Welcome to Conversations with Dr. Jennifer, a collection of interviews on the topics of relationships, sexuality, and more, all featuring Dr Finlayson Fife. life. You're going to do. Okay, so I'll jump in. I'm going to first just talk a little bit about intimate

deception and how I think about it, why it's such a challenge in marriage and then what it might mean to grow beyond it.

And then I will take up some of the case examples of some of the people that wrote in specific

questions but I'm just going to talk for a little bit first. So what is

intimate deception? Well the way I think about it is it's in a committed relationship when someone goes against the assumptions of that's

is the marriage, right? And masks information

that they know their partner would want to know.

This is very important.

This is different between just not telling

their spouse something and deception.

Deception is you know your spouse would want to know it and you are therefore keeping

them from knowing it.

And this could be financially, this can be

sexually, this can be an affair, this can be pornography, this can be

anything in which you are, this can be like spending money you don't want your spouse to know you're spending

hanging out with people you don't want them to know you're hanging out with okay so there's a lot of ways we can deceive in marriage and why do we do it? Well, one of the

reasons that people do it is because, you know, if you have taken my courses and heard me say a lot that human beings we want two things

right I'm sure you could all say it we want to belong to ourselves and we want to belong to a partner and we want to have both things. And so when we have our

fantasies about marriage and falling in love, our fantasies always include belonging to our own desires and

freedom and the freedom to do things that really matter to us and then locking in

backup in a spouse. They're going to love us the whole way. Admire value, be

grateful for all those things in us and we'll finally lock in a love that we deserved all along. That is often the fantasy of marriage and why we think

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