Swift and her ongoing relationship with football star Travis Kelce.

                Millions of women and men throughout the world saw the headlines last year:

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s Love Story — From Friendship Bracelets to Engagement Rings.

                In an article by Jocelyn Noveck and Maria Sherman, August 26, 2025, they reported,

                “It started with a friendship bracelet. It ended with an engagement ring. Taylor Swift, the pop superstar, and Travis Kelce, the football champion, are engaged. The fiancés, both 35, announced the news in a joint post on Instagram on Tuesday. It is the latest chapter in the couple’s love story, one that has spanned two years, two Super Bowls, an album announcement and the highest-grossing tour of all time.”

                For Carlin and me, it is fun to enjoy the evolution of two iconic individuals whose love lives and work lives inspire the world. I’m sure you will have no trouble finding more information about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce and their upcoming marriage.

                If you’d like to learn more about Misty L. Heggeness and her book, Swiftynomics: How Women Mastermind and Redine Our Economy, you can click the link below:

                https://www.mistyheggeness.com

                If you’d like to see my interview with Dr. Heggeness and enjoy our in-depth converation, you may do so here.

                If you would like to read more articles about love, life, and relationships you can subscribe to my free weekly newsletter here:  https://menalive.com/email-newsletter/

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                I have been a marriage counselor since 1968 and have helped more than 25,000 couples find real, lasting love. I’ve also helped an equal number of singles to find that special someone and learn to have a marriage that lasts through time. I tell my clients that marriage is the graduate school of life. It’s the advanced degree that you don’t have to enroll in college to earn, but you don’t get it by simply falling in love. It takes work, but it’s the best kind of work a person can do in life.

                Many would think with all the experience I have gained over the years I would be an expert at creating a great marriage, but that isn’t the case. If you visit my website, MenAlive.com, you will see my introductory video, “Confessions of a Twice-Divorced Marriage Counselor.” There is a lot I’ve had to learn.

                Perhaps the most important question people in the world are asking is this:

                If everyone wants real lasting love in their lives, why do so many people find it difficult to achieve?

                It took many years to find the answer, but I believe I have succeeded. Carlin and I met, fell in love, and I have been joyfully married now for forty-six years and we are still going strong. Here are the secrets we have learned thus far:

Secret #1: Bust the myth that finding the right partner is the most important key for a great marriage.  

                I met the woman who I eventually married in college and we got married in the summer after we graduated. We were sure our relationship would last forever, or at least until “death do us part” in our old age. It lasted ten years and we had two wonderful children before we eventually got divorced.

                After grieving the ending and going through a contentious period working out child support, custody, and settling into single life again, I was convinced I had married the wrong person and eventually remarried a second time, thinking this time I will get it right.

                Before looking for the next Ms. Right, I did some soul searching, personal counseling, and realized that finding the magical “right partner” was a myth. My years of experience have convinced me that there are in fact many potential “right partners” for each of us. I tell clients, only half-jokingly, that there are 5,284 perfect partners for each person. I believe now that looking for that one perfect “needle in the haystack” leads us astray. Never give up on love but let go of the myth that there is only one right partner for you.

Secret #2: Reflect on your past relationships, see what worked, and what you most want in a partner now.

                When a relationship ends, we are often emotionally drained, wounded, and confused. There is a tendency to blame our “ex” or ourselves for the breakup and either bury our feelings or spend endless hours replaying all the things that went wrong.

                A more helpful practice is to recognize, that like everything else in life, all things come to an end. There is much we can learn about ourselves and our needs from a relationship that has ended, but we learn little if we get locked into patterns of shame and blame, whether we are shaming and blaming our partner or ourselves.

                We can practice compassion for ourselves and the other person, we can begin to examine the positive things that brought us together, focus on what we learned about ourselves, and think about what things we would want in a future relationship. Never give up on love and focus on what was loving and good in your relationship.

Secret #3: Recognize the evolutionary basis of our desires.

                When we fall in love with a new person, we are flooded with all kinds of hormones and neurochemicals that alter our perceptions of reality. This is evolution’s way of ensuring we mate and reproduce. As Dr. Helen Fisher, the world-famous anthropologist and human behavior researcher, describes it in her book, Why We Love:

                “Romantic love is one of three primordial brain networks that evolved to direct mating and reproduction. Lust, the craving for sexual gratification, emerged to motivate our ancestors to seek sexual union with almost any potential partner. Romantic love, the elation and obsession of ‘being in love,’ enabled them to focus attention on a single individual at a time, thereby conserving precious mating time and energy.”

