ERP 186: How to Prioritize the Most Important Element of Your Relationship, an Interview With Rabbi Manis Friedman
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Hi, thank you for joining today’s podcast episode. Today’s episode is 186, “How to prioritize the most important element of your relationship”, an interview with Rabbi Manis Friedman.
Before we get started, I wanna invite you to pause with me, and just recognizing the business of life – perhaps our schedules, and everything that’s going on, and still, we’re making time for this very important topic of relationship, and that as we listen to what’s shared on these episodes, perhaps we’re seeking something specific, or looking for some insight, or some tips and tool to reflect on, or learning from people that have walked the path and experienced transformation in their lives and in their relationships… And as we are intending — the intention of the Empowered Relationship Podcast is for you to be more prepared, better equipped in navigating intimacy, long-lasting intimacy… And that you can experience a deep level of connection, and also a deeper sense of authenticity.
Again, as we talk about on this show, often times when we are able to reveal more fully and lean into what is true, and be able to be in connection with another – that that is a deep level of bonding and intimacy. And as you’re learning, as I am interviewing different guests, people have different styles around how they do this… So some of these guests that are on the show may describe things that resonate or don’t resonate. And what I wanna encourage you to listen for is the underlying principle… Because what they’re talking about has merit, in the sense of some of the guiding principles and practices that they’re describing.
And as I’ve said in previous podcasts, what it will look like in your relationship will look different than it’ll look like in someone else’s relationship… So yes, people share stories, and their personal experience, and it might be very different than it will be for you… So I just wanna encourage you to have some openness. And as I have these guests on the show, I do try to create a safe space and really welcome their perspective, and have an open mind.
You might be experiencing a little bit of whiplash if you listened to last week’s episode 185, with Robert Kandell, and then you’re now gonna be listening to Rabbi Manis Friedman. Their perspectives are different as it relates to sex, but again, the principle that they’re referencing – Robert was really emphasizing the importance of transparency, authenticity, purpose, and real truth-telling. And Rabbi Manis Friedman is emphasizing the deep, profound importance of an intimate bond, and really this attachment system that we feel safe and we belong with another. The way he describes that – you might hear me ask at one point about different sexual orientations, and he does speak to that, but I think his larger point is to really emphasize this intimacy bond.
If you would like access to today’s show notes, again, you can visit my website, which is DrJessicaHiggins.com click on Podcast, and you can find all the episodes there. Today’s episode is 186, “How to prioritize the most important element of your relationship”, an interview with Rabbi Manis Friedman. Let’s get started.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: World-renowned author, counselor, lecturer and philosopher, Rabbi Manis Friedman uses ancient wisdom and modern wit as he captivates audiences around the country and the world. Rabbi Friedman started an organization called “It’s Good to Know” which reaches thousands of people every month through his online classes and events. He also has a very popular YouTube channel. Rabbi Friedman, thank you for joining us today.
Rabbi Manis Friedman: It’s a pleasure. My favorite topic, I love to talk about it.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes, and I know you speak about many topics… And for people that aren’t familiar with you and what you speak about, I guess let’s just back up – I’m curious, how did you get interested in focusing on love, intimacy and marriage?
Rabbi Manis Friedman: Well, for the past 50 years or so I’ve been teaching Hasidic philosophy to women from all over the world, of all ages… And inevitably, invariably, relationships comes up. It’s a hot topic.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: It is a hot topic…
Rabbi Manis Friedman: So 50 years of talking to women about relationships resulted in two books, 20 years apart, on this subject.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: And what are those two books?
Rabbi Manis Friedman: The first one came out in 1990, and it’s called “Doesn’t anyone blush anymore? A loss of shame with privacy in relationships.” And the second one came out just recently, and it’s called ‘The joy of intimacy.”
Dr. Jessica Higgins: And with your work, are these two books in response to the frequent concerns and the principles that you’re teaching?
