These days, since becoming a father and moving to West Los Angeles, I get a lot less rest than I was once wont to. (HCRS has been restless at night again, and I spend two hours a day commuting, a significant increase from the ten minutes I enjoyed until June.) As a result, by Thursdays, I’m usually so sleep-deprived that my cognitive abilities are mildly compromised. I have no intention of complaining about my joy-filled life, but will say that at times, such as this morning, I sit down to write at the computer and my brain simply goes blank. I gots nothin’. So, another reprint, this one from July 2007:
A reader named “Bob” writes:
I’m wondering though what you think about the concept of sexual frequency “normalcy†in marriage or committed relationships. In other words, if one partner has a higher sex drive than the other, what are the responsibilities (if any) of one to the other?
I know how the Church generally feels about this issue. The feelings range from glorified body ownership (a wife should submit to her husband’s sexual “needs†no matter what) to lessons of “thorns in the flesh†(repressing sexual “needs†are a good sign of spiritual discipline).
But how does a feminist feel about this? What do you do (if anything should be done) about unequal libido within a committed relationship? As the partner with a higher drive in my marriage, I constantly question my desires. Am I too dependent on my wife for sexual fulfillment? Maybe I should show more restraint as an independent person and a Christ follower. Perhaps this is my thorn in my flesh, a test from God. But then the Christian ideal of marriage seems to say much of “two becoming one,†some kind of mysterious interdependence, or even a combined identity. To have two different ideals of sexual unity, or any other ideal for that matter, seems counterproductive to the married unit.
Obviously, my first recommendation to Bob and his wife is that they seek counseling. That doesn’t mean I’m pathologizing his wife’s low sex drive or Bob’s more boisterous one. I am a great believer, however, in the marvelous progress that can be made with a good marital therapist. There are increasing numbers of Christians who work as marital therapists, and they integrate spiritual and psychological insights very effectively. Most married couples could benefit from a periodic therapeutic “tune-up”, even if no burning problem seems to be presenting itself.
Too often, we do tend to over-analyze incongruent libidos. It’s a staple of pop psychology that the partner with the lower drive is “repressed” or perhaps dealing with abuse issues from his or her childhood. Similarly, we often assume that the partner with the stronger drive is emotionally needy, or someone who seeks to soothe their anxiety and stress through sexual activity rather than a more appropriate outlet. Too often, partners can get into a tail-spin; the more the one with the higher drive presses, the more the one with the lower drive resists. The one with the higher drive feels neglected, unattractive, anxiety-ridden, frustrated; the one with the lower drive feels pressured, nagged, frustrated. Most people who’ve been in long-term relationships can recognize themselves in one (or both) of those roles!
It is by no means always the case in heterosexual marriages that it is always the man with the lower sex drive. But that’s Bob’s situation, and that matches up with our stereotype, so I’ll say a little about it here. I’m not going to rehash the great and mysterious words of Paul in 1 Corinthians 7. I will note that the New International Version says:
The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband.
In the context of a chapter on marital sex, that does make clear that a married couple do have sexual obligations to each other. But it would be a huge mistake to assume that Paul means that the lower-drive partner must always acquiesce to the one who’s hornier. I like how the Message version handles this same passage:
The marriage bed must be a place of mutuality—the husband seeking to satisfy his wife, the wife seeking to satisfy her husband. Marriage is not a place to “stand up for your rights.” Marriage is a decision to serve the other, whether in bed or out.
That’s really good, especially the bit about marriage not being a place to “stand up for your rights.” The mystery lies in how we each serve the other without ever insisting on those rights. For the higher-sexed person to demand that his or her partner provide sex on some sort of a schedule is clearly not what Paul is suggesting. At the same time, each partner is called to be deeply concerned with the well-being of the other — and of the partnership itself. That concern will manifest itself in the higher-sexed partner practicing self-control, not only in terms of physical restriction but also by refraining from nagging and pestering. The higher-sexed partner can’t come from a place of entitlement.