                Never give up on love but recognize that “being in love” is different than “real lasting love.”

Secret #4: Learn that great relationships are built over time.

                Like many, I grew up with the romantic belief that once I found the right partner, the rest was relatively easy. After I found her, we would live “happily ever after.” I learned our love lives are not so simple. A great marriage is built over days, weeks, months and years. Dr. Fisher describes the third primordial brain network this way.

                “Male-female attachment, the feeling of calm, peace, and security one often has for a long-term mate, evolved to motivate our ancestors to love this partner long enough to rear their young together.”

                Both Carlin and I had been married twice before, so we knew that a great marriage takes time to develop and people change a lot over the years. So, we decided that every 15 years, we would decide again whether we wanted to marry each other, and if so, to create new vows that reflected who we were at that stage of our lives.

                We first got married in 1980. We had our first re-marriage ceremony in 1995, our second one in 2010, and our most recent in 2025. We are still together after 45 years and still growing in love. Never give up on love but know that it takes years to develop a great marriage and we must change our vows as we change.  

Secret #5: Understand that disillusionment is a stage in every successful marriage.

                In my book, The Enlightened Marriage: The 5 Transformative Stages of Relationships and Why the Best is Still to Come, I share my naïve belief that I there were just two stages of marriage. In stage one, we fall in love. In stage two, we create a life together and live happily ever after. When disillusionment sets in people often feel the marriage isn’t working and they should get out.

                What I have learned is that disillusionment does not signal the end of a marriage, but is a stage that all marriages go through. When we enter a new relationship, we inevitably project our hopes and dreams on the other person. As time goes on, we must confront the realities of who we are. In stage three we learn to get real with each other and accept ourselves and our partner for the wonderful, complex, ever-changing, human being that they are. Never give up on love but give up the illusions of perfection we project on each other and engage in the challenging work of getting real.

Secret #6: Accept that the purpose of stage three is to uncover and heal wounds from the past.

                The CDC-Kaiser Permanente ACE Study and subsequent surveys that show that most people have at least one ACE (Adverse childhood experience), and that people with four ACEs — including living with an alcoholic parent, racism, bullying, witnessing violence inside the home, physical abuse, and losing a parent to divorce — have an increased risk of adult onset chronic health problems such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, suicide, alcoholism, and problems with relationships.

                One of the gifts of confronting the unhappiness in Stage 3 is we can get to the core of what causes the pain and conflict. Like many people, Carlin and I grew up in families that were dysfunctional in many ways. Both my father and mother suffered from depression and my dad took an overdose of sleeping pills after he had become increasingly depressed because he couldn’t support his family doing the work he loved. Carlin’s father was an angry, violent man. Her mother left him in order to protect herself and her daughter. We all have wounds and the wounds need healing if we are going to have a relationship that is real and loving.

                Never give up on love. Loving ourselves and another requires that we heal the wounds from the past. This is one of the great gifts of being in a long-term committed relationship.

Secret # 7: Real lasting love is the gift we get when we work through our problems together.

                Everyone wants to find a partner they can learn to love and share their lives with. Carlin and I are in our 80s now. We feel blessed to have found each other and stayed with each other all these years. When we first got together, we had the great good fortune to meet one of the icons of psychology, Carl Rogers. He was speaking to a group of therapists and was accompanied by his life Helen. He mentioned that they had been married for more than fifty years.

                At one point Carl turned to Helen, smiled, and asked her, “Do you remember those fifteen difficult years?” She smiled back and said she did.

                I was shocked and surprised that my hero and expert had experienced serious marital problems and even more surprised that the problems lasted so long and they remained together. Now, after being with Carlin for forty-six years, I understand. Never give up on love. The best is still to come.

                If you’d like to learn more about real lasting love, check out my on-line course, Navigating the 5 Stages of Love. If you’d like to learn about private counseling with me, drop me a note to Jed@MenAlive.com and put “counseling info” in the subject line.

                I also enjoy hearing from people. Let me know if this article was helpful.  

The post Never Give Up on Love: Seven Secrets For a Love-Life That Lasts Forever appeared first on MenAlive.

                Those who read my regular articles know that I have a passion for science that offers practical solutions to the problems we face in our daily lives. I recently learned about the work of Dr. Kyra Bobinet who has pursued and studied the truth about behavior change for nearly three decades as a physician, public health leader, healthcare executive, and behavioral expert.

                I recently had the privilege of sitting down with Dr. Bobinet and learning about the secret part of the brain that controls motivation and what we might be doing to unknowingly sabotage our success. She breaks down the mysterious habenula and explains how to achieve our goals. You can watch this exclusive interview here.                