Rabbi Manis Friedman: Yes, it is, and In think it’s reached really a dangerous proportion of unhappiness, and divorce, and so on and so forth… And what I noticed recently, which is really disturbing, is that people who are in marriages that we would call successful, happy marriages, and yet when you speak to the husband or the wife, they’ll tell you that they feel alone in the world, which is a terrible, terrible feeling… But it shouldn’t happen when you’re married. The first thing that changes, the very minimum results of a marriage is that you’re never alone. And here, for the first time I think – because I’ve been doing this for 50 years – I have never really heard happily married people say that they feel alone in the world. That’s what prompted the second book.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: So let me pause there with you for a moment… When people are imagining a successful marriage, what does that typically involve?
Rabbi Manis Friedman: Well, there are functional marriages, and there are intimate marriages. I think the functional marriages, where people still feel alone – it’s because they have not achieved true intimacy. And without intimacy, you really are alone. You haven’t bonded with another human being, so you’re just you.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Okay, so for people listening, a successful or functional marriage might look like you are intact, in the sense that you’re married, you may share activities together, you might have a community together, and you may have children together, and you by all intents and purposes look on paper and look from the outside that there’s a lot of goodness, but there’s a loneliness that you’re speaking to about the lack of intimacy. Is that right?
Rabbi Manis Friedman: Yeah.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Okay.
Rabbi Manis Friedman: And the scary thing is that couples don’t realize it. They can’t put their finger on what’s missing, they can’t complain to each other… They don’t even know what to complain about. And here’s the funny thing, or the scary thing. The culprit, the thing that is ruining marriages – are you ready for this…?
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Mm-hm…
Rabbi Manis Friedman: The thing that is ruining marriages today is love. Love has become toxic, and love cannot hold the relationship together. It wasn’t meant to. So being in love does not mean that you have a good relationship. It means you’ve found some pleasure in your life. I’m not sure that that really amounts to a relationship, because love doesn’t bond you; love actually separates you. Ain’t that shocking?
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes, tell me more. How so?
Rabbi Manis Friedman: Because love is such a personal experience… For all you know, I may love you with all my heart and all my soul, and never even told you. So it’s purely my experience. My love is my experience. It doesn’t really connect me to you, because you might not even know. So two people in love with each other, each of them is experiencing their own personal pleasure, and it happens to be simultaneous, but they’re each experiencing themselves, not each other. The reason for that is because love is a thing. It’s something. You can either have it, not have it, you can have a lot, you can have a little, it can be real, it can be shallow, but it’s an it. Intimacy means there is no it, there’s just you. And you are not an it. You are not a thing.
So the bond that intimacy creates is directly person-to-person, with no thing connecting them. Because if some thing connects us, then it’s the thing that we’re connected to, not each other.
I’m gonna give a good example… If a husband, if a man says to a woman, “I love you for your money. I wanna marry you for your money”, everybody says that that is bad, that’s terrible, that’s shallow, it’s materialistic, it’s not good news. But why is it not good news? It’s because when I say “I love you for your money”, it’s a very thinly-disguised rejection of you. Because I’m saying “I love you for your money, and I wanna marry you for your money, but you know what would be really perfect and ideal? If you could just give me the money… [laughs] Because it’s all about the money, so can I just get the money without having to marry you? No? It doesn’t work that way? Okay, I’ll marry you.” It is so insulting… [laughs] “You know, nothing is perfect in this world, so I’m gonna have to marry you for your money. But if you would just give me the money, I would be much happier.” The same thing is true with love. Really, no difference at all. “I wanna marry you for the love. I want you to love me. Can you just give me the love and save the rest of it? I want your love, I don’t want your opinion, or your personality… So can I just have the love? Don’t subject me to the rest of you, because I’m not marrying the rest of you, I just want the love.” And that’s why if the love goes, there is no relationship at all, because it was never about you, it was about the love. “Without the love, I don’t need you. I never needed you.”
Dr. Jessica Higgins: “I just want your affirmation, I want your positivity, I want your compliment, and your affection…”
Rabbi Manis Friedman: Yeah. “I want things.” Intimacy means no thing. Nothing between us. Not Pina Colada, not walks in the rain… [laughs] When you have a lot in common, that makes for good roommates, it doesn’t make a marriage. Marriage has to be “I need you in my life, not something from you. I’m not using you, I don’t’ need favors from you… It’s not like I can’t open a jar by myself and have breakfast, and even make eggs… I can do it all by myself. But I want YOU in my life.”
