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Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships, by David Schnarch

2024 Contest•February 6, 2026•32 min read•7,195 words•View original

Introduction: A fight I wanted someone to fight.

POV: It is 2013. You’re wandering around the internet, as people do. People on the internet are arguing, as they do. There was this one time when an online forum was debating a rather evergreen relationships topic[294] and someone dropped in a link to a blog post with a subtle, understated title–“Sex.”

I liked the blog post because it neutralized two powerful false narratives (purity culture’s and moral-relativism culture’s[295]), simultaneously puncturing the assumptions of both sides of an argument and saying much-neglected things. (More importantly, one of the people on the thread who was most unlikely to approve of random Christian moralizing liked it!)

The blogger wrapped up the post with some awe-inspiring conclusions. She said something like this: Sex is sacred. While she held that virginity before marriage is desirable, it was not the “be-all, end-all” measure of our worth as a human being! (as some of the communities she’d been within had assumed.) Yet, we can still hold ourselves and those who we care about to a high standard before and after entering marriage—for ourselves and for others’ sakes.

Then I looked at the comments on the blog post. (Sorry, I realize this is like three hops in to an internet rabbit-hole? Anyway…) I promptly got a case of cognitive dissonance! They all seemed to be responding to a single line in the middle of the post where the author said “wedding night sex is kinda “Meh.”, and five years sex is all “Yes!”, but 18 years sex is like “WOAH!!!”  ’ The commenters even proceeded to offer a series of “one-upmanship” maneuvers! Eighteen years of marriage, twenty years of marriage, “Oh boy, just wait till you see what sex is like when you’ve been married thirty years, my friend!” (By the time we’re getting to golden-anniversary award-winners—I am not even sure if I should believe there were 70-year-olds on the interwebz back in 2013!)

So, like, I know what internet-commenters are like, and granted, those comments could have been orchestrated as part of one unified performance piece and all, but I still felt disappointed. Like, what ever happened to “in sickness and in health”? Standing by one's spouse “for better and for worse?” It just sounded really self-interested.

And the commenters seemed eager to perpetuate an obvious myth just because it seemed to be to the advantage of their argument. Taken as a whole, they seemed to imply that you could expect enjoyableness-of-marital-sex to be a monotonic function, ever-increasing with time. Nobody thinks that’s true. I was hoping for just one dissenting voice, someone who hadn’t yet been pleasantly surprised with a marriage that reached the “mind-blowing sex 24/7” stage that these other happy couples seemed certain of. Someone who was realistic like, “Okay, there are some rough patches you may need to ride out, but you’ll both be better for it in the end.” Someone who would be like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego: “Even if my God doesn’t deliver me [from boring or otherwise disappointing sex]...” they would still hold firm to their principles.

That particular day, though, the internet did not deliver.

Oddly, years later, I found someone issuing the sort of clarion call I was hoping to hear… in a book about sex that attempts to sorta-empirically derive the value of monogamy, and without basing its reasons for that value upon Christianity.

That book was “Passionate Marriage" by David Schnarch.

The main deal: A synopsis of the author’s map of the relational world.

One of the key threads running through the book goes something like this:

One of the great challenges of marriage is to keep having good, non-boring sex with someone who knows you as well as a spouse (or a serious long-term monogamous partner). Why? Because the pull of emotional fusion is really strong. It becomes harder to “maintain your own course when lovers, friends, and family pressure you to agree and conform.” It’s hard to keep a hold on yourself–yet stay connected–in the face of a spouse’s growing importance in your life. Additionally, you kind of get to see inside that other person’s head in a way no one else does. But everyone has some bad stuff inside them, and they are often the last person to realize it.

However, he claims, the difficulty of attaining good sex with one’s own spouse isn’t entirely a bad thing. Why? In the book’s model of the world, the struggle to keep having good sex within a long-term relationship is almost solely determined by the couple’s ability to handle high levels of intimacy with each-other. And the path to handling increased levels of intimacy, it turns out, requires us to hike up the steep and toilsome mountain trail of character growth. No, “Now that I’m married, I’m home free and I can just chill out with my bride (or groom) on a nice, flat plateau and never have to worry about personal growth again!” It turns out that personal pain of the inevitable sexual frustrations and rejections encountered within a marriage can spur change and growth in a way few other things can. So, again and again, the gridlock of marital struggles drives one both spouses to enter the painful “crucible” of their own personal growth challenges (Growth attained by one will usually trigger growth for the other as well! Gotta love that. Ha. Ha. Ha.) But if they survive it, what’s in store for them on the other side is a dual gift: increased levels of intimacy and sexual satisfaction within the relationship, and previously un-chosen personal growth that extends beyond the bounds of their coupledom.