One of the most important things I learned from Dr. Bobinet was what her studies show about how to improve our love lives.

                “Valentine’s Day is meant to celebrate love, but it often comes with unspoken expectations,” says Dr. Bobinet. “Be more romantic. Be more connected. Be more intimate. Be better for each other this year. Moments like Valentine’s Day can turn love into pressure.”

                She goes on to say,

               “When the brain senses evaluation or comparison, even from someone who cares deeply, motivation shuts down, leading to defensiveness or withdrawal rather than closeness or change.”

                But it isn’t just our relationships that can be undermined. To-Do Lists & New Year’s resolutions of all kinds can secretly hurt us. Dr. Bobinet helps us to lose weight, and how to stop everyday habits that may be destroying your motivation.

In her book, Unstoppable Brain: The New Neuroscience That Frees Us From Failure, Eases Our Stress, and Creates Lasting Change. Dr. Bobinet also explains:

• Different types of failure
• Dangers of doom-scrolling
• Ties between addiction, depression, and failure
• Best sources of motivation for short term goals vs long term goals
• Ketamine effects on the habenula in treating depression
• Why porn can be so addictive to some
• Why we’re more likely to focus on losses vs wins
• What triggers imposter syndrome and who is most susceptible to it
• Positive & negative effects of the latest GLP-1 weight loss drugs on the brain
• Effects of inauthenticity in sexual relationships
• Downside of institutions overusing performance-based tools
• Difference between “performing” vs authentically being.

Beyond her professional accomplishments, Dr. Bobinet is an enrolled member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota. Her diverse interests include meditation, horsemanship, and herbalism. She lives in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains with her family and draws inspiration from both animal and plant teachers in her daily life.

She points out that most of us know what we should do to improve our lives, but we often don’t do it. We make resolutions to lose weight, improve our relationships, exercise regularly, improve our work/life balance. We make To-Do Lists to keep us on track and make goals that we hope will reduce the constant stress in our lives. Yet, we often blame ourselves when things don’t work out the way we planned, and we too often feel like we are failing at life.  

Today’s performative work and social environments, based on fixed goals, competitions, relentless tracking, chasing likes and followers on social media, cause us to perform constantly for others, masquerading our true selves in our desire to be safe and to belong. Yet loneliness continues to increase, for many of us the world seems to be going to hell in a handbasket, and we feel cutoff and alone.  

I pride myself on keeping up with new findings in brain science, but I had never heard of the most critical part of the brain that can help us or forever keep us from achieving our goals. It is called the habenula. Dr. Bobinet has been studying this area of the brain for many years and for the first time is bringing her findings to the attention of the world.

This newly studied brain area is perhaps the most powerful behavior controller ever found. She helps us understand how the habenula holds the key to everything from our constant feelings of failure to our anxiety, addictions, and depression.

I learned that the habenula is a pea-sized pair of nuclei that acts as a central hub controlling areas involved in emotion, reward, and cognition. Though tiny, the habenula reaches into nearly every aspect of our psychology.

               Dr. Bobinet explains that the habenula has two superpowers over your behavior.

               “First, it acts as a failure detector anytime you think you failed, even in some tiny way, even subconsciously without your knowing. Second, and more impactful, it is a kill switch for your motivation. This means that whenever you think you have failed at something, you will suddenly find yourself unmotivated to keep doing it.”

In my interview with Dr. Bobinet, I learned that the habenula is an ancient brain structure, dating back over 560 million years to our earliest vertebrate ancestors. The most well-defined purpose of the habenula is to act as an “anti-reward” center. It signals when an individual is failing or experiencing a negative outcome, such as missing an expected reward or facing a punishment. It teaches the brain to avoid making the same mistake by suppressing actions that lead to aversive outcomes.

In an environment where eating the wrong kind of berry might cause serious illness or fighting an adversary we could not beat might lead to death, the habenula’s kill switch kept us from making fatal mistakes. In our modern world this lifesaver can become a problem. What once kept us alive, now drives us in the wrong direction and causes us to feel we are failing when we are unsuccessful at making positive changes in our lives. But Dr. Bobinet helps us to reclaim our true power.  

She reveals the failsafe way to change our behavior using the power of iteration to neutralize failure and liberate your true inner wisdom and power. Instead of our all or nothing thinking where we constantly set goals that we can never stick with, she offers us a whole series of small, yet effective, tools to make small changes that add up to a successful life.

