Singles: How to Find a Master Level Love
Henry was 98 and his wife Martha was 96 when they shared the same room in a nursing home. They had been married for more than sixty years when Dr. Earl Henslin met them. Dr. Henslin worked the three to eleven o’clock shift. Every night, as the hour hand neared eleven, he got buzzed at the nurses’ station. Earl went into Henry and Martha’s room and helped move Henry over to Martha’s bed. Henry was embarrassed to let the female nurses know what he was doing, so this was he and Earl’s secret (Henry had a similar deal going with a male janitor who moved him back every morning).
Listen to Dr. Henslin tell this beautiful story: “Martha was mostly blind, but when I’d help [Henry] over to her bed, I’d see this wonderful smile come over her face. She could no longer see him, so she was responding to the sound of her husband coming near and crawling into bed beside her. She beamed when she felt his arms enfold her…. I thought that scene was the sweetest, most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. After all these years, I still think that.”
Dr. Henslin calls Henry and Martha “part of the blessed few—Master-Level Lovers.”
If you’re single and planning to get married, I’m sure you’re thinking, “This is what I want!”
Who wouldn’t?
And yet here’s why Dr. Henslin calls Henry and Martha part of the “blessed few”: Dr. David Schnarch, a clinical psychologist and world-renown sex and marital therapist, coined this phrase to express that only about 8 to 15 percent of couples “know this kind of love and keep their passion burning until death parts their lifelong embrace.”
Eight to 15 percent.
Singles, that means for every ten couples who do experience this, 90 couples don’t.
In his book This is Your Brain in Love Dr. Henslin warns of couples whose brains are literally hijacked (Dr. Henslin calls it “mental kidnapping”) by infatuation. I thought I may have hit infatuation too hard in The Sacred Search, but after reading Henslin’s book I’m wondering if I hit it hard enough. According to Henslin, “there have even been semi-serious suggestions among scientists that the unhealthily love-obsessed should be given a good dose of an SSRI (anti-obsessive antidepressant) to clear up the brain fog and open their eyes to reality.”
The odds are against you if you want a fulfilling, enriching lifelong love. To increase your odds, you need to know about the most common trap that leads couples into poor matches: infatuation followed by early sexual intimacy.
Infatuation is what it is; what it’s not is accurate. Infatuation leads you to concoct a person who doesn’t really exist. You miss that person’s faults, you create fake strengths, and you won’t listen to anyone who tries to point out concerns and flaws. You may even be tempted to hate anyone who suggests the one you love isn’t an absolutely perfect fit for you.
Adding sexual activity to infatuation releases “a second chemical storm that takes place deep inside both of their brains. A blast of oxytocin explodes and showers the brain with natural opiates that we know as endorphins, so that new love mimics a ‘cocaine-on-the-brain’ state of mind.”
This neurochemical process works like “superglue” for a while; many times, just long enough to get married, but never long enough to carry you to even your third wedding anniversary.
If, while dating, you fall desperately in love with someone and then respond to that infatuation by getting physically intimate, and then decide to get married before the brain chemicals wear off, you are basically like the couple that meets in Las Vegas, gets drunk, and gets married before they get sober. That’s how much you don’t know each other.
The odds of being Master Level Lovers are so small, do you want to leave a lifelong decision to chance?
Making couples more aware of this is partly why I wrote The Sacred Search. Instead of relying on infatuation and sexual bonding, I want couples to consider (and be able to evaluate) what qualities will most serve future marital happiness and connection. I want you, sixty or seventy years from now, to make plans to sneak into each other’s beds late at night rather than being one of the bitter middle-aged couples I’ve seen who have actually told me, “I’m praying he’ll have an affair or die so I can just be done with him without feeling guilty about it.”
I don’t know why I have this passion to see couples marry well, or why I want to help already married couples grow their intimacy, but I do. God seems to keep firing up my purpose the older I get. I’ve become more convinced of the need to take the Sacred Search approach, where I explain that certain components combined with spiritual compatibility give a couple the very best odds of making it into the blessed 8 to 15 percent.
It’s wonderful when you think you’ve found “the one.” Even though I don’t believe there’s just “one,” I get what you’re feeling. All I’m suggesting is that you slow it down, give your brain time to get sober, and that you don’t make things complicated by becoming sexually intimate. Maintain a sober enough brain that you can evaluate this person and your relationship to honestly ask the question, “Do we think we’re in the top ten percent?” If you’re infatuated, you’ll think you’re in the top ½ of one percent of all couples who have ever existed, so wait at least twelve more months and ask yourself that question again.
And then you can get married with confidence.
I realize another six to twelve months can sound like forever when you’re “in love.” And the thought of breaking up once the love has faded and you realize this match may not be all that great can be terrifying. What if it’s another five years before you’re able to find someone else and get married? I’ve said this before, but it makes the point: Wouldn’t you rather have forty-five years of a Master Level Love marriage than fifty years of a disappointing and frustrating marriage?
Of course you would.
Don’t sell yourself short.
Beat the odds. Test the relationship before you make it permanent.
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