The normal bar: the surprising secrets of happy couples and what they reveal about creating a new normal in your relationship

257 Pages·2013·5.06 MB·English

by  Chrisanna Northrup

More Praise for The Normal Bar
“This is the book that we have all been waiting for, a hard
empirical look at marriages across continents and cultures. So many
universal truths stand out—about romance, and sex, and money, and
mostly how to have a happy marriage after all…A real gem.”
—JOHN GOTTMAN, PhD, bestselling author of The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
“The Normal Bar is chock-full of good insights and findings in all
areas of relationships, from sex and handholding to commitment and
pre-nups.… Impressive research and results!”
—TERRI ORBUCH, PHD, bestselling author of Finding Love Again
“Are couples who fall in love at first sight happy decades later? What are
the top desires of people in unhappy relationships? Is it normal to stop
kissing in a long-term marriage? In The Normal Bar we learn
fascinating bits about other people’s relationship attitudes,
behavior, and longings—and tips we can put into action to make
our own relationships better.”
—JOAN PRICE, author of Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud about Senior Sex
“Money? Sex? Deep dark secrets? If you wonder how your
relationship compares with the rest of the world, The Normal Bar
offers you a comprehensive heads up—most important, it suggests
that growing healthier and happier may not be mission impossible.”
—GINA OGDEN, PhD, LMFT, author of The Return of Desire, The Heart & Soul of Sex, and Women
Who Love Sex
“I’m obsessed with this page-turner! After nineteen years of marriage, I
faced divorce and entering the dating world with a whole lot of
questions about what was and was not normal. Not only did this book
answer everything I’d ever wondered about relationships and what
people really want, but it restored my faith in the essential
sweetness of humankind. Hot damn!”
—LINDA SIVERTSEN, award-winning author of Generation Green and coauthor of the bestselling
Your Big Beautiful Book Plan
“The Normal Bar is an innovative, easy-to-read book filled with
novel findings about relationships and helpful suggestions on
making relationships better. I will use the important findings from The
Normal Bar in my classes, in my papers, and in my clinical work.”
—HOWARD J. MARKMAN, PhD, author of Fighting for Your Marriage
“For all of us who have wondered if it’s possible to define ‘normal,’
especially when it comes to relationships, the answer is yes. The Normal
Bar delves into intimacy, communication, attraction, and more,
blending into the discussion compelling statistics and keen
insights. The result is equal parts fascinating and comforting. The
authors confirm that while in many ways we’re quite different, at the
core, we’re all very much the same.”
—CHARLA MULLER, author of 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy
“Does being normal make you happy in your relationships and are happy
people normal? This fascinating and very unusual book provides
some detailed and nuanced answers…From relationship formation to
coping with breakups, this is a unique tool that informs the decisions of
individuals and couples, clinicians and policy-makers. Well
recommended!”
—GILBERT HERDT, professor and director, Graduate Program in Human Sexuality, California
Institute for Integral Studies