               She says,

               “There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of frameworks that promise to help you make or break habits. But almost all of them rely on a performative mindset: if you do X, then Y will happen. When ‘Y’ happens, you get a star, a cookie, or a reward. When ‘Y’ doesn’t happen, you fail (and you feel like a failure). Most people who have tried a fad diet or budget or exercise plan have felt the disappointment of this approach.”

Dr. Bobinet founded a company, Fresh Tri, which offers a different way to succeed. She calls it the “Iterative Mindset Method.” You can learn more here.  In describing the emotions connected to the Iterative Mindset, she draws on the work of renowned neuroscientist Jaak Pansepp who described seven main neural networks of emotions we share with all mammals. “Searching is the dominant emotion,” says Dr. Bobinet. In this book, The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions, Dr. Pansepp calls this network, the SEEKING system and says, “When the SEEKING system is aroused, animals exhibit an intense, enthused curiosity about the world.” 

                We all need to tap into our searching and seeking system to continue to find new ways to succeed in life.

My colleague James R. Doty, M.D. was the Founder and Director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University and bestselling author of the book Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart. Dr. Doty worked with Dr. Bobinet for many years and wrote the Foreword to the Unstoppable Brain. He said,

              “From obtaining her medical degree at the University of California San Francisco and her master’s degree in public health at Harvard University, Dr. Bobinet has been at the forefront of understanding not only the neuroscience but the critical aspects of behavioral change. She has built programs to help individuals and organizations change their behavior for the better.”

After meeting Dr. Bobinet, I better understand why Dr. Doty recommended her work so highly.

            “Dr. Bobinet is unique in that she brings together two critical aspects that are extraordinarily powerful, and those are behavioral change combined with design thinking. Fundamentally, she is a designer of tranquility, transformation, and healing,” said Dr. Doty.

                You can learn more about Dr. Bobinet and her work at https://drkyrabobinet.com/.

You can see my interview with Dr. Bobinet here.

If you would like to read more articles like this, I invite you to subscribe to my free weekly newsletter where I share the best of what I’m learning that can help us all to live fully, love deeply, and make a positive difference in the world.

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                In Part 1 of the “Evolution of Sex,” I described a few of the major problems facing boys and men said that what boys and men need more than anything else is to reconnect with the community of life on planet Earth. In Part 2 I said that the ancient philosophical dictum to “know thyself” must start with understanding the biological basis of maleness and the importance of evolutionary science.  In Part 3, we will delve more deeply into biological importance of our sex chromosomes and how they help us understand and heal ourselves.

                Sharon Moalem, M.D., PhD, is an award-winning physician and scientist. His work brings together evolution, genetics, and medicine to revolutionize how we understand and treat disease. In his book, The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women, he says,

                “I was always taught males are the strong sex, yet that’s the opposite of what I’ve seen so far, both clinically and in my genetics research.”

                He offers some basic facts of life:

• “Women live longer than men.
•   Women have stronger immune systems.
•   Women are less likely to suffer from a developmental disability.
•   Women are more likely to see the world in a wider variety of colors.
•   Women are better at fighting cancer.
•   Women are simply stronger than men at every stage of life.
•    But why?”

                Clearly, nature and nurture, biology and lifestyle, are all contributing factors, but recent scientific findings point to inherent biological risk-factors as having particular significance.

                “We used to think that the mitigating factor explaining the difference in longevity between the sexes was behavioral in nature,” says Dr. Moalem. “More men, for example, have typically perished while serving as soldiers, and while employed in more dangerous occupations. We now know that genetic females’ longevity advantage can be attributed to factors that are biological in nature. Having the use of two X chromosomes makes females more genetically diverse. And the ability to rely on that diverse genetic knowledge is why females always come out on top.”

                This biological advantage not only holds for female humans but is true throughout the animal kingdom adding additional credence to role played by biology. In her article “Sex Differences in Adult Lifespan and Aging Rates of Mortality Across Wild Mammals,” Dr. Jean-François Lemaître says,

                “In human populations, women consistently outlive men, which suggests profound biological foundations for sex differences in survival. In our study we compiled demographic data from 134 mammal populations, encompassing 101 species, to show that the female’s median lifespan is on average 18.6% longer than that of conspecific males, whereas in humans the female advantage is on average 7.8%.”

                In Part 2 of “The Evolution of Sex,” I quoted the work of David C. Page, M.D., professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who said,

                “There are ten trillion cells in the human body and every one of them is sex specific. So, all your cells know on a molecular level whether they are XX or XY.”

                Dr. Page goes on to detail the genetic difference between males and females.