We’re talking extreme character change–change of a type and a magnitude that rarely happens to an adult. Why does it rarely happen? Well, one of the best answers to that can be found in Murray Bowen’s model of Family Systems Theory. If you take a systems theory approach and you look at all the people in your family, (or company or institution) and the narratives and informally-held history that charts out how they all fit together, your little (or big) group is maintaining an emotional homeostasis. Make a change so major that it risks disrupting the system–and the system will transform around you to get you back into a position that’s as close as possible to “right back where you started.”

Family Systems Theory has this model as its starting point. So it was developed with the expectation that the usual things people try to do get them right back where they started… and to look in “other directions” than the usual ones, to give a robust approach to “breaking out” of such entrenched patterns.

And that gets me back to the author’s map of the relational world: He arrived at it, in large part, by applying the lens of Bowen Family Systems theory to sexual and marital relationships.

A note about the level of detail in this book review

David Schnarch, the author of “Passionate Marriage,” is a sex and marital therapist. Accordingly, there are stories from his counseling practice. Since some of the couples come into his office are on the verge of divorce, some of them involve horrific fights. Since he’s a sex therapist, some of them involve the very personal details that he clearly only knows because his clients re-capped how things went with the, ahem …“at-home lab portion”.. of the, ermm, “program of studies” on sexual and marital relationships they “signed up” to take together.

I don’t want to assume that all readers of this are, to a man, ignorant of or uncomfortable reading about sexual functions and practices described in the book. Of course not[296] But I also will assume that this book review will cross the eyeballs of a few people who wouldn't have sought out the level of detail of a book on sexual and marital therapy, and aren’t comfortable with a high level of detail on that.

For that reason, (and a few others) I’ve decided to mostly stick to very general descriptions of actions involving foreplay and the genitals.[297] This choice on my part might lead you to believe that the book has such a restrained vocabulary that it never talks about the nitty-gritty details of physical specifics. That… would be inaccurate. There are even two layers of distancing: the author, too, exercised his own editorial restraint when he recounted some of his clients’ most personal moments.[298]

Oh–and about the terrible fights in the counseling sessions: these are wildly interesting to read. Since I’m only relaying a small portion of the counseling, (This book is great about following individual couples through the process of their transformations–and all the aspects that come up in counseling and in their responses to the “push” when their back home and throughout their lives. Even while illustrating a single aspect of human nature or of his approach, Schnarch doesn’t usually often mention one-off anecdotes about a couple, who you then never hear about them again.) I think a reader who picks up the book might find some of them are “dialed-down” by comparison.

  1. Some concrete, object-level observations, some theory.

  2. Obstacles to change.

Trying to move forward with personal growth is full of ironies. One of the foremost is that the person whose presence has the most potential to provoke you to change is the same person most likely to hinder you once you try.

Schnarch’s take looks like this. He quips:

The task of marriage seems to be finding out who you really are—while fending off someone who’s all too ready to tell you!

(And then he quotes a Mencken line saying “Someone may be a fool and not know it—but not if he or she is married”!)

“Fending off someone who’s all too ready to tell you” (to tell you what’s wrong with you, that is) is pretty serious. And then once you think you’ve figured out what you’ve been doing wrong and start to fix it… that doesn’t guarantee your spouse will instantly applaud your efforts. Sometimes it even feels like a case of “wow, your partner will punish you right at the moment you think you’re finally getting something right.”

And that indeed is also often the case. We complain and complain about a family member’s faults, but we find it convenient to have something about them to complain about. If he or she starts unilaterally pursuing growth and change—now, that’s really threatening!

There’s a great moment example of confrontation and then self-confrontation with one of the couples Schnarch counseled, Bill and Joan.