Similarly, the spouse with the lower drive has the obligation to be alert to the various ways in which he or she can provide emotional reassurance; the spouse with the lower drive is also, I think, obligated to honestly explore whether some dynamic within the relationship is causing a lack of interest. There’s a huge difference, after all, between genuinely not being “in the mood” and withholding sex as a passive-aggressive technique to gain the upper hand in the relationship. I’ve known plenty of men and women who’ve pulled the latter trick. They know the ugly old rule most of us first learn in adolescence: “He who wants it less, wins.”
The bottom line is that the “Yes” or the “I will” of the wedding vow is not a permanent disavowal of the right to say “No” in the future. Whether we are married to our sexual partners or not, none of us has the right to demand that another human being please us. In practical terms, it’s safe to say that the greatest enemies of true eros are entitlement and expectation. Nothing is a greater turn-off than a petulant insistence that someone “owes” us an orgasm (or even a kiss).
Sex drives have a way of fluctuating over time, of course. Most of us will go through periods in our lives (or in our months) in which we are hornier than at other times. That’s true for one of us in our solitude; it’s all the more true for a couple over time. Some couples stay at the same level of frequency in terms of sex for years and years; others start off fast and furious and taper off; still others go through various fluctuations depending on any number of circumstances (ranging from children to job stress to, heck, you get the idea.) Having spent lots of time with religious and secular couples, I note that these anxieties about unequal sex drives show up equally in partnerships where the two “waited” and where they didn’t. Refraining from pre-marital sex is no guarantor of post-marital sexual bliss; by the same token, lots and lots of “experience” prior to marriage doesn’t make anyone an expert on how to have great sex for years and years after the wedding day.
So, to Bob: there’s nothing wrong with having the higher sex drive. There’s nothing wrong with wanting your wife more often than she wants you. I understand that it feels disempowering and scary to be the one who “wants it more.” But you’re not wrong for wanting what you want, and your wife is not wrong for not wanting what you want. The test of your marriage is not the equality of your passion, it’s the prayerful, courageous honesty with which you both work through this disparity together. It’s a hard thing to talk about, even with (and, I think, especially with) a spouse; our fears and resentments and anxieties can come up so quickly. But there’s no way to work through this without that kind of radical honesty, which is why having a patient therapist to facilitate is often a really good idea.
Look, I’m not quite two years into my fourth marriage, so I’m hardly a relationship guru. But I’ve been around the block a time or nineteen, and I’ve done a lot of listening and living in my time. And I know some great marriages where there isn’t a lot of sex; I’ve seen some marriages fall apart even while the spouses within them were getting it on nearly daily. This I can say based on my own experience and on that of countless friends of mine: the absence of regular sex is not an automatic indicator of trouble, and a regular and mutually enthusiastic erotic life is no prophylaxis against marital misery. What makes a healthy marriage is the way in which the two partners deal with their incongruent desires. If they each practice radical mutual submission, remembering that marriage is not a place to assert one’s rights, they’re probably well on their way.
So has the commute been worth it? I personally would hate it.
A relationship between people whose sex drive is consistently very different is, in my opinion, doomed. For how many years can a person be expected to repress her desires for the sake of the institution of marriage, a relationhsip, or a desire not to hurt a partner? You can talk the issue to death (with or without a counsellor), but the truth will remain that one of the people in the relationship will feel sex-deprived, miserable and frustrated.
Sadly, people who atart dating are schooled to look at everything else before they even give a thought to their sexual compatibility. They try to figure out if their personalities, hobbies, values, belief systems, even reading preferences are compatible. And then if sex works, that’s fine, but if it doesn’t, they believe that they can coax it into functioning by talking, analyzing, counselling, etc.
Of course, it all works in the exact opposite way. Everything can be negotiated except desire. It is very difficult for a fiercely puritanical American society to accept but it’s a simple reality: desire cannot be summoned at will and harnessed to serve the needs of our social institutions. It’s either there or it isn’t.
