Uncover more passionate, meaningful sex

I believe society has approached marriage the same as we have the environment (until recently): tried to bend it to our will and suffered for it. Today we recognize that the earth's ecology is a complex system of processes that operates as a whole with rules of its own. My twenty years of experience working with couples suggests that marriage operates similarly if we have the wisdom to recognize and heed its operating principles.

We don't usually think of marriage as a system with its own rules. Like the earth's ecosystem, marriage can operate more or less according to whatever template we choose to place on it. ("Wounded child" theory is an example of a template. In this book you'll learn another.) The rules of a system are not mandates we can bend them by ignorance or design, usually at our own peril. The more we try to force our marriage (or our planet) into a mode of operation that is antithetical to its natural processes, the more likely that it will reach a point of imbalance from which it cannot recover. But it's also possible to remove the blinders of conventional wisdom, discover the processes that govern intimacy and sexuality within emotionally committed relationships, and act accordingly.

What I offered Ken and Karen, and what I'll offer you, is a way to harness the natural processes of sex and intimacy and use marriage in radically new ways. In retrospect you can see that Karen and Ken used their marriage to help them become people capable of having the sex and intimacy they wanted.

Not only do sex and intimacy seem to operate according to some core principles, but they seem also to create predictable sticking points in marriages. Moreover, these patterns can be harnessed in fairly reliable ways that enhance sex, intimacy, personal development, and marital satisfaction.

In other words, marital problems arise for more reasons than our mistaken view of marriage. Mistaken beliefs create unnecessary marital problems, but some marital difficulties aren't "problems" at all. They're part of marriage that our ill-fitting beliefs don't prepare us to handle effectively. These issues inevitably arise because they are part of the evolution of the partners involved and their relationship. These "problems" are tied into a core process of human development that weaves through marriage. This process is called differentiation (which I'll explain shortly). How you handle differentiation gives your marriage its form and flavor. The issues and "problems" of differentiation are inevitable how you handle them makes the difference.

I have compassion for anyone who tries to understand how differentiation controls the course of marriage. This path causes people to discard lots of beliefs; that's the price of understanding something drastically new. The gain is that you can stop feeling inadequate about common developments in your marriage and use them in entirely new ways to achieve much better solutions. I, too, have gone through the painful process of feeling like an outsider with my professional colleagues. And I know some felt I was acting superior and condescending because I would not conform to prevailing ideas. My wife Ruth and I also went through all of this on a more personal level we've had to discover differentiation by living through it and seeing how things worked for us.

How could society lose sight of the natural processes of sex and intimacy in emotionally committed relationships? Unfortunately quite easily, since we've hardly looked for them. Only in the last decade have sex therapists and marital therapists seriously attempted to integrate these two fields and to explore how marital sex and intimacy operate as a sophisticated system. This is no simple task because the foundations and working concepts of these fields are fundamentally different and often at odds. I say this from experience, because I've devoted the last ten years of my professional life to accomplishing this very thing.

But what makes this difficult also makes it powerful and useful to do. I found fundamental inaccuracies in contemporary sex therapy by looking at it through the lens of marital therapy and systems theory. Then I used sexuality as a window to see the gaps and inconsistencies in marital therapy. And in case you wondering, "What makes him think he's discovered how sex and intimacy operate as a system in marriage?" the answer comes from exactly this process. The clinical approach you'll learn here is the first application of differentiation theory from family therapy (developed by psychiatrist Murray Bowen) to problems of sex and intimacy in marriage. In Chapters 2 through 5 I'll share the details of my discoveries with you. But let me point out something now.

In twenty years as a sex and marital therapist, I've seen people achieve levels of intimacy and sexual satisfaction my training never prepared me to expect. In integrating the fields of sex and marital therapy, my clinical approach has pioneered the use of sexuality as a vehicle for personal development. Previously, sex therapy aimed mainly at curing dysfunctions and low desire. Reducing sex to issues of performance pressure, misinformation, and inhibition destroys the possibility of using it to make yourself grow. Resolving common marital problems requires personal development rather than skills and techniques.

What does using sex for personal development look like? Remember Karen's discomfort tasting her own vaginal lubrication but her willingness to taste Ken's penis? Or her rejection of her own body as unattractive? We used both these issues to help her enhance her self-esteem and integrity. We also used them to resolve the past in the present Karen took these as opportunities to work on her lifelong pattern of self-rejection. She also illustrated another pattern of personal growth. I've seen lots of clients whose fantasies change as they grow. I've even helped them work the process backwards using their fantasies to trigger self-confrontation and growth, just as we did with Karen tasting herself. Ken showed a similar usage of sex for growth when he realized that always making Karen have her orgasm first was selfish, and that letting her do him was an act of integrity that challenged his self-worth. (Highly erotic sexual styles of doing, being done, and fucking are discussed in Chapter 10.)