I think the best example of that is when your husband is out of town, do you miss him? “Yeah.” What do you miss about him? “Well, him. He is not home. I don’t like that.” So you’re missing him, not something from him, about him… But then as soon as he walks in the door, it becomes about something. “Oh, good, now you can take out the garbage.” So we know what it means to want someone, rather than something about that someone.
A man tells me “You know, I love everything about my wife.” I said “That’s nice. Do you love her?” He says “I love everything about her.” I said “Yeah, but do you love her?” He says “What about her?” [laughs] I said “Not about her… Just her.” He says “I don’t know what that means.”
If you take away all the things – her looks, her love, her money, her character, her sense of humor, if you take all those things away, what’s left? That’s why she feels alone in the world, because you’re enjoying many of her things, but you’re not bonding with her. And the same is true with sex. There’s a huge difference between sex and intimacy. Maybe a long time ago sex was intimacy, but it’s not anymore. Sex has become a thing. It’s a thing. You have it, you don’t have IT. You like it, you don’t like IT. It’s a thing. And I think it started — and this, I think, is really important…
You know, the whole #metoo development – men abusing women, molesting women, and so on, and people say “Men don’t respect women. They have to respect women more.” Some people say it’s the abuse of power; you give a man power, and he’ll abuse it… Well, first of all, if you give a woman power, she’ll abuse it, too. Power corrupts, we know that; it’s an old story. And men not respecting women – also an old story, but I think it’s gotten a lot better. I think today men respect women, and some of these guys who are accused of molesting or abusing – they do respect women. I would give them the benefit of the doubt. So if you would ask them, “If you respect women, why do you do what you do? Why do you behave like that?”, and I’m sure their answer will be “Like what? What did I do? It was nothing! It was just fun! When did it become so serious?” So what happens is not that men lost respect for women; men and women lost respect for intimacy. Because pornography has now become the norm, in most bedrooms. It has worked its way into mainstream life. For example, people are intimate with the lights on.
I don’t know if you remember the old shows, like “I love Lucy”, or “The Honeymooners.” Everybody knew that before they were intimate, they turned the lamp off. That meant they were gonna be intimate. Intimacy was always in the dark. Only pornography introduced the idea of having the lights on… And yet today, when I mention or suggest that intimacy should always be in the dark, people are shocked. Unheard of. But it wasn’t that long ago when that was the norm. And then when they stop and think about it, their reaction is “Whoa… Yeah. Wow, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, the lights off. Dark. Nothing to look at. And no music, no sound, nothing to hear.” You see nothing, you hear nothing, and you do not speak during intimacy. So where will your mind go? To each other. Sex and love – this is the shocking thing – are destroying marriages, where most people think that sex and love is the definition of marriage.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: It sounds like what you’re really helping people understand is that if we get focused on the sensation or the experience of love, or the physical sexual intimacy, that that’s actually distracting us from the larger, more important bond of intimacy.
Rabbi Manis Friedman: Yes.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Okay.
Rabbi Manis Friedman: And it also turns out that sex is not really a human need. You can live your whole life without sex. I don’t know if anybody would want to, but you can live your whole life without sex and you’re not missing anything. You’re a wholesome, complete human being, having a wholesome life. But without intimacy, you’re not complete. You’re alone in the world, and it feels wrong, it feels terrible. So intimacy is a real need, sex is not. Just like chocolate. Everybody likes chocolate, can’t even imagine living without it. But can you claim that you NEED chocolate? You don’t need chocolate. You can go your whole life without chocolate. In fact, not so long ago nobody even ever had heard of chocolate. So yes, you can be a completely healthy human being without chocolate and without sex, but not without intimacy. And that’s why – this is also a little shocking – you can never have enough sex… Because something you don’t need can’t be satisfied.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Or perhaps to your point maybe it’s an attempt to cultivate intimacy, but perhaps through a wrong avenue, or an avenue that doesn’t actually provide that type of bond.
