“My husband and I were happy until the birth of our son when our relationship changed. After our son was born he started cheating, lying, and drinking everyday. We spent less time together than we used to. I thought we were friends, but now it feels like we are distant cousins. Our sex life is boring.”

Your future must seem dull and painfully endless! While I am sad that you are victim to your husband’s cruel behavior, I am also sad for your child who is witnessing a marriage he could hardly want to emulate.

Please read David Schnarch’s book entitled Passionate Marriage. I will warn you that it is the very best book on sex and relationships I have ever read. While it is very sexual, it is never pornographic.

It is to be read as a whole, cover to cover, before judgments are issued on its worthiness.

The book outlines the journey of couples who have lives as miserable as you describe yours to be, and offers valuable keys for all marriages and all relationships.

I have gotten into hot water for recommending this book to couples, not only because it promotes very strong and healthy sex lives, but because it challenges people to live full, complete, and adventurous lives.

Women who lose themselves to a lover or a spouse, do so because they did not bring enough of self into the relationship in the first place. They “soft-pedal,” downplay, or compromise who they are in order to be accepted and loved.

Conversely, a woman, with a healthy sense of self, understands, before she even meets a man, that no man, (marriage, or children) will make her happier than she already is. Such a woman will not “lose herself” in a relationship because she does not invest all of her hopes and dreams in any relationship. Healthy people do not expect relationships to offer what relationships simply do not, and cannot, offer.

If a woman sees a man, (marriage, or children) as a means to be delivered from some unhappy state, or as possessing the key to finding true happiness, she has already sold herself to the illusion that her happiness and fulfillment somehow rests within the hands and the power of others.

Bringing strength, self-awareness, self-assured-ness, personal goals, courage and determination (a developed “sense of self”) to a relationship (in other words, refusing to “soft-pedal”) may indeed scare off a man who has a poor sense of himself, but it will invigorate and attract the kind of man who honors equality, mutuality and respect.