Copyright © 2012 by Chrisanna Northrup, Pepper Schwartz, PhD, and James Witte, PhD
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random
House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Harmony Books is a registered trademark, and the Circle colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data is available upon request.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-95163-2
eBook ISBN: 978-0-30795574-6
ILLUSTRATIONS BY STACY D’AGUIAR
JACKET DESIGN BY MICHAEL NAGIN
v3.1
C
ONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION: The Genesis of the Normal Bar
Chapter 1: The Normal Bar Is…
Part I: Getting Together
Chapter 2: Are You the One for Me?
Chapter 3: A Little Romance … Or a Lot
Chapter 4: Shows of Affection
Chapter 5: Let’s Get Physical—Maybe Even Kinky
Part II: Living Together
Chapter 6: The Great Communicators
Chapter 7: The Look of Love
Chapter 8: Working 9 to 5 and Then Some
Chapter 9: Dollars and Sense
Chapter 10: Friends and Family
Part III: Staying Together
Chapter 11: Keeping the Sexual Flame Alive
Chapter 12: Secrets and Lies
Chapter 13: Unfaithful
Chapter 14: Addictions, Obsessions, and Bad Behavior
Chapter 15: Commitment—Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Chapter 16: The Pursuit of Relationship Happiness
RESOURCES
APPENDIX: Methodology—The Normal Bar Survey
About the Authors
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
FROM CHRISANNA NORTHRUP
The Normal Bar concept and book would have never existed without
endless love and support from my husband, Mark. Sweetheart, thank you
for entertaining the kids and taking care of the house so that I’d have the
opportunity to pursue my dream. You’ve been such a trooper through
this whole journey, and I couldn’t have done it without you.
To my kids, Jake, Shelby, and Luke, thank you for sitting with me
patiently for hours while I wrote and for not giving me a hard time when
I’d say, “It’s almost done,” knowing I was nowhere near done.
Stacy D’Aguiar, thank you for bringing all my visions to life!
Thanks to Joseph Castagnola, who has always supported my creative
passion and has had to listen to my nonsense day in and day out.
Thanks to Elisa Esparza who always managed to keep my stress level
down by stepping right into my shoes and taking over my day-job
responsibilities on a moment’s notice.
And thanks to my dear friend Kristine Grigsby, who was my on-the-fly
editor and sounding board.
Glenn Bautista, you saved me a couple times, not sure what I’d do
without you.
And thanks to Helen Zimmermann, our agent, who from the moment I
pitched her this book idea never let me go.
FROM PEPPER SCHWARTZ
I want to thank Fred Kaseburg and my children, Cooper and Ryder, for
their support.
FROM JAMES WITTE
Thanks to Connie, Jonny, Victoria, Aaron, Heidi. Our love for each other
is a very good normal.
AND FROM ALL OF US
Thanks to our editor, Rick Horgan, and to our publisher, Tina Constable,
for the opportunity and for making this happen.
A special thanks to Roy Pargas, codeveloper of OnQ. Without Roy’s
able assistance we wouldn’t have been able to collect the survey data
that is the basis for The Normal Bar.
A big thanks to Peggy Northrup and her team at Reader’s Digest—we’re
forever grateful for all of your support.
Thanks to our other media partners—Huffington Post, AOL, and AARP
—from whom we gathered more data than we ever could have
imagined.
Thanks to all the people who helped ensure our success either by
directly supporting us or by saying “yes” to working with us: Arianna
Huffington, Sara Wilson, Willow Bay, Jennifer Barrett, Mary Hickey,
Beth Domingo, Raimo Moysa, Keller Felt, Megan Baker, Barbara O’Dair,
Seth Grossman, Lorna Davis, Deb Colitti, Ingrid Arna, Yang Yang, Linda
Sivertsen, and Ariane de Bonvoisin.
And, finally, thanks to the tens of thousands of people worldwide who
participated in our survey and shared their intimate personal stories
with us. This is our gift back to you. Enjoy!
I
NTRODUCTION
The Genesis of the Normal Bar
The Normal Bar was conceived during a relationship crisis that
became an opportunity for marital rebirth. My husband, Mark, and I had
been together for well over a decade when we started to question
whether we were as happy as we could be in our relationship. At the
time we were both so busy with work, the house, and our three kids that
we barely had any energy left for ourselves, much less for each other. I
remember thinking, is this as good as it gets? Curious to know if this was
normal, I asked some of my closest friends, who also had been married
for over ten years, how they felt about their relationships. I was stunned
to learn how many of them were struggling. One of my friends confided
that she hadn’t made love to her husband for six months. Six months! I
thought, there’s no way that could be good. But who was I to judge?
Mark and I had our own laundry list of relationship issues, and I knew
the normal that we’d created for our marriage was making us both more
miserable than we cared to admit. Was this the price everyone paid for
working full-time while raising kids? That was too depressing a thought
to accept without further inquiry. I had to believe there were some long-
married couples whose normal made them happy! If I could find them,
then maybe Mark and I could learn from them what we needed to do to
create a better normal for ourselves.
But how would I find them? Like a lot of women, I equated
relationship happiness with those dreamy scenes you see in movies—you
know, the ones where the guy sweeps his true love off her feet and tells
her he loves her so much he can’t live without her, then proves it with
endless, incredible sex. Unfortunately, much as I wanted this vision to be
true, I had a sneaking suspicion it wasn’t very realistic. Deep down, I
knew I needed to find some “real” people who were happy in their
relationships—if such couples even existed. What did their sex lives look
like? How did they sustain that feeling of being in love decade after