Rabbi Manis Friedman: Right. And it used to. Sex used to be intimate, until the ’60s. In the ’60s we all agreed, men and women – so this is not men against women, or women against men… Men and women agreed that love should be free. Free love. And “free” meant (or came to mean) no commitment, not attachment, no involvement, no emotions… Just sex. And they call it “making love”, which is really sad, because it should be something much more than love. It should be bonding. We should become inseparable. And it doesn’t happen, because love is my experience; I don’t know what you’re feeling. And sex is my experience, I don’t know what you’re feeling. And that’s why after having sex it’s quite common for people to ask each other, “How was it?” First of all, there shouldn’t be an “it”. Human beings are not objects, there should not be an “it”. So “How was it? …it was just us in the bedroom. Who’s the it?”
Secondly, why do you have to ask? You were right there, so obviously you were not right there. You were in your own universe, experiencing your pleasure, and that’s not my universe, and you have to ask me and check with me to see what happens. Whereas intimacy means the pleasure of having each other. It’s not a performance, it’s not an event. There is no “it”. There is just us. And us is always good.
So all these articles about “12 secrets to better sex” – you don’t want better sex. You want more intimacy. We’re not lacking pleasure in our lives, but we are desperately lacking intimacy.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Before we pivot into that, I wanna be able to explore for people listening and resonating with what you’re describing how to start to — I guess I wanna have a discussion with you around what you recommend to help people cultivate more of this intimacy… But before we do that, on the sexuality note, the way that I’m hearing you is that we all have a sexual aspect to ourselves, right? That’s part of how we’re wired, and that’s part of our experience… But similarly, with love, it’s our individual experience, and we get to choose to share that with someone else. But how we choose to share that could be intimate or not intimate. Is that what I’m hearing you saying?
Rabbi Manis Friedman: Yes. It can be just a little more pleasure, like chocolate, or it can be the merging of two people.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Okay. So let’s pivot towards that then. For people that are listening to you, and there’s something about what you’re describing around having a lonely experience while having a successful marriage, or recognize that they’re focused on the expressions of love, or how that person makes them feel, rather than the goal of intimacy, what do you recommend in helping people shift from perhaps the “it” perspective to more of the intimacy perspective?
Rabbi Manis Friedman: I think it has to be intuitively comfortable. It’s gotta make sense to people, you can’t convince… And I think once people hear this, they’ve got it. Because that is their experience. So what would it mean – first of all, we have to stop worshipping love. It’s not an exaggeration. Love is the false god, the idol of our time. We worship love. We think love is the answer to everything. “Love will keep us together. All we really need is love.” It’s not true. “Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage” – no, it’s not true. Marriage is much more powerful than love. So we’ve gotta stop looking to love as the panacea, the answer to everything. “Just more love, and everything will be fine.”
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Well, Rabbi Friedman, I don’t know what you think about this, but I am listening and I’m also just feeling empathetic who maybe haven’t had the experience in their life to trust being with another person… Because the way I’m experiencing how you’re describing this is it’s “Take your emphasis off of trying to achieve something, or seeking comfort, or seeking pleasure, and be in the presence of another, your significant other. Be present to that”, and that is experience is less goal-oriented or achievement-oriented… But I think people get into this habit, or they haven’t had the safety of having that presencing with another and maybe it’s just super unfamiliar.
Rabbi Manis Friedman: This is sadly true. You’re right. But you see, a husband – his primary responsibility is to provide security, so that they can become one, they can dissolve into each other. If they have to protect themselves, if they can’t let go, then they remain separate. Now, for the woman, the vulnerability of letting go is deeper, and therefore more frightening than for the man. So the husband has to provide that sense of total security, so that a woman can abandon herself, dissolve into the relationship… Because if she does that and it turns out that he’s not there for her, that is way too painful.
So what’s happening in marriages is that people are cooperating, they’re working with each other, they’re there in practical terms for each other, but they’re too frightened to let go, to really merge with the other person. I have a good example – like two drops of water, next to each other, side by side, but they’re two drops. Now, why aren’t they flowing? What’s keeping them apart? Some kind of surface tension. The air is keeping them apart. But if you just touch the drop and break that tension, they will become one. They will only be one drop; it will not be two. A husband and wife should be able to break that tension and simply merge into each other without fear. And the fear, of course, is the fear of abandonment. It’s like, if I’m gonna jump off — there’s the example of a baby jumping into your arms… He’ll do that because he trusts you. But if he doesn’t trust you, he can’t jump.