Clarissa, I think part of the problem is that desire is hardly a constant throughout one’s life. The high-desire partner can become the low-desire partner and vice-versa as ageing, or parenting, or hormonal fluctuation, or a billion other issues emerge. Libidos rise and fall in response to many things — the way one is at 25 with one partner is no guarantee one will be the same way a decade or two later.
Among these billion other issues you forget to mention that people often just stop wanting each other. Their bodies need no reason for that. It just happens. Often, our desire to control every aspect of our lives doesn’t allow us to see that this is one area that we cannot control.
As for guarantees, they don’t exist in any area of human relationships. But at least people can hope to spend the first several years in sexual bliss if they pay more attention to their sexual compatibility from the very start.
Sure. But part of sexual compatibility is, how do you feel about the other person being more/less interested than you are? If one partner feels that sex is an entitlement, or one partner thinks that the other has an obligation to acquiesce to any sexual whim of the other’s, that’s going to be a problem even if your desires are perfectly matched the first several years of your marriage.
Broken record time – I highly recommend the blog series Why Your Wife Won’t Have Sex With You, written by a woman who was in one of those he wants it/she doesn’t/they hate each other marriage, and how she and her husband found their way out of the ugliness into a happy married life.
Thanks, myth, for that always essential website.
I was just wondering: why do you call your daughter HCRS instead of simply Heloise?
Clarissa: “Sadly, people who atart dating are schooled to look at everything else before they even give a thought to their sexual compatibility. They try to figure out if their personalities, hobbies, values, belief systems, even reading preferences are compatible. And then if sex works, that’s fine, but if it doesn’t, they believe that they can coax it into functioning by talking, analyzing, counselling, etc.”
Or, if sex “doesn’t work” (whatever on earth that means), then it’s okay, because the two of you are still compatible in all the IMPORTANT ways.
bmmg, because sex is unimportant to you, doesn’t mean it is objectively unimportant in the world and ought to be unimportant to everyone else. Sheez.
I would think you’d have something to say if Clarissa’s point had been the other way around – that people try to figure out before marriage if they’re sexually compatible but don’t bother finding out about whether they have shared reading preferences, and then hoo boy! the silly people think they can “coax it” into functioning!
But part of sexual compatibility is, how do you feel about the other person being more/less interested than you are?
This kind of thing is why I don’t think it makes sense to say that sexual compatibility is “important” or “not important,” because sexual compatibility means so many different things. Maybe you’d prefer three times a week, don’t consider a partner wanting sex only ever couple of weeks a deal breaker, but would absolutely not be able to tolerate a partner who insisted you go to clubs with him where you’d have sex in public. Maybe, for a given couple, sexual compatibility is agreeing with each other that sex isn’t that important.
For me personally, the number of times that I’ve been really hot for someone, we’ve gone to bed with each other, and I’ve discovered then and there (or, say, within the first few months) that we were sexually incompatible is precisely zero. In theory, I could imagine it happening – someone never mentioned that they wanted to get into BDSM or something – but it’s never really happened to me. I’ve had a couple of occasions I froze and had to bail on someone and not go through with what he wanted, because I really hadn’t been feeling the attraction to begin with (and I learned my lesson, and quit even starting to make out in those cases), and there have been health issues in the course of twenty-one years of marriage. But that’s it.
So, if I were ever in the market to marry again, I’d be looking for us both to be hot for each other, naturally, and to be able to talk freely about sex, and I’d be looking at how my potential spouse handled differences in general, but I wouldn’t assume that our mutual desires for frequency in the beginning were all that predictive or our desires for frequency over time.
Also, I third mythago’s web site recommendation.
Mythago, even among the many to who feel most in touch with their sexuality (which is fine), it’s still given too much priority if it’s being considered (as she suggested) before personalities, belief systems, and values.
Mythago: “But part of sexual compatibility is, how do you feel about the other person being more/less interested than you are?”