In a counseling session, they had discussed how basically every time they’d try to have sex, the husband ended up losing his erection. The discussion was tangled up with Bill saying he felt really terrible about letting his wife down, about not pleasing her. The counselor pointed out that there are options for doing the latter which don’t depend on that specific member to be aroused… if he’s genuinely worried about disappointing his wife, why doesn’t he avail himself of those options?

The response? Silence.

Joan says, “I really want to hear this one!”

More silence.

“Well, I guess I look pretty selfish.”

“The question isn’t how you look. Are you?”

Several days later, when they make their next attempt at sex, their typical pattern begins to play out, with the husband losing his erection in the same circumstances when that would normally happen for them.

Schnarch recounts:

“Bill thought that was the end of sex for the night. He expected Joan to get angry and pull away, which was actually okay with him under the circumstances.”

But this time our last session was fresh in Joan’s mind. She thought, “I saw that split second when Bill acknowledged he was selfish. He knows he is! …He as much as admitted he should keep doing things to arouse me if he’s really interested in my satisfaction…”

So Joan’s there chewing on her thoughts. That’s two differences in her response already:  1. She doesn’t instantly flare up in anger. 2. She has something to think about: In their counseling session, she SAW what was within her husband. So there’s kind of no point in declaring she thinks he’s being selfish now that they both know he knows he’s selfish.

It sounds to me like they had acted like “having just lost an erection” and “not being able to please your wife” were “obviously” equivalent for a long time. So long that it hadn’t even occurred to Joan that she could ask her husband to pleasure her to orgasm by another means (in spite of the fact that this was indeed a familiar routine to them early in their relationship) after that happened. She wanted that though, and was in the process of thinking things through and gathering up her courage to ask for it.

Most of you reading this are probably thinking, “That’s so stupid; how could she not think of that?” (and indeed, Joan seemed to have this same reaction.) But that is no indication that you’re tremendously wiser than her: The question for you is “What things that I do in my own family that an outsider would look at and say ‘That’s so stupid; why do they keep doing that?’ ” This reflects how family systems operate: you get “locked in” to a set of habits, tendencies, and assumptions that only exist within the strange, small world of that family (or group or institution). The activation energy required to overcome a mindless “this is always the way we do things” habit is intense. Without a word needing to be spoken, we know what suggestions will cause backlash–and which moves involve significant risk.

When Joan did make her request, Bill was stunned. Their drama continued:

He didn’t say no, he just lay there in silence until Joan got the message.

Very rapidly, Bill’s refusal confronted them both with his selfishness. Normally, Joan would jump out of bed in a huff and move into the guest bedroom for several nights. But this time, she stayed in bed. She didn’t make a show of moving to the far edge of the bed to get away from him, and she didn’t reach out to reconcile. She lay awake in the dark, alert, saying nothing, but not letting the issue slide. The silence was deafening. Neither of them could sleep.

And then, about an hour later, he agreed.[299] Leading up to that decision, his mind had gone in a lot of different directions: “first he thought about criticizing Joan for the way she had asked him, then feeling embarrassed and immediately assuming it was because she made him feel like he wasn’t good enough–just like his father did.” Then trying to convince himself Joan was insensitive, next trying to convince himself to be “independent” and not let her tell him what to do.. Yadda-yadda. These were the familiar paths of thought.

But as he hung in there, in the quiet, there were some unfamiliar things for him to contend with as well. He saw what he had to contend with:

Her composure, however tenuous, told him Joan knew what she was seeing, and she wouldn’t forget it. He felt pushed by Joan, but something deep inside him said she was entitled to ask what she did. Although he was angry at her, he also respected the way she had stood up for herself. He sensed this was somehow a decision point in his life. He was in turmoil–and alive.

Joan didn’t just need to get up the courage to ask for what she wanted; she needed to “hang with it” through a time when they were both uncomfortable. Instead of fleeing to the guest bedroom–an action that, while unpleasant, was a familiar routine (and one that would leave Bill feeling justified that the fault is not just with one party), she stayed right where she was, silently letting Bill grapple with having to see himself. The possibilities that the experience which followed were going to open up preceded by one of the most unhinging things in a relationship–a wide gap opening between them because one of them is suddenly not playing by the familiar rules.

