I woke up this morning with the words of a song running through my head: What the world needs now is love sweet love. Written in 1965 by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and made famous by Dionne Warwick. It was the year I graduated from college and began my career as a marriage and family counselor.
If you visit my website, MenAlive.com, you will see the welcome video Confessions of a Twice Divorced Marriage Counselor. I write an article every week that I hope will help people who, like me, are interested in sex, love, intimacy and marriage. Let me start by telling you about the title, “Love 6.0”.
My wife Carlin and I have been married twice before. When we met, fell in love and planned to get married, we wanted this wedding to be our last — “the third time’s the charm,” we told each other. Based on our experience, we knew that people change over time and the vows made at the beginning of a marriage can 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 wedding ceremony. We were first married in 1980 and renewed our vows in 1995, and again in 2010 and 2025. So we’ve had two marriages with previous partners and four marriages between us. Therefore, this is wedding 6.0 where I will share some of the lessons we have learned so far.
Love Lesson #1: Our parents love lives and losses affect ours
My parents were both from the south. My father grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. My mother in Savannah, Georgia. Both moved to New York in their 20s, lived in Greenwich Village, and married in 1934. Both wanted children but 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 born on a cold winter’s day in December 1943.
My father was an actor in New York and he and my mother moved to California shortly after I was born. The first public demonstration of a television had been at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, and my father was convinced that it was destined for a career in television or film.
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 gazing at the leaves in the fall. It was a happy time in our lives, but things were about to change. My father became increasingly depressed because he couldn’t find a job, and after five years of experiencing one rejection after another, he overdosed on sleeping pills, feeling that my mother and I would be better off without him.
Luckily he didn’t die. But he was committed to the Camarillo State Psychiatric 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 started my career in the helping profession, I found a series of journals my father had written in the months leading up to his overdose. I wrote about his mental and emotional challenges in my book, My Distant Dad: Healing the Wound of the Father of the Family.
In the last journal, number nine, I found these entries. Reading them was like watching a train wreck happen and not being able to stop it. I still feel his pain, and mine, all these years later.
July 3, 1948: “Oh, Christ, if I can only give my son a decent education—a college order with a love of books, a love of people, a good, solid knowledge. I’ve been given no guidance. I’ve loved, cracked, and blundered two-thirds of my life.”
July 24, 1948: “Eddie, dear Johnny, I love you so much, but how can I find the bread to sustain you? The seed of despair is part of my heritage. It is barren for months, and then it gnaws until its bitter fruit chokes my throat and swells inside me like a great room for life, hope, black life.”
August 8, 1948: “I am tired, desperately tired, surrounded by a vast brick wall, a brick world of blood, spattered with my blood, with the blood of my head, where I knocked senselessly to find an opening, to find a loose brick, so that I could feel the cool breeze and my hand would come out. 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 one-block titles, unable to sell, unable to find work, Yes, it’s enough to make anyone, turn white, pale, and sick.’
February 24, 1949: “Faster, faster, faster, I’m walking. I’m moving away looking for work, anything to support my family. I’m trying, trying, trying, trying, trying, trying. Always trying and never stopping.”
March 12, 1949: “A hundred failures, an endless number of failures, by now, my confidence, my hope, my belief in myself, have been completely depleted. Middle-aged, I stand staring 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, knocking on the same doors I knock on, striving in the same field I strive. Yes, on a Sunday morning in March, my hope and the flow of my life are both hopelessly low, so low, so stagnant, that I hold my breath in fear, believing that the dark, empty curtain is about to come down.’
Shortly after March entered, my father took the pills and entered the mental hospital. THE treatment available in 1949 was not useful. It got worse and worse and the doctors told my mother that she needed more treatment and that she might never be able to leave. Finally and reluctantly, she filed for divorce.
I experience tears of sadness and joy reading my father’s diaries. Grief that feels his deepest pain and growing fear as he suffers because he cannot financially support his family. I also feel the joy of hearing and feeling my father’s familiar words as he reaches out over the years to tell me what was in his heart and soul and how hard he worked to be there for me.
Given my parents’ experience, it’s no surprise that I eventually became a marriage and family counselor. One of the books I read that helped me understand the difficulties in my relationships 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 tear us apart. they say
“When we fall in love, we think we’ve found the happiness we were born with. Suddenly, we see life in Technicolor.”
That’s certainly how I remember feeling when I married my first wife.
They go on to say,
“But inevitably—often when we marry or fall in love together—things start to go wrong. In some cases, everything falls apart. The veil of illusion falls and it seems that our partners are different than we thought. Old wounds are reactivated as we realize that our partners cannot or will not love and care for us as they promised us and our dream.”
Fortunately there is a way out and Drs. Hendrix and Hunt have developed a wonderful and effective system to help us all that 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 ignore the agenda of love, that it is a disaster because our childhood scenarios inevitably repeat themselves with the same disastrous consequences.”
Carlin and I share our own healing journey in our book, The Enlightened Marriage: The 5 Transformational Stages of Relationships and Why the Best Is Yet to Come. You can learn more about our own wedding in our book and online course, “The five stages of love”.
If you found this article helpful, please let me know. Drop me a note at Jed@MenAlive.com and put “Love 6.0” in the subject line. Perhaps this will be the first in a series of articles.