So to make that leap, the security, the certainty, the permanence, the sanctity of it has got to be real. It can’t just be “Well, I promised to be loyal…” That’s shallow. That is not strong enough. “Oh, we love each other so much. We’ll never –“, yeah those are the famous last words.
In Jewish tradition, under the marriage canopy, the husband does not promise love, and loyalty, and obedience… He doesn’t. Those are empty words. You can’t promise that. You cannot promise to love somebody forever. It’s childish. What does happen under the canopy is the husband – or the groom – gives the bride a ring, and the bride receives the ring. The essence of marriages are giving and receiving; not to givers and not to receivers. If you’re going to merge, it’s gotta be a giving and a receiving, and then they merge to where you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. But if you have two givers, there’s going to be conflict. There is this idea that marriage is a 50/50 proposition. We share all responsibility, all activity, everything equally, which means we’re both partly givers and partly receivers. That is so confusing. The husband should be the giver, the provider. The wife should be the receiver. Then they can blend.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: It sounds like the way you’re describing this is through gender, and I’m just curious what your thoughts are for people that are listening that are in same-sex marriages, or perhaps the woman runs more of that masculine, and the man is maybe a little more of the receiver and feminine; do you think those polarities work as well, or does it need to be the gender-specific?
Rabbi Manis Friedman: We’re flexible human beings, but even in same-gender marriages there is always the giver and the receiver, otherwise it doesn’t last a month. So that dynamic is at play regardless. But by nature, men get more pleasure from giving, and women get more pleasure from receiving. It’s just biologically… And receiving means nurturing.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Gotcha. So for people that might have — like you described, this surface tension, or this block, or this lack of trust, what do you recommend for people to start being able to address those tension point, to be able to access more of this intimacy and build more of this connection and trust?
Rabbi Manis Friedman: Good question. You have to look to the past. Why did marriages work in the past? Why was divorce almost unheard of? It’s not because they didn’t know how to get divorced, or because there was some kind of a stigma. If people are unhappy, they get divorced, so why didn’t they in the past? And I think that what they did in the past – our grandparents – is they did not think of sex as an activity, as a performance…
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Or an indicator of how successful their marriage was.
Rabbi Manis Friedman: Yeah, or how sexy they are. They really married each other to have each other. And maybe because there weren’t very many things to be had. All you had was each other, in the bad old days. And then people say “Yeah, but they were unhappy. They were always complaining, and all the bickering…”, and that may be true. But they were complaining about things; they were very married to each other. And we’re doing the opposite. We love every thing about the person we marry, we just don’t see why we need the person. So when we argue, it’s about each other, not about things. And that is much more painful.
So what we need to do is rethink marriage. Marriage is not a love affair. Marriage is not a ride into the sunset. Marriage means this god-given talent that we have, that we can actually soften the borders that make me me and you you, and we can merge those borders to where we become really a single unit, a single person.
Biblically-speaking, God said that it’s not good for man to be alone. Now, what it’s saying is being alone is not good. The aloneness is a problem. Now, we would not have realized that without God telling us. We would have thought being alone is not good, because “I’m not that capable. Sometimes I need someone to help me. I can’t carry the burden myself. I need somebody to make breakfast for me, or do laundry. I don’t know how to do laundry”, and that’s why it’s not good to be alone. But then being alone is not the problem, laundry is the problem. So if I happen to be capable and self-sufficient, then being alone would be great. But the Bible says “No, it is not good to be alone”, even if you’re perfectly capable.
God himself was alone, and perfect, but he didn’t like it, so he created us. So even for God, being alone is not acceptable. And not because he can’t do laundry. [laughter]
Dr. Jessica Higgins: So great. So it sounds as though you’re saying with the focus and the awareness of intimacy, and the way you’re describing it, that in and of itself can help illuminate and resonate, and perhaps help us identify these surface tensions that if we’re really focused on intimacy and the being with, that that can help us start to see the difference, and that in and of itself can give us a pathway to work with… Is that true?