I agree with this question. For those couples in which there is at least one sexually interested person, I would still think that it wouldn’t be very enjoyable for a person to know his/her partner is only acquiescing to sex out of a sense of duty.
Just to save a few clicks — here is the current link to the “essential” website:
http://juliagrey.wordpress.com/
It moved. Who knew.
bmmg39, why do you think it’s given too much of a priority? All those things you listed – and let’s throw in views about money, and whether or not to have children, since I’ve seen marriages implode over these issues – if a couple is incompatible in any one of those areas and cannot reach an acceptable middle, I’d say it’s good reason to end a relationship. If you have a couple where one person is Jewish and the other is Christian, and one felt that they couldn’t be happy without the other converting, I’d say they were acting prudently to end things. Or if one person wanted kids and the other didn’t. Or if one person insisted on saving every penny earned and the other wanted a more lavish lifestyle. Any one issue that a couple has to negotiate can cause major, painful strife in a relationship if they can’t come to a solution that leaves everyone satisfied, even if they’re compatible in all other ways – why would sex be any different?
How about before hobbies and reading habits? You’d probably put those ahead of sex, but most couples wouldn’t. And as B and Lynn said, sex isn’t something that’s in a separate little box, untouched by values or belief systems.
This is from the Julia Grey website that some of you have recommended:
“Here’s a common situation “Steve†outlined in the Comments sidebar to one of my earliest posts:
Man wants sex more than woman. Man seeks to find occasional sexual release in masturbation to pictures of other women. Woman throws giant fit, throws out magazines etc. Man feels woman is trying to completely control all sex by setting herself up as only provider, sees masturbation as harmless. Woman feels jealous, hurt and betrayed; feels threatened by masturbation. Man feels he has lost all control of sex life with woman completely in driver’s seat. Sex between them deteriorates.
Let’s get something out of the way right off the bat: as much as I understand and sympathize with what’s going on in this woman’s head (something similar having gone on in mine once upon a time), she is not behaving well. At all. She has unreasonable expectations and is making unfair demands. She is W.R.O.N.G., and that spells “stoopit.â€
That’s really the mindset that you want to recommend? The woman is “stoopit” for objecting to her man’s use of porn? Really???? If that’s the case, I hope every woman in a relationship is “stoopit.” Then maybe we have a chance of ridding ourselves of the ruinous influences of porn. Of course, what do I know? I’m stoopit.
“Stoopit” is not a smart way of putting it. But your comment is tangential to the objection being posited.
Julia Grey was (I believe) saying that the OTT response — throwing out his autorerotic aids and pitching a fit — is both wrong and not smart. She concludes this in the context of the understanding that the reaction drives the issue along the power dimension and not the love dimension of the relationship.
By all means she can express her feelings and assert her boundaries — what she will or will not do in response to his behaviour up to and including ending the relationship. But a smart person uses the P.U.R.R. principle to behave with emotional responsibility (as opposed to reactivity) when triggered.
Pause
Understand what you are feeling
Reflect on what you should do
Respond appropriately.
Reacting without PURRing is emotionally irresponsible and usually self-defeating and in that sense if not stoopit is at least immature.
The unreasonable demands and unrealistic expectations statement I read as relating to the belief that he should not have any outlet for expression of his sexuality than those that she affords him. I don’t see this as necessarily an endorsement of pornography per se.
What Randomizer said. The probability that promptly pitching a fit and throwing the pictures out will actually communicate to the guy what she likely wants it to is exceedingly low. There are better ways of handling marital communication about porn.
I’d note that elsewhere on the site, Julia has a section where she explains why bringing your low sex drive wife porn in order to rev up her sex drive is likely to backfire, so it’s not that it’s a “yay, porn is great” site, more that this particular example is one of lousy marital conflict resolution.
Mythago: “How about before hobbies and reading habits? You’d probably put those ahead of sex, but most couples wouldn’t.”
There’s a reason I chose the other examples for my sub-list.