Revolutionizing your marriage isn't as simple as learning new touch techniques, improving your communication skills, or rescheduling your time priorities. It involves growing enough to be capable of the wonderful marriage you might think springs simply from love. I hope to do two things in this book: share with you information that's helped many people find meaning and possibility in unexpected places, and offer you the opportunity to find value in what is problematic in your relationship.

As you saw with Karen and Ken, sex can be used as a window into who we are. As Karen said, sex is about who we've been, where we came from, and becoming who we can be. And just as they did, you can use your sexuality as the stage on which you play our your life's drama and rewrite your script. They did this by shifting from doing predetermined sexual behaviors in order to feel connected to letting their behavior be determined by their connection. This shift from the familiar "sensation-based" approach to an intimacy-based approach emphasizes the "tone" and depth of connection rather than technique. (We'll discuss ways to do this in Chapters 6 through 10.)

As stated earlier, many marital problems occur even when we have an accurate picture. The more accurate picture simply allows us to anticipate common difficulties and use them to thrive. Accurate understanding makes it easier but not easy.

The poorly understood processes of differentiation in emotionally committed relationships often give rise to a common pessimistic view that marriage inevitably kills sex and romance. According to the French philosopher Voltaire, divorce was invented about the same time as marriage about two weeks later, to be exact! And playwright Oscar Wilde said that one should always be in love and that's why one should never marry.

My work with couples suggests something entirely different: differentiation doesn't kill love, intimacy, or sex it just looks like that at some points along the way. If you use your marriage in a particular way (which I'll illustrate throughout this book), it makes you more capable of keeping these alive in a long-term relationship. As my client said, "you don't think your way to a new way of living, you live your way to a new way of thinking."

Marriage is often like Procrustes' famous code of hospitality. Procrustes had a bed for his guests he built the same way we build a marriage: according to his own expectations. Shorter visitors were stretched to fit; taller folks were surgically shortened. Integrity-building processes of marriage are tenacious. Your spouse will try to change you into what he or she thinks you should be, just as you have fine-tuning in mind for your partner. Barbra Streisand once asked, "Why does a woman spend ten years trying to change her husband and then complain, 'You're not the man I married!'" Marriage is the procrustean bed in which we can develop and enhance our psychological and ethical integrity. It can be the cradle of adult development.

This is partly why my approach to therapy is known as the sexual crucible approach. The name describes how it often feels when marriage's classroom is in session. What's an example of a crucible in marriage? How about the fact that your spouse can always force you to choose between keeping your integrity and staying married, between "holding onto yourself" and holding onto your partner. These integrity issues often surface around sex and intimacy about what the two of you will and won't do together. They can just as easily arise over issues about money, parenting, in-laws and lifestyle. The more emotionally enmeshed you and your spouse are fused in my lingo the more you will push this choice right down to the wire. Stay in the marriage or get divorced. The key is not to lose your nerve or get overreactive or locked into an inflexible position. I know that's tough when you think your marriage is about to explode or you're about to sell out your beliefs, preferences, or dreams. But it's actually part of what I think of as the people-growing process in marriage.

There are other crucibles in marriage that embody what Carl Jung said about our realizing our full humanness in the sufferings of our life. There's a reality to long-term relationships that makes all spouses potential heroes: the end result is that one partner buries the other. Our choice is between losing our partner a little every day by withdrawing to lessen death's impact or risking the heartbreak of losing a beloved, cherished partner. Ernest Becker thought heroism was our willingness to persevere in the face of life's meaninglessness. I believe heroism is our willingness to confront life's meanings. Sometimes it's a tossup which is worse: thinking life has no meaning or realizing the meaning it has.

When you're oblivious to ways marriage can operate as a people-growing process, all you see are problems and pathology and the challenges of marriage will probably defeat you. Your pain will have no meaning except failure and disappointment; no richness, no soul. Spirituality is an attitude that reveals life's meaning through everyday experience; however, don't bother looking for sanctuary in your marriage. Seeking protection from its pains and pleasures misses its purpose: marriage prepares us to live and love on life's terms. It's what Euripides called the "luck" of choosing a marriage that goes well and avoiding one that feels like living "at home in hell."