And this is not just a one-off. Earlier in the counseling sessions, when Joan would get calm or curious in discussions that would typically make her anxious, Bill’s anxieties would have an uptick, and he’d try to “get them back into familiar territory” by embroiling her in a fight. Other couples in other situations, too. When one spouse quietly, reasonably, draws a new line in the sand, that’s what really scares the other one.

  1. A certain tone

The thing about committed long-term relationships is that you know each-other so well. Such an effective “sparring partner.”  This can be for bad, or for good.

You can communicate way more than the on-the-surface legible meaning of the specific words spoken and the objective actions taken. Different tones have different meanings as well–exquisitely parse-able by your spouse, and crucial to how a given interaction plays out.

Schnarch gave some examples of how this may play out with differences of tone that could show up in a kiss. You could have:

  • The perfunctory kiss on the way to the office.
  • The smothering kiss that rekindles childhood fears of an intrusive, engulfing parent.
  • The mushy, limp kiss of passivity and withheld eroticism.
  • The impatient kiss of a partner preoccupied with more important things.
  • The sloppy, soupy, wet kiss that triggers anger rather than desire.
  • The rigid-tongued kiss of the mechanical lover.

Okay, those are the bad ones he listed. He gave the good ones first, but I figured I could take liberties with the organizational scheme. Here they are:

  • The soft but electric kiss of a familiar lover.
  • The hard kiss of passion.
  • The breathy, languid kiss of tasting and smelling each other’s body.
  • The gentle bite on the lip from someone begging to be [redacted][300].

Notice how if your spouse gives you a lousy kiss, this is such a hard thing to call them on. (Or maybe just you know. But maybe if he or she doesn’t even know, that’s worse!) Yet it alters the tone of the interaction in ways that are perfectly perceptible. This is an instance which, as the author likes to point out, even if nobody’s saying a word, is full of rich communication.

  1. Illusions

This model we’re using here anticipates family members around each-other will get “locked in” to certain modes of behavior (how we “always” do it), and be constrained by little deceptions and personal myths which become, for one reason or another, difficult to shake. They warp one's vision of oneself and one's family members. From the inside, though, they may even seem utterly necessary.

Sometimes one false word, one misunderstood action… in an anxious family system… might result in you feeling pretty compelled to perpetuate a lie about who you are. I remember once marveling that a Christian book about sex technique[301] advised that in the situation where a wife has been faking orgasms for years or decades “I believe that the husband, in most cases, is better off not knowing.” This was based on horror stories of disastrous results seen as a result of this “attempt at honesty” in their counseling practice.

And really, how do “walk back” from that one? “The sex we had… I may not actually have enjoyed it as much as I’d led you to believe at the time?”

Sometimes an illusion emerges even when there’s less of a “white lie” situation and more of an incorrect assumption that clashes with reality. Lie the assumption that… even if the magnitude of f(t) is not very high, the d/dt of it will cause it to improve over time.

Such was the case for one woman who sought out Schnarch for counsel because she was having difficulty getting aroused. When she first met the man she later married, she found the shy and clumsy way in which he pleasured her to be endearing:

She could reach orgasm even though he didn’t stimulate her in the way she liked. It was fairly easy for her to reach orgasm (low orgasm threshold), and she figured he’d improve with time. Several years into marriage, however, he hadn’t. The same physical technique now made her angry and frustrated…

This is in a section (one of the many sections, really) that talks about how tremendously “what’s going on inside your head” affects the satisfaction and arousal level of sex. (Spoiler: It seems to be waaaay more than the conventional narrative assumes! And waaay more than many respected therapy techniques assume as well.) Mental dimensions of the sexual experience. “…’poor technique’ under the right circumstances can lead to orgasm; the same technique, perceived differently, does not.”

Their first therapist, who tried to find out “what had changed,” could never explain her problem. The real problem was that nothing had changed as far as she was concerned!

That’s a point.

Then we have the sad case of a woman who had a rather hair-trigger orgasm. (I have to wonder how many people just stopped to laugh at that sentence. But I’m being serious here. Here me out.) She had been mortified and guilt-ridden throughout adolescence when she would reach orgasm in the context of a guy, but not really doing anything super-sexual. Then she got married.