If you read for purposes other than cherry-picking for argument, the problem isn’t ‘she is uncomfortable with porn – the problem is in the response which escalates into a power battle, and quickly stops being about the porn itself. I believe elsewhere on the site she explains WHY many women are uncomfortable with porn.
For what it’s worth, I find that if the sex part of the relationship is going well, I have a pretty long fuse about any other conflicts, and an easier time working them out without a bunch of resentment.
That said, I’d like to humbly submit that “the sex part” isn’t the same thing as “intercourse”, and there’s a whole landscape of physically intimate, more and less vulnerable/demanding/time-consuming/orgasmic stuff that can all be options for compromise when there are disparate sex drives at work — but generally when we say “sex” that’s not what we think of.
This is one reason why it behooves men with a high sex drive to marry a younger woman. Things might be OK in the 20s or 30s, but at some point if there is incompatibility there will be a degree a seperation which becomes greater as time goes by.
…so that when you’re older and less interested, willing or able, she’ll leave you for a man who can keep up? I’m really not trying to be snarky but your last sentence is gibberish.
Heh, yeah I’ve actually been advised (by my mother of all people, yeesh) to marry a younger *man* because he’ll be willing and able for as long as I will. Not sure where xyz’s recommendation is coming from, perhaps Pfizer?
Meh, there are a number of folks who can’t admit to themselves that dating much younger women is their bag, or for some, that the reason they prefer younger women might rest on less than admirable reasons (a desire to feel young, or a sense of entitlement that now that they’ve bloomed late they’re entitled to those hot young babes they missed at the same age). Fertility or sexual compatibility sounds a lot better than “I have a fetish for women half my age”, I guess.
Mythago
“…so that when you’re older and less interested, willing or able, she’ll leave you for a man who can keep up? I’m really not trying to be snarky but your last sentence is gibberish.”
I guess that is always a risk. Perhaps you might chose to marry a woman who is older, less fertile, and less attractive just so she will be less likely to leave you. What ever your bag is, is ok with me.
Metamanda
It is good that your mother is teaching you about the birds and the bees.
i do try to learn from those older and wiser than i.
hope you took my pfizer comment as just some unserious ribbing, i realized after hitting submit that it could have come off crueler than i intended.
(Chuckles) A week ago, Hugo, I’d have sympathized, but added a bit of an elbow about my 30 minute commute on BART. Then our bridge started falling down, and I have about a dozen elbows every morning in my face… Cali’s falling apart fast.
In my experience, the most destructive things that can happen in a relationship in which there are going to be sexual variances between the partners are dishonesty and denial, to self and to the other person, about what one absolutely needs sexually and what one is and is not capable of doing and being sexually. I’m not going to shade in all the lines here, but I got married knowing that despite the fact that we loved each other and were committed to each other, my wife and I weren’t going to be all that sexually compatible. I went ahead anyway. I deceived myself, and by implication her, into thinking that we’d eventually work it out, and I was also still in the military at the time, which tends to impose its own incentive for having a stable, officially-sanctioned dependent and cohabitant off-base. I spent the first two and a half years of our marriage ignoring the problem before I tried more actively to resolve the discrepancy. She spent the next two and a half leading me to believe that we could work it out, even though what I wanted and needed proved fundamentally beyond what she could do. She was afraid of losing me, or at least, of losing what stability we had, and, for a time, so was I. We spent the last year miserable, resentful, and without very much trust in or respect for each other before the situation became emotionally and materially intolerable enough to put an final end to it.
Based on that experience, I would say that there is a lot that can be worked out between people if they do have love, trust, respect, and honesty between them. But some things can’t, some needs are too fundamental and central to a person’s sense of self to get past. Fear, self-delusion, and dishonesty can keep things under wraps, but only for so long.
I work from my home office. The commute consists of walking down the stairs. Working from home has its drawbacks, of course, but I *care* about Gaia and the ecosphere.
Well said.