Mr Heer, are open relationships the solution?

Mr Heer, keeping a couple's relationship alive even after years of living together with children is a major challenge. How can you do justice to yourself, to each other as a couple and as a family?

You are searching for the ultimate secret recipe for a happy love. But your search betrays you: you are at the service of the mainstream. Our entire culture is full of paradisiacal notions of love. People unanimously harbour the fixed idea that they are constantly falling short. Like a child abandoned on a lonely country road at the age of two or three. Only great love could fill the huge deficit in their chest. This is the fundamental deception that constantly produces new disappointments.

So what can you do to influence your own fate as a couple in a favourable way?

A relationship is a creative task. It is often said at this point that you have to «talk to each other». This recommendation is just as uninspiring as it is counterproductive. After all, everyone wants to and can talk - even the many men who are considered constipated and lazy. But the problem lies somewhere else entirely: nobody wants to hear what the other person is saying as soon as it doesn't agree with their own ideas. And as soon as they feel attacked. This makes it completely impossible to initiate and implement the necessary course corrections in the relationship. Love slowly suffocates due to its own disturbances and the lack of new impulses that are essential for survival.

What does that mean?

Love and sexuality are dependent on concrete exchange. It is not enough to make assumptions about what could be the cause of disturbances in bed. Most intellectual assumptions and explanations for sexual anxiety are wrong and part of the problem, because they are what hinder and prevent a solution.

What specific advice would you give to a couple who come to your practice because their sex life has fallen asleep?

The sex life can't «fall asleep», it's just seemingly dead. Rather, the couple has put their sexuality on hold. Why? Because it no longer corresponds to the ideas they both have about it. These ideas either stem from the long-gone love affair or from the omnipresent world of porn. And my advice for them? I encourage them to take a close look at the physical contact that has saved them through their difficult times to this day. This can be developed and made fruitful.

How does that work in practice?

This needs to be discovered in a very concrete, curious and creatively active way. In couples therapy, I support the couple in reflecting on the simple question: How can we become physically close again - without worry, without stress and without fear?

What if their mutual ideas about sex have diverged so much over the years that they no longer find each other in bed?

To be honest, I am often amazed! Sexuality, the heartland of love, turns many couples into veritable war zones. They reproach each other, accuse each other of neglect, complain angrily about their lack of sexual fulfilment, make strict demands and threaten drastic retaliatory measures. The couple really have to decide whether they want to devote themselves to the power struggle or search carefully for the intersection of their needs. Both are not possible.

What is your approach?

Think and talk to each other lovingly, but also persistently, about how you can make it so that you both feel good in bed during sex. Yes, comfortable! Nothing more than comfortable. You can't do it without talking to each other and listening to each other. Listening above all. Open your ear canal, open your heart and listen.

Is it advisable to open up the relationship and outsource your sex life?

Outsourcing your sex life is a captivating idea in a globalised world. It could perhaps really work. In my estimation, however, not for another 200 to 250 years. Until then, our hearts will still react as they always have when we «open» our love: they tense up, it hurts, it scares us.

When can the open relationship model save you from divorce?

Most relationships cannot withstand the stress. It is not to be expected that this opening will be able to «save» a relationship. Quite the opposite.

What would have to happen for an open relationship to work?

I don't know that. So far, I've only seen individual cases. Most of these relationship experiments have gone wrong. My job is usually to help with damage limitation. I notice that selected success stories are often featured in the press. And this has been the case for almost fifty years. But the publicity value of these stories is modest. The projects obviously fail because of the interior architecture of our hearts: jealousy relentlessly watches over our love, whether we like it or not. The fact that the two partners rarely agree on the crucial questions is particularly burdensome: how do we want to live the opening in concrete terms and how do we handle external contacts? These differences usually escalate into serious conflicts, which then also affect the children.

If parents agree on an open relationship, how should they communicate this to their child?

If a pioneering couple lives an open relationship and has a good feeling about it, they don't need advice from outside - quite simply because there is no such thing. It is their own courage that gives them the energy to move off the beaten social track. Living prudently and courageously at the same time - that is passionate living. It must be clear: passion without suffering is, as the term says, unthinkable. But such special parents could also teach their children this in a child-appropriate way.