Schnarch:

In the 20 years of marriage she and her husband had created a paradox I’ve seen many times: she was viewed as the sexual “dud.” Her husband described her as “frigid,” unimaginative, and unwilling to experiment…

The wife had successfully hidden her eroticism from her husband for almost twenty years. She was afraid of her own responsivity and kept it under control. Her husband didn’t know what she could be like–or that she was ready to break out of her self-imposed dud pattern.

So… the husband started an affair… and then with his encouragement, the wife did, too. It’s deeply and ironically nuts that he was seeking a woman who was more sexual / really liked sex, yet Schnarch reports the wife and her boyfriend being way wild beyond what the husband and his girlfriend were doing. (Do not know how he has this data. Most of his own patients described are success stories. Could have been a case study he read.) Yet he remained “in the dark”:

He never believed it–that would have required recalibrating his picture of his wife, himself and their marriage. In some ways their relationship was a casualty of common denial of women’s eroticism: they eventually divorced.

“Oh what a tangled web we weave…” etc., etc.

In one of his counseling sessions, the author drew out an even larger deception.

Peter and Audrey came to him with a rather dark problem. It was marital combat. Furious resentment seethed between them, and as the first counseling session progressed, Audrey basically expressed that she wanted to be able to stay married to Peter, but also to be free to never have sex with him again.

As usual, I’m skipping a lot, but trying to somehow include “enough” for context. So fast forward to the intense session when Schnarch challenged her, saying he thought she’d been encouraging her husband to believe that she didn’t like sex at all, when the reality was that she “really liked sex.” (Yes, there was, ahem, a blunter wording than that used as well!) When she challenged Schnarch, asking “why might you think such a thing?” her counselor’s rejoinder included the observation: “It occurred to me that you might indeed know the difference between hot and mediocre sex. Maybe better than Peter.” And that implies other men. Also, not all of these were before they got married. (When, in private, she “came clean” to Peter about those affairs, she felt honest. While he felt terrible. She tried to make him feel better by saying, “the sex was lousy anyway.”) But, yay, a therapist who can do good epistemology for lie detection!

One good note in this really painful exchange, though, is that when Schnarch got done enumerating the pieces of evidence he’d used aloud, she just sat there. So she didn’t say anything–but she also didn’t object. In the words of her counselor, “That bespoke two things: my perception of her dilemma was accurate, and she was ready to deal with it.”

But maaaaybe not as ready to deal with it as you could wish! Audrey started in with:

"Well, I never told him I was a virgin!"

Well, that’s a way to make things look like your counselor is the one with the unreasonable position in the conflict! (From the book, it’s not 100% clear to me whether she revealed the affairs to Peter before counseling or during. In any case, she made it a condition of counseling that Peter not tell her counselor about the affairs. Fortunately, said counselor didn’t need to know that information to deal with this issue of deception.) Schnarch was ready to continue in a verbal volley:

“Nice try. You’re overlooking your intent. Did you know he believed your problem was that you didn't like sex and were inhibited across the board?”

“…Yes."

"Did you do anything to clarify this distortion when you realized that?"

"… No."

“Did you do things to deliberately reinforce his misperception of you?”

“…Yes.”

You can look at situations like this as an excuse to say “oh no, what terrible people” or “this is inexplicably crazy, and she’s hindering herself from her own desires[302],” but if you assume inexplicable chaos, does that have predictive power? I’m not saying you should believe that the therapist in the anecdote is doing way better than that (even though I happen to think so), but let’s look at his comment on this moment / see what happened next:

This was a ray of hope–but as far as Audrey could see, it was another step towards Armageddon. But she took it. There would have been no way to resolve the situation unless the truth finally came out.

And his counseling sessions are full of these–painful moments of insight that really skewer one spouse or the other… that “catch them in the act.” They each will make their own choices for how they will change going forward, but its pretty impossible that both spouses will leave these moments unchanged.