Facing relationship realities like these produces the personal integrity necessary for intimacy, enduring eroticism, and a lifetime loving marriage. Integrity receives a lot of attention in this book because a satisfying marriage cannot be created without it. How is integrity relevant to marriage? Integrity is the ability to face the realities I just mentioned. It's living according to your own values and beliefs in the face of opposition. It is also the ability to change your values, beliefs, and behavior when your well-considered judgment or concern for others dictates such a modification. Putting your partner's goals on par with your own and delaying your agenda accordingly takes (and makes) integrity.

This is exactly what Ken and Karen did after they returned home after our sessions. It wasn't always smooth sailing and their marriage wasn't perfect. But together they achieved a level of intimate erotic connection that neither had experienced or imagined themselves capable of having. They had to get beyond the common, but mistaken, belief that being in their fifties meant they were past their sexual prime; their experience demonstrated that they were just reaching theirs. But they had to do more than just give up misguided information that everyone believes.

Karen kept hoping Ken would dress nicer and act in ways she found sexually attractive but he didn't. Having faced her own integrity issues and stretched her self-image by taking off her clothes and putting on a necklace, as well as tasting her own body, she felt new personal pride that made her unwilling to settle for the way things were. Eventually Karen made it clear that she wasn't going to keep nagging and hoping Ken would change, but she also wasn't going to be eager to have sex with him if things continued as they had. At first Ken complained that Karen was trying to make him into someone he wasn't, but Karen maintained that he was entitled to be who he was and she was entitled to her preferences.

When Ken realized Karen was serious and this could cripple their "honeymoon," he bought himself a silk shirt three in fact. And to his surprise and delight, he liked wearing them. It was really to their mutual delight, because Karen not only liked to see Ken in them, she also recognized and respected how much self-confrontation went into Ken's decision. She knew more was involved than his caring enough about her and their relationship to do it. She realized how much Ken had to face his own lack of self-worth and stretch his self-image to get comfortable wearing the shirts. (It was another example of the way integrity and self-validated intimacy coincide in marriage.) Their relationship blossomed in and out of the bedroom.

And rather than feeling like he had capitulated to Karen, Ken felt proud of himself. He could have dodged his anxieties and insecurities and tried to cover them by demanding that Karen "accept him as he is." Understanding differentiation (as I'll explain in the next chapter) helped Ken confront himself rather than accuse Karen of trying to tamper with him. He could see she was merely holding onto herself and maintaining her right to her preferences. It let him shift from seeing his marriage as a procrustean bed to their springboard to adult sexual development.

Couples don't always start from the point Karen and Ken did when they came to see me. They were in their fifties and had struggled through many hard years together in their marriage. Even they had difficulty accepting how long it takes for a person to mature sexually, wishing they'd done this in previous years. But if we had we seen Ken and Karen in their late thirties they might have looked more like Bill and Joan, another couple who came to see me. Bill and Joan were struggling (and avoiding) issues that younger couples characteristically face. (Older couples face the same issues if they've dodged these for years.)

In our initial meeting, Bill blurts out his worst fears about their marriage. "We got married for the wrong reasons. I really wasn't ready to get married. I let her push me into it." Joan, twisted like a pretzel on my couch, immediately adopts a "Don't blame me again for that, it's your fault too!" expression.

For several seconds it's not clear where things are headed. Then I realize tears are streaming down Joan's cheeks. "Damn! I promised myself I wouldn't cry!" she stammers, trying to gain control, "I've . . . I've always known he never chose me. He just didn't want to give me up. I haven't been able to face it."

Bill turns beet red. "I told you I wasn't ready to get married! You know I've always been afraid to make decisions!"

The session seems to be rapidly deteriorating. And as usually happens, opportunity emerges out of nowhere. I speak to both of them, but I look at Bill. My tone is serious but not hopeless. "If you want to get over your fear of making decisions, then maybe nothing's wrong. That's exactly what your relationship is going to push you to do. I'm curious about why you're defensive about not being ready to get married and marrying for the wrong reasons. Many highly successful marriages start out that way."

Bill lowered his guard and looked interested, "What do you mean?"

Is anybody really be ready to get married? I doubt it. Nobody's ready for marriage. Marriage makes you ready for marriage!

Bill and Joan are finally facing the secret they thought would blow up their marriage. Much to their surprise, the long feared devastation doesn't materialize. Instead, there's a reasonable answer and a potential solution to what they thought was an insolvable problem. Bill seems so locked into their pattern of interaction that he hardly notices Joan has stopped crying. She seems to see new hope but no guarantee of getting chosen. Instead of berating herself and Bill, she is attentive and composed.