                “In humans, there are 23 pairs of chromosomes. One pair of the 23 chromosomes, known as sex chromosomes, determines at conception whether a fertilized egg will develop into a male or female. Today, human females have one pair of identical X chromosomes. Human males, instead of a matched pair, have one X and one smaller Y chromosome.”

                My friend and colleague Robert Bly used to say that boys need to be in the presence of older men “in order to hear the sound that male cells sing.” This is a wonderful and poetic way of expressing our biological difference.

                Evolution helps us understand why females should come out as the biologically stronger sex.

                “Although we belong to the same species and are more similar than we are different,” says Dr. Moalem, “there’s an important reason that females are more genetically endowed. Our very existence has depended on it for millions of years. Being the stronger sex, genetically speaking, is what allowed females to survive long enough to ensure the survival of our offspring — which in turn means the survival of us all.”

Like Every Other Part of Us, The Male Brain is Significantly Different from the Female Brain

                Louanne Brizendine, M.D. is a neuropsychiatrist, researcher, and clinician and a professor and is on the faculty of U.C. San Francisco Medical Center. She is the author of three books, The Female Brain, The Male Brain, and The Upgrade: How the Female Brain Gets Stronger and Better in Midlife and Beyond.

                In her book The Male Brain, she says,

                “Simplifying the entire male brain to just the ‘brain below the belt’ is a good setup for jokes, but it hardly represents the totality of a man’s brain.” She goes on to say, “The male brain is a lean, mean, problem-solving machine. Faced with a personal problem, a man will use his analytical brain structures, not his emotional ones, to find a solution.”

                Here are some of the significant differences in the brain structure and function Dr. Brizendine describes:

• The anterior cingulate cortex weighs options and makes decisions.

It’s the worrywart center, and it’s larger in women and smaller in men.

• The medial preoptic area is the area for sexual pursuit.

It’s two-and-a-half times larger in the male.

• The temporal parietal junction is the solution seeker.

It’s more active in the male brain, comes online more quickly, and races toward a “fix-it-fast” solution.

• The hippocampus is the center for emotional memory.

“It’s the elephant that never forgets a fight, a romantic encounter, or a tender moment — and won’t let you forget it either,” says Dr. Brizendine. She notes that it’s larger and more active in women.

Testosterone: The Holy Grail of Manhood

                Larrian Gillespie, M.D. calls testosterone the “Holy Grail of Manhood.” Testosterone is an androgen that is produced both in the adrenals and testes of men. Women produce this same steroid from their ovaries, but as is true in all aspects of life, quantity is important.

                In her book The Alchemy of Love and Lust,Theresa L. Crenshaw, M.D., says,

                “Men have about 20 to 40 times more testosterone than women, which is one reason why our sex drives are so different. This forceful hormone is responsible for the drive associated with sexual appetite and patterns of aggression.”

                Dr. Carole Hooven is a human evolutionary biologist and an associate in Harvard’s Department of Psychology, in the lab of Steven Pinker, and an active member of the newly established Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard. In her book, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, she says,

                “The consensus of experts is that testosterone’s main job is to support the anatomy, physiology, and behavior that increases a male’s reproductive output — at least in nonhuman animals. And men are no exception — T helps them reproduce and directs energy to be used in ways that support competition, and directs energy to be used in ways that support competition for mates.”

                Dr. Hooven goes on to say,

                “Sex differences are simply differences between males and females — in humans, chimps, or other species — and noting difference says nothing about cause. Men are more likely than women to be sexually attracted to women, and they are far more physically aggressive than women in every pocket of the earth, at every age. For example, they are responsible for around 70 percent of all traffic fatalities and 98 percent of mass shootings in the United States, and worldwide commit over 95 percent of homicides and the overwhelming majority of violent acts of every kind, including sexual assault.”

                She concludes saying, “One important point about sex differences, illustrated by these examples, is that almost any feature that differs between the sexes isn’t exclusive to males or to females. Women murder and sexually assault, they enjoy sex with other women.” 

                We all are aware than males, are on average, taller than females. But is a male who is 5 feet, 5 inches tall if I stretch to my fullest, there are many females who are taller than me (including my wife, Carlin).

Accepting Ourselves For The Vulnerable Males We Are is Our True Superpower

                My mother loved Shakespeare and passed on his wisdom to me early. Writing in my Junior High School yearbook she offered this quote from Hamlet.

                “This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

                Over the years, I’ve learned more about what it means to be true to ourselves.

                As I approach my 82^nd birthday, I believe that accepting our inherent male vulnerability and weakness, is the key to developing our own superpowers. I believe the world needs males and it would be a better place if we let go of our need to dominate others. Men would treat women and other men with more kindness and generosity, if we truly accepted ourselves for the beautiful and vulnerable beings we are.  We would also have a better chance of finding our home in the community of life on planet Earth. 