Rabbi Manis Friedman: Yes, and I see it working. I see it helping.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Okay. In what you do, and how you’re guiding and offering facilitation and support. Wonderful. I have one more question for you. When you were talking about the vows and the promises that we perhaps can’t really fulfill, or like you said, it’s childish, and yet you’re also speaking to the security and the trust, and the being there – how do those things fit? If someone’s looking for “Are you there for me? Can I lean into you?”, more from the kind of feminine place, but then you can’t say that you’re gonna really be there forever – how does that fit for you?
Rabbi Manis Friedman: Well, the question is so glaring… “I need you to be there for me unconditionally, so I’m gonna ask you, will you be there for me? And you say yes, and I say good.” No, no, no… Your word does not provide security, because then if I walk out on you or if I cheat on you, what are you gonna say? You lied? Okay, I lied. So asking the person to personally guarantee that they will never abandon you – you’re not gonna get any security. What gives you the security is the sanctity of the marriage. We are getting married. That means forever. Will I love you forever? Not if you’re nasty… But we will be married, even when you’re nasty. And that’s why divorce is a tragedy. It’s not like “Well, I loved you, but now I don’t. So… Bye.” We bonded, we got married, and that is a fact, not a feeling. Nobody says “I feel married.” I AM married.
Now, what kind of feelings are you experiencing in your marriage? Hopefully, love. But if not, you’re still married… I don’t know if you’re familiar with Fiddler on the Roof, the musical… The husband – they’ve been married for a long time, and the husband says to his wife “Do you love me?” and she says “Do I what?!” Because that kind of language was not familiar back then. He says “Do you love me?!” And she sings him a song about “25 years I’ve washed your clothes and made your meals”, and so on. And then she concludes “And if that’s not love, then what is?” What she’s saying is really wise. He’s asking her, after 25 years of marriage, “Do you love me?” She says “Am I giving you my love? Is that what you’re asking? Am I giving you my love? I’ve given myself to you. I am yours for 25 years, and you’re worried about the love? What are you, a teenager?”
So that’s what it is – don’t get married if you’re not in love with marriage. If you don’t believe in marriage, if you don’t think it’s the only way to be, if you’re not convinced that that’s God’s vision and plan for the human being… If you’re not sold on marriage, don’t get married. No matter how much you love someone, love them. Don’t marry them. So when the love stops, you’ve lost nothing. But if you’re getting married, it should be because marriage is the right way to be. And marriage can be unconditional, and emotion cannot. You cannot love unconditional. That’s a monstrosity. “I will love you no matter how much you beat me.” How can love be unconditional? It means I’m not paying attention to you anymore. You tell your child “I love you unconditionally”, the child feels rejected. “Oh, so that means I don’t matter anymore? No matter what I do, nothing will change? So you’re not responding to me… You have this fixation; you decided you want to love. But it’s not about me, because I’m not lovable right now. Why haven’t you noticed that? Why aren’t you reacting to me?”
So emotions, by their very nature, cannot be unconditional. They’re very subjective. “This is my response to you. When you’re lovable, I love you. When you’re hateful, I hate you.” So what is the security – which is going back to your question… The security comes from the fact, not from the feeling. Marriage is a fact, just like you tell your child “I am your mother unconditionally. It is so unconditional that I will be your mother even when I hate you. And right now I hate you!”
Dr. Jessica Higgins: [laughs] Yes. So if I’m hearing you correctly, there’s a reverence for marriage, and it’s almost as if it’s the container that we are stepping into with the belief that we’re saying yes to this journey and this belief, as you’re saying, and that it’s the intimacy, it’s really the experience of being with and loving the other person and being present in that intimate bond that makes the marriage.
Rabbi Manis Friedman: Yes, and the marriage has to be bigger than both of us, otherwise it’s not stronger than each of us, and we know how weak we are… So we need the marriage to have the power, the staying power, the permanence.