I notice that in each of these stories, the illusion is perpetuated by the woman. I’m not making some claim that women are more likely to be anxious about revealing that they “wanted more” or afraid of revealing their eroticism. Not sure what to say. Uhh.. let’s put it up to “I figured the things in these anecdotes were stuff that, on average, more ACX readers would just kinda want to be aware could exist.” Okay, let’s see what’s next…

II. Analyzing the analyst.

We’ve looked at stories from a few of this guy’s counseling clients, seen some “light bulb moments,” and talked a bit about the model the author is using to understand the pitfalls and the glories of committed relationships. And the means by which one resolves their consequent relational conundrums. (Namely: Have integrity, first, second and last. Also note: Having integrity means growing in integrity when you notice yourself falling short. Other also note: Having integrity means not “losing your cool” in the face of the many anxieties that revolve around your closest relationships, so you need to find a way to soothe your anxieties.)

Now we want to know how his theories and principles guide him as he tries to transform people’s relationships–from a position outside those relationships. Fortunately, he’s very willing to be up-front about the answer to that. (And even for some things he leaves unexplained, he’s not so bad at, “show, don’t tell.”)

  1. A certain style of persuasion

One of the more blunt and forceful commentators analyzing our present cultural climate whom I’ve ever read wrote up an interview with a high-profile Rationalist, pro-natalist couple a bit ago[303]. A thing that stuck with me was how she chose to repeatedly “ding” them for dodging (as she perceived it) from addressing moral absolutes:

“meticulously Californian in their aversion to offer explicit moral judgement [sic]”

But I hear this and I’m like, “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar!” At least that’s what the rural folk say–and twenty-thousand Arkansan grandmothers can’t all be wrong!

And make no mistake: In this age, moral judgment is vinegar. We don’t live in teeny-tiny villages with uniform values legible to all anymore. Airing your personal moral opinions (when the write-up of the interview is going on the internet, no less!) too readily is a way to ensure that someone, somewhere, who hears of you will become convinced you hate them.

So, back to that interview:

“...they studiously route round any explicit moral statement that might impose coercive obligations on someone else…”

Well okay, but maybe this couple has a set of moral convictions that binds them to not carelessly say things that impose coercive obligations on someone else? That IS a morality. (It actually sounds like something about which multiple major in-world treatises would exist in Terra Ignota[304]--and for reasons.)

If you have “access” to the ears of lots of people who don’t automatically agree with you, have not chosen to bind themselves by the same ethical constraints as you have, yet you want to persuasively speak truth into that person’s life to get him or her to CHANGE… isn’t that a good and beautiful thing? That type of verbal self-restraint… in a world that relishes “letting the outgroup have it,” that… that could be powerful.

  1. The author’s persuasion style often involves him refusing to let others “nail down” his take on moral issues.

The kind of verbal self-restraint I hinted at above is something he exercises, and something he preaches. For example:

Previous generations have recognized that marriage is often improved by the two or three things not said each day.

Which is not to say you don’t put forward hard-hitting truth to your spouse, or that he doesn’t put forward hard-hitting truth to his clients: You put it forward as you see they can take it. We speak to be useful to the other person, not to feel better about ourselves. That’s the point.

He doesn’t exactly push for his clients to “do X or Y because it's a morally-superior option.”

Why not “push” someone that way? Because, you see, the other person has a really obvious way to respond if pushed past the limits of what they’re willing to consider: They walk.  “But,” you say, “If a person is coming to counseling–even if it’s because he or she promised their spouse to do so, they can’t just ditch, now can they?”  Ha. Ha. Ha.  There are ways of “running” which don’t even require you to get up out of your chair.

And, in fact, thinking about whether one person’s choice[305] is or is not “morally-superior” can trigger a variety of failure modes: looking down on the other (if I am the one with the morally-superior choice), or if not despairing that the way I’ve hurt my partner has been terrible (which can have its own form of self-pity) and I’ll never get it right.

He makes a point that goes something like this:

You should not even want for someone to start espousing different beliefs at a drop of a hat, just at your say-so. (however awful their original of their beliefs are.) It would be a problem with their integrity. Part of integrity is holding firm on the inside to the things you advocate for on the outside. Changing what you think or what you do… is a thing that comes in response to receiving new information[306] or a greater concern for how your choices and actions affect others.

TLDR for this section: Sometimes it looks like he’s repeatedly dodging whether something is a moral issue.  He does this skillfully, and seems to be doing it when he does not think people are prepared to deal with it.

