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| The Basics of
Behavior Analysis
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| Parents
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| Love & Sexuality
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| Employees & Bosses
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| OneScience
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Intimacy and Loneliness
Behavioral Manipulation in
Intimate Relationships
When one member of a relationship needs to
enjoy the intimacy of the relationship and the
other does not, the member seeking intimacy
will begin to engage in the behaviors that
worked in the past to initiate the process and
their partner will not reciprocate. So she will
fall back on strategies that will evoke behaviors
from their partners that are not the same as
those within the intimacy-building process, but
that evolved from that process.
When the original intimate relationship began, there were other behaviors
that these two people engaged in that resulted in reinforcers that were not
functionally related to the process of intimacy-building, but that were
reinforcers nevertheless. Sexual behaviors are probably the best example.
As the couple learned to trust each other with the deepest parts of the
themselves, they were also learning to exchange other reinforcers. When
two people are emotionally close, they also desire to be physically close.
They create a physical relationship at the same time that they are creating
an emotionally intimate relationship. The feelings of intimacy occur at the
same time as the feelings of sexual satisfaction. The two types of feelings
become paired with each other such that physical contact can produce
feelings of intimacy while talking to each other can produce sexual arousal.
Then later, when the intimate relationship fades, the physical relationship
can maintain the relationship. The couple may no longer be sharing
personal thoughts and feelings with each other, but they are still
reinforcing each other's physical and sexual behavior. So when one
member of the couple needs to feel emotionally close, she will attempt to
initiate the interactions that resulted in feelings of intimacy in the past. If
her attempt fails, then she will attempt to initiate the physical and sexual
interactions. These interactions, while failing to produce feelings of
intimacy, produce feelings that once occurred at the same time as the
feelings of intimacy. They are approximations to the feelings of intimacy. A
relationship that has become primarily physical can mask a person's need
for intimacy by fulfilling them sexually.
So, for example, a wife has a frustrating day and would like to share her
feelings about it with her husband. She attempts to discuss these feelings
with him and he doesn't listen or seem to care about what she is trying to
tell him. The husband doesn't respond the way he once did. She then sets
the occasion for a sexual interaction. Perhaps she cooks a special meal or
appears from the bedroom wearing sexy lingerie after the kids have gone
to bed. These behaviors are more likely to be reinforced because she is
indicating that powerful physical reinforcers are available to her husband if
he reciprocates. So in time, she learns to respond to her need for intimacy
by posturing for sex.
The problem with this is that her need for intimacy is not truly being
fulfilled; it only feels like it is. She has learned a way to ease herself
painlessly back into a world of isolation and loneliness.
An inability to obtain fulfillment extinguishes the behavior that once
produced that fulfillment, but it does not extinguish the deprivation that
motivates the behavior. Whatever produced the motivation for a behavior
in the first place does not disappear just because the person's behavior is
unsuccessful in satisfying the need. Being unable to find food when I am
hungry does not make my hunger go away. It makes me hungrier. So when
a spouse attempts to engage the intimacy-building process and can't, her
need for it does not diminish. It actually probably grows stronger, like
hunger does.
There is a shift in focus that results when this has happened often enough.
In order for this relationship that has become primarily physical to continue
satisfying the need for emotional intimacy, the pairing of the intimate and
the physical must still occur from time to time. If this doesn't happen, the
feelings of intimacy and the feelings of sexual satisfaction will separate.
The spouse attempting to initiate the intimacy-building process, while
unsuccessful there, may be successful in initiating the process that results in
sexual reinforcers and feelings. But without the occasional pairing of sexual
feelings with feelings of emotional intimacy, this back up strategy begins to
lose its effectiveness and the mask that hides the spouse's need for
intimacy starts to come off. Soon she will be feeling the full force of that
old loneliness she once escaped. She is then highly motivated to escape it
once again by whatever method works.
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What's really going on between two people?
Are we defined by what we do...in private? |
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