                As historian and geologian Thomas Berry reminds us,

                “We never knew enough. Nor were we sufficiently intimate with all our cousins in the great family of the earth. Nor could we listen to the various creatures of the earth, each telling its own story. The time has now come, however, when we will listen or we will die.”

                In Part 4 of “The Evolution of Sex,” we will explore our biology and our evolutionary future.

The post The Evolution of Sex Part 3: On the Genetic Superiority of Women appeared first on MenAlive.

                I have been a marriage and family counselor for more than fifty years. It’s a great profession since it has allowed me to answer questions I have had since I was a kid — How are boys different from girls? What is sex and why do we crave it? How do we find the love of our lives and learn how to love deeply and well?

                Since I specialize in working with men, I often get contacted when a new book is coming out that focuses on men’s mental, emotional, and relational health. I was intrigued when I received an email about a new book by Caitlin V:

                “Hi Jed, Nice to be in touch! Male loneliness has become a quiet epidemic – suicide rates are up 30%, and the number of men not having sex has nearly tripled. Yet men who report sexual satisfaction are 63% more likely to say their mental health is ‘good’ or ‘excellent.’”

                Over the years I have written seventeen books including international best-sellers Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places and The Irritable Male Syndrome: Understanding and Managing the Key Causes of Male Depression and Aggression.

                I had never heard of Caitlin V, but her background was fascinating as the email continued with this introduction:

                “Caitlin V, host of HBO Max’s Good Sex (plus over 900,000 YouTube subscribers with 150 million views) and one of today’s leading sexologists, believes intimacy is the missing piece. Her new book, Harder, Better, Longer, Stronger, reveals how performance pressure, shame, and anxiety disconnect men – and how rebuilding confidence in the bedroom can transform every part of life.”

                We set up an interview which you can watch here. I also got an advance copy of her new book, Harder, Better, Longer, Stronger: Science, Skills, and Secrets for the BEST SEX of Your Life. I had recently interviewed Dr. Justin J. Lehmiller, senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute who offered a powerful endorsement of Caitlin’s book:

                “Harder, Better, Longer, Stronger is the user manual that probably should have come with your penis. Whether you’re looking to build up your confidence, cultivate deeper connection with a partner, or simply have hotter sex, Caitlin V has you covered. Equal parts science, skill building, and pep talk, this book is a bedside essential.”

                My first questions for Caitlin were about her name and how she came to write a sex book for guys. Her answers were unexpected and enlightening.

                “I was brought up to believe that getting a good job at a stable institution with a 401(k) and benefits was the only goal. Early on, the thought of studying sex never occurred to me so I studied what my 20-something heart thought was relevant: conflict studies, women’s studies, even international relations. I did my undergraduate thesis on sexual health as a human right and hoping one day I could help more people enjoy sex on a global level.

                “After undergrad, I obtained a master of public health focused on women’s health, but by the time I got to my doctorate I was burned out on research and science and wanted to help people directly. Initially I expected to work with women, couples, and the LGBTQIA+ community, since that’s who I had worked with and advocated for in the past.”

                That all seemed like the kind of professional experience I might expect from a fellow researcher and wondered how Caitlin went from working with women’s sexuality to working with men. That’s when I got the rest of the story.

                “Then I made a YouTube video about squirting,” Caitlin told me, “and it went viral. Seemingly overnight, I had a thousand men with performance issues in my inbox and DMs begging me to help them with their dicks and last longer in bed. As a sex educator and researcher, I was blown away by the need.”

                As a fellow clinician and researcher that was one of the reasons I began to work with men and their families. There was such an unmet need. If we could help men with their problems with sex and relationship, we could also help women. Men’s and women’s sexual and relational health are forever intertwined. Like me, Caitlin began to experiment and developed unique ways for helping men.

                “Four years later,” Caitlin told me, “I landed on a system of exercises that solved premature ejaculation. Later, I adopted a similar approach for erectile dysfunction. Of the 300 men I’ve helped directly, only three didn’t have a substantial improvement by using my approach. That gave me a 99 percent success rate, which is better than the best-known therapies within the health care system.”

                She went on to say, “I haven’t just helped those 300 men. More than 15,000 men have taken my online courses on how to solve these issues.”  

                Caitlin offers many powerful courses on her website including:

• Make Her Squirt. My best-selling program Make Her Squirt reveals the little-known, barely-understood methods of giving women joyful, squirting orgasms on command.