  1. The path to provoking change in others… as involving an almost blanket refusal to provide techniques?

You have all heard the old line about the definition of insanity. Yet when it comes to something as elegant and complex as human intimacy, it’s hard to reproduce initial conditions + context sufficiently to notice you’re “doing the same thing and expecting different results.”

The myths referenced in the previous sections have people acting as though “If I just tell people that what they are doing is wrong, surely they’ll realize that was a bad thing to do and they’ll change.” This is profoundly impotent, yet people tell themselves that proceeding in this way is somehow what they are “supposed to do.”

And the “map of reality” handed to the author by the history of how therapy has been practiced includes its own myths. One that he “zeroes in on” is an overemphasis on technique:

Marriage manuals of the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s dictated laborious foreplay and machine-perfect technique. Men were told to touch their wives like they were polishing their cars. Caught up in prescriptions for rubbing every nook and cranny, conscientious men were as estranged from their partners as if they’d skipped foreplay altogether. Trying to rub your partner the right way often rubs her the wrong way, since she’s likely to feel you’re just “doing your job.”

It may sound obvious that foreplay isn’t amenable to a skill-building approach–but you couldn’t prove it by the hordes of contemporary self-help books. Now we’re supposed to “communicate” and reveal what we want… But… we always communicate through foreplay.

There’s both a positive and a negative to that. There’s this dynamic which maybe seems a little paradoxical (but not really) which he encourages his patients to consider: By not hyperfocusing on trying to attain some specific concrete goal (like, you know, wife’s orgasm. husband’s orgasm. Something like that.) but just trying to have a pleasant experience together, focus on each-other, and focus on providing pleasure to one's spouse, paradoxically, often makes you more likely to attain that goal.  Or, at least–doing the opposite makes you less.  Not sure which it really is.

  1. “I just wanted you to validate me.”

The author recounted one moment from his practice where the couple he’d been counseling had just made a great shift, and success and insights were abounding. But Schnarch was convinced that for him to take the next “obvious, ordinary move from the standard social scripts” for that interaction would have been a misstep:

Suddenly, we’ve got meaning everywhere! Ken’s insight is so accurate and important it would be easy to agree.  But I’m also clear Ken isn’t really asking me a question–he’s already pretty sure of the answer and anticipates praise for his insight. He’s making a bid for me to validate him. Out of respect and belief in him, I’m not going to take the one-up position he’s offering…

If you think about that for a minute, you really have to wonder if that passes judgment on our educators, counselors, and therapists across the land. Wouldn’t this imply that most of them are repeatedly, constantly and continually failing us? But how can that be? Doesn’t the current discourse teach us that validation is the nicest and most wonderful, life-giving thing we can provide a person?

I’d say he hit the nail on the head. I’ve sure seen this problem before; maybe we’ve all been in the author’s shoes, more or less: Someone turns to you for help, effectively pleading “Tell me I’m okay,” “Tell me I’m doing the right thing,” “Tell me this plan of mine is good”--and you’re sitting there looking at your friend, or listening to them on a call, all the while knowing on a deep level that you cannot give them the specific thing they are asking for.

This sort of request can come in many guises, and I’ve often felt a tingle of apprehension that “taking the bait” (by straightforwardly answering the question) will put me at risk of violating my integrity. I always thought the problem was, “This is just too thorny (and important) to answer in a reasonable amount of time while also being kind.”

But Schnarch points out–no: the problem is they have put you in a position of being an authority on them. Accepting that role and offering that affirming praise (which if you think about it, is usually scripted/dictated for you by them)–for the low, low cost of being a little more entwined in a damaging and dysfunctional dynamic–doesn’t actually improve anything for them: it’s a negative. He seems to be implying that youcan’t give validation; it’s the nature of the beast. Self-validation or nothing; giving nothing is better locking yourself into a dynamic where an adult who came to you for help with his or her “I need to grow more strong and mature” problem relying upon other-validation so explicitly.

So then what do you do when someone tries to put that on you? Schnarch admitted there was a risk and a tension in not just taking that counselee’s bid for affirmation and hitting him back with the good vibe he signaled he wanted. (“...how far could I go before Ken feels like he’s back with his uncommunicative family?”)

