Cleaning Your Emotional House

My husband, like most men, doesn’t ask for much this time of year. He’d like a good meal, a little appreciation for replacing the light bulb in the kitchen (it required a ladder after all). Then he wants to be left alone to watch the Chiefs plunder the Broncos.

This Valentines, on the other hand, I want…what?  I don’t know. Everything, I guess. I don’t care about the flowers or the chocolate. Instead, I want pure eros. Where the man truly yearns for the woman—body and soul. If you ever wondered why the Twilight series was so phenomenally successful, this is it: they depict erotic engagement very well. Not the act of sex, but taking full notice of each other.

As soon as I say this, of course, other issues seep in. I’ve gained weight this winter and don’t feel sexy. I have a writing deadline and will be late to bed. My son is coming home from college this weekend and I’d like to spend time with him. I just changed the sheets.

This integrative, overlapping aspect of a woman’s thinking is somewhat foreign to the average man. He knows that the kitchen needs updating, and that he and his wife haven’t had a real conversation in a week, but it’s just not as much on his mind as it is on hers. He compartmentalizes his thoughts.

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According to Lucy Danziger and Catherine Birndorf, co-authors of The Nine Rooms of Happiness, this tendency to think in intertwined emotions is at the root of much female malaise. The authors imagine a woman’s life as a house of many rooms: love and sex (the bedroom), family and friends (The family room), health and appearance (the bathroom), nourishment and the division of chores (the kitchen), and my personal favorite, the place where you’re always wrong (the kid’s room).

Because our thinking is comprehensive, there will always be something that isn’t measuring up to our standards, and sometimes we let that dissatisfaction spill over into other areas of our lives, distracting us from taking pleasure in everything that is going right. The authors, one a psychiatrist and director of a women’s program, counsel that trying to solve problems in the wrong room, for the wrong reasons, can sabotage your relationships and happiness.

Back to my poor husband and my wanting to be adored. Is our issue really about sex? Does this discussion belong in the bedroom? Probably not. Looking at the guidelines and examples in The Nine Rooms of Happiness, I need to do some housekeeping in the bathroom (body issues), the office (bringing work home), and maybe even in the family room (time for son). To complicate things further, it’s possible I won’t alleviate my work anxiety in the office, because the real problem is a philosophical difference between my husband and me about earning and spending money. If that’s the case, I may want to take him with me to visit the basement, and explore our childhood memories of family money woes growing up.

The book’s concept gives an arrestingly visual approach to identifying and analyzing issues in your relationships. One thing I know for sure: my Valentine yearning for body-and-soul eros has little to do with a lack of sex. When we do return to bed, hopefully we will both be more in touch with each other’s’ feelings.

This month, instead of obsessing about the one thing in your life that are lacking, walk through the rooms of your emotional house, and let the things that are going right become the sparks in a chain-reaction to burn away the negative. When we clean house, we must first clear space to make room for something new. The same is true energetically: eliminate a negative thought pattern to replace it with happier thinking.

May your Valentine’s Day be filled with sweet thoughts.