Bill rests his elbows on his knees with his chin in his palms. His fingers hide his facial expression from me; he's used to masking his feelings. He seems surprised that the browbeating he anticipates from Joan is not forthcoming. He doesn't know quite what to make of the fact that she is sitting quietly beside him, eager to proceed.

Why did I tell Bill that highly successful relationships are often launched for the "wrong" reasons? We get married for wrong reasons because we haven't matured enough for right reasons to exist yet. Struggling with wrong reasons for getting married can produce right reasons to stay married.

What are some wrong reasons to get together? Bill and Joan had a few:

• Both of them had low self-esteem.
• Bill was afraid of being lonely.
• Joan feared meeting the world as a single person.
• Bill needed someone to take care of him.
• Joan needed someone to care for.
• They both needed to be needed.
• They both believed two people can live more efficiently than one.

I've found stunning clarity in every couple's wrong reasons: they show us who we are, where we've been and who've we been with, how we're with our partner now, and where we think we're headed. And more importantly, wrong reasons provide the means to get there.

Troubled couples are often saddled by the illusion that their marriage has gone bad for simple reasons and that the problems can be solved with simple solutions. We like to believe that "communication problems" underlie most relationship difficulties because we welcome the idea we can literally talk our way out of anything. We love the fantasy that we can "understand" and "express" our way out of our dilemmas.

But this is not what happens. Instead, in unwitting partnership, couples unconsciously create emotional gridlock. Bill and Joan's relationship was like an intricate Chinese puzzle: one's movement was blocked by the other's equally stymied position. Joan complained that Bill drained her energy by having one crisis after another. Bill was furious that Joan wasn't "supportive." He demanded to be "number one" in her life. She found his neediness unattractive. He became more insecure and accelerated his demands until they were trapped by their interlocking frustrating and frustrated needs. (In the next chapter I'll show you how Bill and Joan worked this out.)

After seeing this go on repeatedly in my office and my own home I've concluded that some dilemmas aren't meant to be "fixed." All problems aren't meant to be "smoothed." The solutions we seek sometimes come from living through them. We spin intricate webs until we have no way around them. We can escape the situation we've created (temporarily), but we can't escape ourselves. Our self-made crises are custom-tailored, painstakingly crafted, and always fit perfectly. We construct emotional knots until, eventually, we are willing to go through them. It may sound farfetched, but it's true, that sexual dysfunctions are blessings to couples who use them well. In like fashion, we sometimes create situations that ask to risk our marriage in order to receive its bounty.

Approached in this light, committed relationships become epic dramas of heroism rather than soap operas. The suffering and strife inherent in marriage are as purposeful as its delights. Hugh and Gail Prather write in Notes to Each Other:

Did I pick the right person? This question inverts the starting and ending points. We do not pick our perfect match because we ourselves are not perfect. The universe hands us a flawless diamond in the rough. Only if we are willing to polish off every part of ourselves that cannot join do we end up with a soul mate.

This polishing process in marriage is what I referred to earlier as differentiation. In a nutshell, differentiation is the process by which we become more uniquely ourselves by maintaining ourselves in relationship with those we love. It's the process of grinding off our rough edges through the normal abrasions of long-term intimate relationships. Differentiation is the key to not holding grudges and recovering quickly from arguments, to tolerating intense intimacy and maintaining your priorities in the midst of daily life. It lets you expand your sexual relationship and rekindle desire and passion in marriages that have grown cold. It is the pathway to the hottest and most loving sex you'll ever have with your spouse. Differentiation brings tenderness, generosity, and compassion all the traits of good marriages.

Differentiation isn't a trait, however. It's a process a lifelong process of taking our own "shape." Chapter 2 is devoted to explaining differentiation in detail. It doesn't surprise me that people have successful marriages in spite of our distortions and misguided beliefs our will to grow and differentiate takes us beyond the obstacles we put in our own way. Differentiation involves one of nature's basic drive springs, a fundamental life force rooted in the evolution of our species. In subsequent chapters we'll explore how differentiation weaves through the various facets of marriage in the most subtle, intricate, and beautiful ways including the most exquisitely intense sex you've ever had. You're about to discover that sex, intimacy, and marriage are more elegant processes than you ever dared imagine.

Published in 1997 by W. W. Norton & CO (hardback) and 1998 by Owl Books (softback) ® Copyright 1997 by David Schnarch, Ph. D. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the author.

MORE FROM LOVE AND MARRIAGE

Love and marriage Section Front

Searching for more passion in the bedroom Quiz: Do you have a sexless marriage? Myths about passion in the bedroom Tips for creating a more passionate relationship Love and marriage Section Front   Add Love and marriage headlines to your news reader: