“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.

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!