Desiring Desire
1.15.2010 | Blog, Marriage & Commitment
I wrote an article yesterday for the February issue of Natural Awakenings, a free publication in the Charlotte area that covers Healthy Living. I wrote about desire since it’s been a hot topic as of late.
As I was looking for a quote by David Schnarch (something along the line of “if you don’t desire sex, it’s probably because the sex you’re having isn’t very desirable” – I think he wrote that in Passionate Marriage), I came across an interview he did. I bookmarked it so I could come back to it later. I try to ingest as much Schnarch as I can. Which reminds me, I really have to get his new book, Intimacy & Desire.
Tonight as I was reading the interview, I was reminded again how much I appreciate his approach to relationships. I thought I’d share this specific answer with you because it pretty much sums up my whole article.
Q. You propose that the very way we think about sex and sexual desire sets couples up to have difficulty. Please explain.
A. People have been taught that “sex is a natural function.” However, the sex that comes “naturally” is reproductive sex; intimate sex is an acquired ability and developed taste. The notion that “sex is a natural function” leads couples to believe that sex and intimacy emerge full-blown unless some “blockage” is in the way. But usually, getting the sex and intimacy we want doesn’t involve removing a block, it involves growing up. Usually we just think of sexual desire as physical cravings (like horniness and “blueballs”). Desire involves wanting your partner — not just wanting sex — and we often don’t want to want our partner because it makes us vulnerable.
As we get older and as our relationships mature, we can’t sit around waiting for desire to suddenly show up at the end of a busy day. We need to take the initiative to make space – physical, emotional, mental and spiritual – for desire. Too often, people assume that they just aren’t attracted to their partner anymore, that they’re too old/fat/busy for sex, or that the solution to their lack of desire is to get a new partner. Instead, Schnarch would argue (and I would agree) that this apparent impasse is actually a time for growth.
Q. What do you mean when you say that intimate relationships are “people-growing machines?”
A. A good marriage is not smooth, and marriage is not reducible to a set of skills. People have difficulty with intimacy because they’re supposed to. It’s not something to be “solved” and avoided. Problems with sex and intimacy are important to go through because this process changes us. These are the drive wheels and grind stones of intimate relationships. The solution isn’t going back to the passion of early relationships because that’s sex between strangers; it’s about going forward to new passion and intimacy as adults. If we use relationships properly they make us grow into adults, capable of intense intimacy, eroticism, and passion-having sex with our hearts and minds, and not just with our genitals.
What do you think of Schnarch’s assertion that problems are important to go through? How might the frustrations or conflicts in your relationship be an opportunity for growth?
1.15.2010
I love this post! Favorite quote: “People have difficulty with intimacy because they’re supposed to.” I am learning, I am ready to grow up and quit thinking it is just something that happens. Also, when their is an intimacy problem, I have moved beyond thinking that it defines everything about us. It’s just something to work through or sometimes, it is just something to take a break from, step away for the moment, remove the stress of performing, of forced communication.
1.15.2010
Becky, everytime I read your posts I just have so much hope. I am so consistently surrounded by people who have no idea how to interact with their sexuality in a healthy way, it can get really depressing. Thanks for these great little snippets of David Schnarch… I read Passionate Marriage a few years ago and got so much out of it. I could not have started my marriage with a better book, even though his intended audience was older marriages.
I could not agree with him more that problems are so important to a marriage. I just started reading Kathleen Norris’s Acedia in which she describes some of the difficulties her marriage went through and how it was a catalyst to true honesty and true compassion. Conflict and frustrations are opportunities for growth because they ask us to be truly humble and vulnerable and from there the kind of healing we dream of is possible.
p.s. Would you mind sending me the link to that interview? Thanks!
1.15.2010
Here’s a link to the full interview. http://www.bemindful.org/schnarchintrvw.htm
1.15.2010
You wrote:
“Too often, people assume that they just aren’t attracted to their partner anymore, that they’re too old/fat/busy for sex, or that the solution to their lack of desire is to get a new partner. Instead, Schnarch would argue (and I would agree) that this apparent impasse is actually a time for growth.”
True, but not the whole story.
I’ve read all of Schnarch’s work carefully, from THE SEXUAL CRUCIBLE (the best) to PASSIONATE MARRIAGE (pretty good) to RESURRECTING MARRIAGE (largely a repeat of PASSIONATE MARRIAGE, with more emphasis on describing medical problems if not solutions), to the new one (a synthesis of all three), and Schnarch would more carefully argue that an impasse over sex is a time for possible growth in the marriage, but also a possible time for ending it.
Schnarch is particularly interested in a marriage therapy that would encourage both parties to the marriage to learn to both differentiate and self-sooth, but he specifically acknowledges that this process is potentially fraught with danger to the marriage, even if that danger can be characterized by the personal growth of the parties. As he writes in PASSIONATE MARRIAGE at page 378, “Every spouse must decide if and when things have gone too far; this can be difficult in less extreme cases. After serious self-confrontation and effort to repair your relationship has failed, it can be an act of differentiation, sanity and integrity to divorce.”
I just haven’t found any spouses, as an empirical matter, who have misled themselves in term of their attraction or lack thereof to their spouses, and their core sexual desire for — or lack thereof — for their spouses. More and more, I’ve come to believe that attraction and desire are core emotional and physiological responses, not ones that can be manipulated (in the best sense of that word!) psychologically. This is not to say that people can’t do things to keep themselves attractive and desirous, and make marital sex the amazing sexual/emotional/life-affirming playground that it deserves to be. They can, and in my humble opinion, they should. But if the attraction and desire is gone? Really gone? All the emotional intimacy in the world is not going to bring it back. heightened emotional intimacy might make for a tolerable if sexless marriage, but it’s not going to make partners hot for each other. At least that’s what I’ve seen.
Are you doing research in this arena? It is fascinating! Thanks for your post.