Lust For The Long Haul

By Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn

When my husband and I started dating, we quickly became one of those obnoxious couples who couldn't keep their hands off each other. We kissed every time we stopped at a crosswalk—in New York, that's a lot. At Starbucks we were so grotesque—staring into each other's eyes, stroking each other's arms—that when the branch removed its tables and converted to carryout, we wondered if we were the reason. Once, during a protracted public goodbye, a group of teenagers actually screeched at us to get a room.

We did more than that. We got married. Like most couples in the throes of passion, we were smug, convinced that all the clichés about things slowing down described partners who weren't meant to be together in the first place. But slowly, things did cool off. We still loved one another, still held hands. But the crosswalk kissing and the subway platform clinches faded away. Instead of long weekend mornings in bed, we started getting up early and going to the gym.

I couldn't help (a) noticing, and (b) torturing myself about what it meant. You'd have to be hiding under a rock for the last decade not to know that half of all marriages now end in divorce, and that sexual difficulties are one of the leading complaints of unhappy couples. Was this how it begins?

It's some consolation that many other Americans face the same question. In the benchmark survey of desire, roughly one-third of all adults reported having some kind of sexual problem during the previous year. Some pundits blame gender politics, job stress and cultural changes. Others, more cynical, point to the monotony of marriage. But these plausible (and socially acceptable) explanations obscure a more disquieting truth. Sex, and more importantly, intimacy, are grown-up skills, and most of us, metaphorically speaking, are still in junior high. We're still clinging to the idea of romance, when real intimacy requires something a lot more difficult: pushing past your own limits to become a more fully developed human being.

Conventional wisdom holds that an intimate couple thinks pretty much the same way about most things. You connect seamlessly—especially in bed. But according to the radical ideas of the marital and sex therapist David Schnarch, we've got it all backward. "Sex is inherently based on intimacy. The problem is that most people have a very misguided idea of what intimacy means," he says. "There's this idea that your partner is going to make you feel good and validate you." It's our cultural template for "true" love. Think Tom Cruise in Jerry McGuiredeclaring his love for Renee Zellweger: "You complete me," he says, with trembling lip.

Except that no one has a marriage like that. What's more, says Schnarch, no one should. Sure, the you-complete-me stuff works fine in the beginning. It's even fun. Like two people cinched together for a three-legged race, there is satisfaction in getting the groove of operating side-by-side with perfect fluidity. But when you try to keep those tethers on indefinitely, reality intrudes. Two people aren't going to agree on every move. And they'll get tired of always accommodating the other—by keeping quiet, by moving the same way, by propping the other one up.