The Lesson of Demi and Ashton: Don't Marry Your Friend

What can we learn from celebrity relationships, specifically Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore?  I think we can learn a thing or two from married movie stars, especially when they break up. Their profession requires them to display their personalities to the public, and we get to watch a relationship unfold in all of its glorious, flawed humanity.  Some Hollywood actors try very hard to keep their relationships private, but not Demi and Ashton. They eagerly shared themselves with fans, tweeting practically every giddy bedroom moment and defiant denial of infidelity, all the way up until they announced their divorce, on Twitter.

So, if we must see and hear so much about one couple in the media, perhaps some lessons can come of it. Here's what I learned from observing A and D:

Don't marry your friend.

If that sounds simplistic, you're right, it is. Of course, we should marry a friend!

The question is whether or not friendship is enough. What else is needed, in addition to great friendship, to make a committed relationship work?

I believe that Ashton and Demi are great friends across the divide of their 16-year age difference. A and D seem to have the kind of deep, abiding friendship connection that we explore and define in our program on personality dynamics: KWML Mastery.

Their personalities compliment each other. She's brash, serious and exacting, possibly feeling isolated in her career and status as an iconic actress. He's a merry prankster with a shaggy dog persona, spontaneous and eager to please and by all accounts, a sincerely good person to those around him. (Again, you can learn how to instantly read personalities in KWML Mastery.)

Just look at the charitable endeavors that A & D launched while they were together. During their marriage, A & D's movie and TV careers remained successful, aided perhaps by the publicity that their marriage generated. That might strike us as unsavory and calculated, but it worked.

I can't deny, Ashton and Demi make a pretty good team together.

It's sad, because you'd think that such a strong friendship bond would help a couple to weather any storm. But I guess that wasn't enough. Something was missing. The gossip magazines ran stories, credible stories, about Ashton's dalliances with young women, and I think it's possible that Demi was unfaithful. I say this because we see far more gossipy stories about male infidelity and far fewer about women cheating, when research and simple logic show us that women cheat in equal proportion to men. 

The psychological underpinnings of sex

So what happened? If you are familiar with our dating, romance and courtship program, The Seventh Sense, you'll know that sexual attraction in a relationship has several components. These are PSYCHOLOGICAL components that go beyond the act of sex. 

If a long-term relationship is going to work out, it needs more than just the physical act of sex. It needs the psychological underpinnings of sex. This is what we call "courtship."

Courtship is more than just an old-fashioned word. It's real. It's what launches a great long-term relationship, and it's what makes the sex very hot. Forget all of the homespun wisdom you've heard, such as "the way to a man's heart is through his stomach." And be leery of the "hip" advice on edgy women's web sites, about how to "spice up" a marriage with sex tricks. Some women are even buying into the notion that having group sex (the now-tired notion that "every man wants a threesome") will save a marriage.

I'll let you in on the truth: men like sex, but not in the way you've been led to believe. Men respond to a certain psychological component of a relationship that supports the physical element.

What is it that a man, and probably a man like Ashton Kutcher, wants even more than sex? The one thing that will keep him coming back to you, again and again, and never want to stray or have an affair? Call it adoration or admiration. In The Seventh Sense Program we define it and explore it in detail, and it's called Step 2 of Sexual Attraction, or simply, cheerleading.

Ashton and Demi both work in the same profession. Ashton is younger, less experienced and less accomplished than Demi in the realm of movie acting. A man's identity - his SEXUAL identity - is tied to his career to a greater extent than a woman's career. This is a fundamental difference between masculinity and femininity.

I surmise that Ashton might not have received the adoration that he craved specifically for his career from his wife. They are great friends, of course. It's wonderful. But a man craves recognition and adoration for his exploits outside of the relationship and outside of the bedroom. It feeds his passion for life. He feels vital and more ALIVE. If he's not receiving this one quality in his relationship - which is wholly different from friendship - he might respond sexually to another woman who displays this singular kind of admiration. This dynamic of masculinity and femininity in courtship is explored in depth in The Seventh Sense Program.