• Hard as You Want. This program offers an all-natural & holistic 3-step process designed to help you get more consistent and reliable erections.

• Come When You Want. This a counterintuitive approach to ending premature ejaculation, that allows you to control your orgasm with ease and last exponentially longer without expensive medications, numbing creams, or thinking about something nasty just so you can last a few more seconds.

• Epic Relationships. Whether you’re on the brink of a breakup or simply looking to fall in love all over again… Epic Relationship will strengthen your bond and help you resolve the inevitable conflicts that arise in relationships.

Developing A Sex-Positive Approach to Love and Life

                Although it seems that sex is everywhere in our world, sex is often used as a way to sell us things we don’t want or need or to control our sexuality to fit someone else’s view of who we should be. I believe we are all sexual beings. It is part of the evolutionary heritage that we share with all other beings in community of life on planet Earth.

                I still remember my early experiences as an eight-year-old little boy playing “doctor” with my little eight-year-old girlfriend, Caroline. We delighted in the fun of newly discovered sexual play… Until we were discovered. After than her mother forbade her play with me, though my mother was more understanding. It was my first experience of sexual shame.

                I believe that most children experiment with sexuality and in more sex-positive cultures it can lead to a healthy adolescent and adult life.

                I loved learning about Caitlin’s early sexual experiences.

                “I love to geek out about sex,” says Caitlin, “because, personally, I’ve been into sex from a young age. And that’s not as weird as it might sound. Or at least it wouldn’t be, if our culture weren’t so puritanical about sex.

                “My parents never discouraged me from exploring my body and were fairly sex-neutral, which could almost have been seen as progressive in Michigan in the 1990s. I learned from an early age how I could feel pleasure and satisfaction with my body. At 13, I remember asking my dad to drop me off at Barnes & Noble so I could read every book about sex on the shelves.

                “When I started having sex, I kept track of everything my boyfriend and I did in my planner. Whether we had orgasms (or not) and how many. What positions felt good, and which modifications felt better. I tried anal at 15 because I was curious, nerdy, and wanted to experience everything I had read about.”

                Now you can get to know Caitlin V. Neal (Caitlin V) by visiting her website at https://caitlinvneal.com/. You can also learn how to get her book – Harder, Better, Longer, Stronger: Science, Skills, and Secrets for the BEST SEX of Your Life.

                She is also offering A free, half-day virtual masterclass for men on January 17, 2026. Get more information and sign up here:

                https://harderbook.com/from-pressure-to-power-summit

                If you would like to see the interview I did with Caitlin, you can do so here.

                I write regular articles on my site, MenAlive.com, and send out a free newsletter with my latest article and other news about my work. You can subscribe at https://menalive.com/email-newsletter/.

The post The Best Sex of Your Life: The Truth From Renowned Sexologist Caitlin V appeared first on MenAlive.

               In Part 1 of the “Evolution of Sex,” I described a few of the major problems facing boys and men said that what boys and men need more than anything else is to reconnect with the community of life on planet Earth. In Part 2, I said that the ancient philosophical dictum to “know thyself” must start with understanding the biological basis of maleness and the importance of evolutionary science.  In Part 3, we delved more deeply into the importance of our sex chromosomes and how they help us understand and who we are and how we can heal ourselves.

                In Part 4, we will address the truth that humanity has become so disconnected from the community of life on planet Earth that we are in grave danger of destruction. Thomas Berry, the geologian and historian of religions, warned us.

                “We never knew enough. Nor were we sufficiently intimate with all our cousins in the great family of the earth. Nor could we listen to the various creatures of the earth, each telling its own story. The time has now come, however, when we will listen or we will die.”

                The core problem we face and the hope for our future is Berry’s recognition that a large part of humanity has come to see itself as existing outside the great family of life on planet Earth. Dr. Christine Webb is primatologist at Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. In her book, The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters, she reminds us:

                “Darwin considered humans to be one part of the web of life, not the apex of a natural hierarchy. Yet today many maintain that we are the most intelligent, virtuous, successful species that ever lived. This flawed thinking enables us to exploit the earth toward our own exclusive ends, throwing us into a perilous planetary imbalance.”

                She concludes saying, “The Arrogant Ape shows that human exceptionalism is an ideology that relies more on human culture than on our biology, more on delusion and faith than on evidence. What’s at stake is a better, sustainable way of life with the potential to rejuvenate our shared planet.”