If you still have a minute, let me give you this really important, beautiful description of what it is we really should be looking for if it’s not love and sex. What we should be looking for is to create our own home. “Home” is a much more powerful word than “love.” When a person comes home, that experience should be so powerful… “I come home. I’m home. Shouldn’t that be more pleasurable than someone loving me? I’m home. I am where I belong. I can close the rest of the world out. I’m no longer competing, I’m no longer threatened… I’m home.” We need that desperately. That is not just a pleasure, that’s a real need. “I’ve gotta be able to come home.”
Now, when I come home, I am where I belong. And there’s no place else I’d rather be. And what I’m doing at home is what I’m supposed to be doing, and there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing. And who am I doing it with? The person that was meant for me, and there’s no one else I’d rather be with. If you can experience those three absolutes, you are in heaven. And if coming home doesn’t feel like that, then you’re in hell. It’s really painful.
So that’s what home should feel like… And it should not be dependent on moods. Love is a mood. It changes, and it’s supposed to change. That’s what makes it exciting. But home – that’s stable. That’s where I belong. There’s no one else I’d rather be with, because this is MY place. This is where I belong.
So if a husband sees beautiful women at work, or the secretary is beautiful, why would that threaten his marriage? And if it does threaten his marriage, then how secure is the marriage in the first place? If the wife has to sit at home worrying that the husband might meet a good-looking woman – you can’t live like that. Of course he’s gonna meet good-looking women. The idea that he thinks you’re more beautiful than anyone else in the world? What kind of silliness is that? That’s Hollywood. Particularly if you’re 48 and the secretary is 28. What are you, competing? That’s horrible, if you feel like you need to compete.
So if the husband comes home and says “We just hired a new secretary. She is gorgeous!”, why does that threaten the wife? It shouldn’t… Because she can be as gorgeous as she wants, and it has nothing to do with me. This is my home.
And then there’s another thing maybe we don’t have time to talk about. Why do we equate beauty with sex? Why is it if someone is beautiful, we have to have sex with them?
Dr. Jessica Higgins: [laughs] So well said, yes.
Rabbi Manis Friedman: What is the relationship? Again, beauty is a thing, and it’s not meant to be private or personal. Beauty is a public thing; it’s in the eyes of the beholder. You don’t hide your beauty… But what is intimate – well, that’s personal. That’s only at home, and only in the dar, and only with each other. So beauty and intimacy are two completely separate things. But again, it’s Hollywood that said “If she’s good-looking, you have to have sex with her. If he’s handsome, you wanna have sex with him.” What’s the connection? And by the way, it’s not true that good-looking people have better sex…
Dr. Jessica Higgins: [laughs]
Rabbi Manis Friedman: It’s absolutely not true. Maybe the opposite.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Right. Rabbi Friedman, I know you have so much to offer in the way of videos on your YouTube channel… What else and where else can people get in touch with your teachings?
Rabbi Manis Friedman: Well, if you go online to itsgoodtoknow.org, hundreds of hours on all sorts of topics… I think everything I’ve ever said has been recorded. It sometimes comes back to haunt me.
And you can go to Joy of Intimacy, and see what the book is all about… But I really think that this has become a crisis… And if people can rediscover the intimacy in their lives, it would save their lives. Loneliness has become the curse of our generation. We are so alone, so disconnected, that we can actually refer to somebody who texts you as someone who likes you. That’s really sad.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes… Well, thank you so much for the message and your light and guidance that you’re bringing to this topic to help people reengage with the essence of intimacy, and the power and the essential nature of it. It’s been such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Rabbi Manis Friedman: Thank you so much for the opportunity. I really think it’s a public service.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes.
Rabbi Manis Friedman: If we wanna make the world healthy, we wanna make life livable again, we’ve gotta get back to the intimacy. It’s not negotiable. Here’s my slogan for the book – “Friends don’t let friends get married without reading this book.”
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Nice…!
Rabbi Manis Friedman: [laughs] Thank you so much.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes, thank you.
I hope you have enjoyed today’s conversation. Again, if you would like access to today’s show notes, you can visit DrJessicaHiggins.com, click on Podcast and you can find all of the episodes there. Again, today’s episode is 186, “How to prioritize the most important element of your relationship”, an interview with Rabbi Manis Friedman.
Until next time, I hope you take great care!
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