I look Ken in the eye and invite him to join me as a competent man. “If you’re becoming more of a man–especially, your own man–why not answer the question for yourself?”

Ken clearly isn’t expecting my response. We talk a few minutes more. He walks out a little shaken. Karen[307] looks a little worried.

It’s just a very different set of priorities from what we’re used to.

Conclusion

TLDR: Committed relationships put you eye-to-eye with someone who knows you all-too-well for decades on end. (No surprise there!) The inherent conflicts that spring up between two people being united so closely regularly drives them into gridlock. But resolving the conflicts that drive us crazy can drive amazing personal growth. And also more amazing sex and intimacy than a lot of people who have been married for a long time can imagine is possible.

The author, David Schnarch, seems to have been an insanely-good counselor.  He’d hold back from sticking in his opinions at the wrong moment, but when he’s convinced his client is ready for the truth, he doesn’t pull punches. He knows there’s a tone and a context to every conversation. He keeps his eyes open for the “negative space” in the dialogue–what things aren’t being said that are usually said, and what does that mean? Good use of evidence. Also, he proceeds according to his principles and a theoretical framework (Family Systems Theory) that seems pretty effective.

Implications for society: A flawed map of human intimacy

...we’ve taken one kind of intimacy–the type in which our partner accepts and validates us–and convinced ourselves this is what intimacy is per se. Thus, we assume that intimacy hinges on acceptance and validation from our partner. Likewise we’ve confused ‘good communication’ with being understood the way we want and getting the response we expect.

–Schnarch in “Passionate Marriage”

And he uses his distinction that “good communication” is worlds apart from “the other person telling me what I find easy to hear” to amusing effect in some of the counseling anecdotes that he shares. “Actually, I don’t think you two have a communications problem,” he’ll posit: “It sounds like she’s very clear with her message; it just wasn’t what you were hoping to hear!”

But wow, a whole society taking a subset of the things which make up intimacy (namely the ones which in the moment: A. feel good and B. are not a threat to my present view of myself, and therefore C. interact with the parts of me that are things I like about myself) and saying that’s all there is to intimacy? All that exists? Sounds pretty crazy to me. You would end up with a whole tribe of millions of immature humans. That would be pathological.

We’re driven by something that makes it look like we crave intimacy, but in fact we’re after something else: we want someone else to make us feel acceptable and worthwhile. We’ve assigned the label ‘intimacy’ to what we want (validation and reciprocal disclosure) and developed pop psychologies that give it to us–while keeping true intimacy away. We’ve distorted what intimacy is, how it feels, how much we really want it, and how best to get it. Once we realize that intimacy is not always soothing and often makes us feel insecure, it is clear why we back away from it.

Well, daaaang. That’s kinda scary. But it reminds me of something I’m familiar with: having interactions in the so-called “real world.” I’d say that’s where we are these days.

We’re taught, and teach others to have wrong expectations surrounding intimacy, so around the world–or at least across the West, individual people don’t come close to the level of personal stability, integrity, and maturity they should be attaining. We’re missing out.

Suggestions to readers:

Should I read this book? Should I not read this book? I have no idea! But if you really want to take advice from somebody on the internet, I’ll do my best…

I think this book gives hard-hitting guidance for someone who’s struggling in a relationship. I also think it can be great for someone who's in a good place in their marriage! If you will literally read a moderately-technical 400-page book about sexual dynamics within committed relationships and think hard about what it has to say rather than divulge the details of your most intimate moments of your life to a complete stranger, this might be for you.

Some people would find it easier to “run” from most therapists’ efforts to press them to change. (That’s not to say that all therapists are even trying to press for change, or are effective at it.) Some people might find it easy to “run from” from taking in the claims of a book and applying it to their own lives.

You don’t have to hang on Family Systems Theory as the thing that could fix your life if only you could “get it”; do what is useful for you. Listen to the advice given you. Work at it from a different angle. Take an improv class. I don’t know.

But also, remember this is bigger than you.

The author quotes Pulitzer Prize winner Ernest Becker saying "our social ‘maps’ trivialize life and destroy any opportunity to feel heroic.” Doesn’t mean the opportunities for heroism don’t exist. Just, they’re harder to see.

Be a hero.