The Vision of the Sinking Ship of Civilization and Introduction to Father Earth

                  In 1993 I attended a Men’s Leaders’ Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. One of the activities offered was a traditional Native-American sweat lodge ceremony where we ask for guidance and support for ourselves and our communities. In the sweat-lodge I experienced a vision where I saw “the sinking of the Ship of Civilization” and the launching of “lifeboats for humanity.” You can read about what I learned in this article, “How You Can Survive and Thrive as The Ship of Civilization Sinks.”

                That same year, I remember sitting with 200 men and women at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. My wife, Carlin, and I were attending a special workshop for women and men, appropriately titled “Ovarios y Cojones: Labyrinths of Memory and Danger Within Women and Men,” with author Clarissa Pinkola Estés and mythologist and storyteller, Michael Meade.

                Towards the end of the day, Clarissa shared a few poems, including, “Father Earth.” As soon as she shared the title, the hairs on the back of my neck began to tingle. I knew I was going to hear something special. Here’s what she shared:

Father Earth!
There is a two-million-year-old men, no one knows.
They cut into his rivers.
They peeled wide pieces of hide from his legs.
They left scorch marks on his buttocks.
He did not cry out.
No matter what they did to him. He did not cry out.
He held firm.
Now he raises his stabbed hands and whispers that we can heal him yet.
We begin the bandages, the rolls of gauze, the cut, the needle, the grafts.
Slowly, carefully, we turn his body face up.
And under him, his lifelong lover, the old woman is perfect and unmarked.
He has laid upon his two-million-year-old lover all this time
Protecting her with his old back, with his old, scarred back.
And the soil beneath her is fertile and black with her tears.

                Both experiences occurring thirty-three years ago had a profound impact on my understanding of humanity, my place in the community of life, and what we need to do to reconnect with our biological and evolutionary roots as males. Here are a few of the most important things I learned from these two experiences:

                1. “Civilization” is a misnomer. Its proper name is the “Dominator Model.” 

                In her international best-selling book, The Chalice & The Blade: Our History. Our Future, originally published in 1987, historian Riane Eisler said,

                “Underlying the great surface diversity of human culture are two basic models of society. The first I call the dominator model, what is popularly termed either patriarchy or matriarchy — the ranking of one half of humanity over the other. The second, in which social relations are primarily based on the principle of linking may best be described as the partnership model.”

                You can view my podcast with Riane and her team at the Center for Partnership Systems here.

                2. There is a better world beyond civilization.

                In 1992, I was given the book Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. I got a clear sense of the two worlds that are competing for our attention: A world where hierarchy and dominance rule (Quinn calls it the world of the Takers) and a world where equality and connection rule (Quinn calls it the world of the Leavers. In his book, Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure, Quinn says,

                “The tribal life and no other is the gift of natural selection to humanity. It is to humanity what pack life is to wolves, pod life is to whales, and hive lives is to bees. After three or four million years of human evolution, it alone emerged as the social organization that works for people.”

                Returning to our tribal roots reconnects us with the community of life on Planet Earth and our best hope for the future.

                3. Becoming fully human means we must reconnect with the earth.

                In her book, The Arrogant Ape, Dr. Christine Webb asks the question “what does it mean to be human?” Her reply offers us all hope for the future.

                “Our first hint might come from the world ‘human’ itself — which derives from the root word humus, meaning ‘earth.’ To be human thus means to be of the earth, not apart from or better than any of the other beings with whom we share this planet.“

                4. In her wonderful poem, Clarissa Pinkola Estés offers a wonderful new vision of the healing that is needed.

                When women changed their vision of God from a hierarchical one headed by a male deity to one that included female goddesses it gave women a more engaged view of their spiritual essence. It was no longer God the father and mother Earth. Now men were being given a more masculine connection with the Earth and a new integration of the male and female essences.  

                Our job as men has been as a protector and our role now is to create a new partnership as the last lines of the poem, “Father Earth” remind us:

He has laid upon his two-million-year-old lover all this time
Protecting her with his old back, with his old, scarred back.
And the soil beneath her is fertile and black with her tears.

                Author and philosopher Sam Keen offered a simple, yet powerful, call to action:

                “The radical vision of the future rests on the belief that the logic that determines either our survival or our destruction is simple:

1. The new human vocation is to heal the earth.
2. We can only heal what we love.
3. We can only love what we know.
4. We can only know what we touch.”

                If we want to survive and thrive, it begins with our getting in touch with ourselves, the other creatures of the earth, and the earth itself.

                I look forward to your feedback. Drop me a note to Jed@MenAlive.com and put “The Evolution of Sex” in the subject line. If you are not already a subscriber to my free weekly newsletter, you can sign up here.

The post The Evolution of Sex Part 4: Our Biological and Evolutionary Future appeared first on MenAlive.