It’s common in the marriage for the sex to die over time. You become partners in projects, running the house and having kids. The dynamic differences between the man and woman start to blend, as we find ourselves waring matching jackets and finishing each other’s sentences. Then the list of unsaid announces build, until it becomes impossible to want to have sex with the same person you want to grab around the neck and wobble the head of. The partnership and the friendship maybe there and solid. One partner may like to keep the love alive, but the other has a headache. Other time it’s done, but like a washing machine at the end of its cycle, it can take a while for the door to open with a click and you can pack up your laundry.
Then into the frame steps the marriage rescuer, she’s young, free and unlikely has kids. She is the other woman, and she will save this marriage. Because the husband cant tolerate a sexless life and he may also be in need of repair after being a bit broken from a string of sexual attempts that got rejected. A low libido and a girl who is really into him is a winning combination.
He might play with her heart like a string quartet and make some beautiful music, but it is his wife that plays the fiddle he will dance to.
When a woman gives birth a man’s child, especially if he watched the birth, a hormone is realised that bonds the man to the mother. A little like a mother having ‘the baby brain’ full of the love hormone oxytocin, a man has a similar reaction.
In my private practice it has come to my attention that we have stepped into a new family paradigm and I’m not convinced enough people have noticed the enormity of it. Twenty five to thirty years ago, mothers were telling daughters ‘all men are only after one thing’. There was a generation of crap dads. These new dads grew up with those crap dads and are now the most amazing dads and no matter what they won’t leave their families. However the women are now projecting on to them the teachings of their mothers and no matter what he does, he I tarred with the same brush and in many, not all but in many cases, the men are holding fast to their family’s whilst getting a ego, libido and mojo bashing from inside their own homes.
The marriage rescuer, isn’t just saving the marriage, she is saving the man. She can sometimes show up when the marriage is over and do a broken wing repair job in time to watch him fly and feather a nest with someone else. As a man needs to be a hero and will hardily ever stay in a relationship with the woman who saves him. That’s his job.
The marriage rescuer never gets to keep the guy, but the kids get to keep a daddy due to her external support. She will remain, daddies little secret and the key to holding his family together.
For her she gets to escape the things she heard through-out her childhood ‘all men are bastards’ with this arrangement, she gets to be the one who is saved the real heartache of being the woman in the dark.