Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship by David Schnarch Page B

helped him stop overreacting to Jason and give more measured responses. He became less worried about whether Jason respected him or not.
    Robert and Sally made love a few weeks after their big encounter. The important thing was how they got there. It felt different because it had a brand new meaning: Sally wasn’t doing it to placate Robert, and Robert hadn’t demanded it. During sex, they created another new meaning: Robert and Sally stopped trying to bring each other to orgasm to quiet and calm their reflected sense of self. This allowed them to have their first positive moment of meeting during sex: Sally and Robert opened their eyes and looked into each other for several minutes. Neither said a word. They were open with each other in a way they never were.
    This episode didn’t resolve all of Sally and Robert’s difficulties. But it was certainly a powerful beginning. At least now they had hope. They had a glimpse of a different way of living. If you appreciate the elegance of love relationships, you can have hope, too. Marriage is driven by people simply being people. A love relationship is a path to becoming more of a person.
THE ANSWER TO THE AGE-OLD QUESTION: DOES MARRIAGE KILL SEX?
     
    Does marriage destroy sexual desire? This question has haunted lovers for ages. People have suspected emotionally committed relationships kill sex at least as far back as two thousand years ago, when the poet Ovid wrote in
The Art of Love
, “Quarrels are the dowry married folk bring one another.” 92 And in more recent times, Oscar Wilde quipped, “Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.” 93
    We’ve covered a lot of ground in Part One to prove what these authors feared is true! Marriage
does
kill desire! But that answer means something different than they or you might have thought. Sexual desire problems are part of the middle phase of marriage. They are how love relationships grow. They are normal evolutionary developments in the life cycle of a relationship.
    What you’re going through feels painful, heartbreaking, frightening, and demoralizing. I’ve been there too, so I speak from personal experience: Realizing you’re going through one of marriage’s processes gives you hope and helps you make the most of it. Understanding what you’re going through makes you more resilient and less defensive, and speeds your progress.
How
you go through desire problems makes a huge difference in how you come out—including whether your relationship comes out intact.
•
Welcome to the club: Where we’re headed
     
    When you started reading
Intimacy & Desire
, perhaps you wanted tips and tricks to get your partner hot or ignite your own rocket. You probably never thought the ebb and flow of sexual desire, and the resultant conflicts, are part of the natural growth processes of love relationships. You probably never imagined you’d be reading about sexual desire, the human self, and mind-mapping co-evolving over millions of years.
    Where does love fit in the picture? Not romantic love, driven by your reptilian and mammalian dopamine-laced brain, but mature adult love, driven by your prefrontal neocortex and your solid sense of self. Loveand desire that involve your most uniquely human capacities, like eroticism, intimacy, compassion, and commitment. That kind of adult love and mature desire is exactly where we’re headed.
    Since your ancestors hatched the human self, we have all had the potential for exquisite sexual desire and mature adult love. Mastering your sexual desire doesn’t mean conquering your animal nature. It means developing the highly tuned sense of self necessary to explore your sexual potential. This always involves a stretch. Sexual desire problems will stretch your reflected sense of self as taut as a drumhead. Guaranteed.
    A more solid sense of self gives you more
capacity
for desire. It may sound strange to think of sexual desire as a capacity you can develop. But think about it in terms