Sex Starved Marriage
Sex Starved Marriage...
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By Patrick
Kampert, Tribune staff reporter Published January 26, 2003
`It's a very simple
principle, but when you are caring about your spouse's needs and
desires, there's almost always reciprocity.' --Michele Weiner-Davis
All of the nine women
gathered in therapist Michele Weiner-Davis' Woodstock office had
hubby trouble and poor sex lives. So Weiner-Davis asked them
to try an experiment: Go home and seduce your husbands for two weeks,
even if you don't feel like it. Flirt, be affectionate, initiate
sex.
These women, in their
30s and 40s, came from various walks of life: teachers, administrative
assistants, stay-at-home moms living in Henry County . And they
all were complaining vigorously about their husbands' lack of attention
and help with household chores. So when Weiner-Davis suggested they
come on to their husbands, they thought she had flipped but agreed
to give it a try.
Two weeks later, they
returned, entering the room giggling and whispering. "I could
not believe what happened," one woman said. "My husband started
reading the kids bedtime stories--he never does that. He was talking
to me more. He was putting grout between the tiles." Every
woman had a similar story to tell. But one was still a little disgruntled.
"Why do we have to be more sexual to get our husbands to be more
of a partner in the relationship?" she asked. "It's not fair."
"Imagine if I was talking
with a group of guys and they were interested in being more physically
intimate with their wives," Weiner-Davis replied. "And I sent
them home with a homework assignment: They had to talk to their
wives more, and they had to go out on dates and be a little more
romantic. Can you imagine if they said to me, `Why do I have
to talk to my wife just because I want to be more physical?'
"It's different ways of achieving
the same closeness."
It could be said that
for centuries people have been using sex to get what they want.
But to Weiner-Davis, the story is less agenda-driven than you might
think. It's what she calls "real giving," or simply, the golden
rule: Treat others as you want to be treated. "All good marriages
are based on the notion that people who love each other take care
of each other. It's a very simple principle, but when you are caring
about your spouse's needs and desires, there's almost always reciprocity,"
she said. "What happened with those women is that, rather
than wait for their husbands to be more of the men they were hoping
they would be, they all took responsibility for their own role in
the marital stalemate and decided to tip over the first domino.
And in this case, that was being more physical, being more sexual."
In her private practice,
Weiner-Davis makes it a priority to get couples talking about what
makes them tingle. She said her experience with couples tells her
that there are many marriages out there with what she calls "a desire
gap," in which one partner wants more intimacy than the other.
Her assertions are borne out in a University of Chicago study published
in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which showed
that 43 percent of women and 31 percent of men admitted to having
sexual problems. (Although a new Kinsey Institute study pegs that
number at 24.4 percent of women, U. of C. researcher Edward Lauman
noted that the Kinsey sample was smaller, was based on random phone
calls instead of face-to-face interviews and excluded women who
may have had serious sexual problems.)
Finding an answer
Weiner-Davis found herself
focusing on sex when she saw a pattern developing in her practice.
Most of her clients with troubled marriages put her suggestions
into practice and were off and running in rebuilding their relationships.
But others got stuck. It took her a while to solve the puzzle.
"One of the things I finally figured out--like, duh--is that there
was no physical intimacy in the relationship," she said. "I wouldn't
say it was completely sexless, but it was infrequent and not passionate.
They had this void. When I finally started to ask about it and get
them talking about it, and getting them focused on touching each
other, the relationship started falling into place."
Clients say Weiner-Davis
makes herself vulnerable during her therapy sessions, sharing stories
from her own life and marriage. Weiner-Davis recalls a time early
in her own marriage when she was less interested in sex than her
husband and how they overcame that crisis to deepen their bond.
"I feel like I've been there, done that," she said. "I know the
benefits of having come out the other side."
Weiner-Davis' new book,
"The Sex-Starved Marriage: A Couple's Guide to boosting Their Marriage
Libido" (Simon & Schuster, $24), hopes to offer some of that problem-solving
to couples she will never meet in person.
How much is enough
But if you think a "sex-starved
marriage" is when the couple is intimate, say, once a month, think
again. According to Weiner-Davis, a licensed clinical social worker
with a master's degree in social work from the University of Kansas,
a sex-starved marriage is one struggling with that desire gap, whether
a couple has intercourse once a year or five times a week.
"Usually what happens is the person with less desire needs to have
all those good emotional things in place before they want to be
physical," she said. "But the person with more desire wants
to be physical before they're willing to invest energy in doing
all those emotional things. It's like a Catch-22."
As she tries to help couples
find a middle ground on sexual issues, Weiner-Davis is moving away
from being typecast as the "Divorce Buster." She got that tag with
the success of her book "Divorce Busting" (now in its 17th
printing), which caused a stir in psychological circles. In it,
she admitted she was biased in favor of marriage ~ a no-no in the
world of therapy where the focus is usually on an individual's self-fulfillment.
"I put the goals of the relationship above the goals of the individual,
and that means mutual caretaking," she said.
She also is at odds with
her profession through her use of what's called solution-oriented
brief therapy, which focuses on a person finding inner strengths
to achieve wellness. Typically, her clients don't need more than
a few visits ~ far different from the stereotype in which a client
gets counseling for a year or two or three. "When I'm stuck,"
she explained, "I don't want someone explaining that this is based
on the fact that I grew up like that. I want to know: What do I
do today? What are some ideas I can try?"
Yes and no
Her peers have mixed feelings
about her. The American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy
gave her its Outstanding Contribution to Marriage and Family Therapy
Award in 2001, but she hasn't been invited to speak at its annual
conference in more than a decade.
For her professional training
seminars, while others recommend her books to clients. Some university
professors make her books mandatory reading. Yet she's accessible
enough to dole out advice on everything from "Oprah" to "Today"
(she's scheduled to appear Monday on "Today"). "Michele is
effective because she speaks in a language that the general public
can relate to. She's warm and she's humanistic," said Northwestern
University 's Wei Jen Huang, a clinical psychologist. "However,
everything she says can withstand the most rigorous scientific challenge
and, to me, that's a gift."
Weiner-Davis dislikes
it when mental-health professionals use complex terms that go over
the heads of the public. "It's like there's this `in' group.
And if you don't do what they do, you can't have access to this
information," she said. "I think it's obnoxious, quite honestly,
and I've made it my life's mission to translate this stuff."
As the Divorce Buster,
her book and her Web site >
http://www.divorcebusting.com/
are usually a last resort for couples or individuals before they
end up in the bustling world of divorce court, which is especially
busy this time of year. "It really picks up in January. People usually
hold off on filing until after the holidays," said Frank Ariano,
an Elgin attorney and head of the family of the law section of the
Illinois Bar Association.
Weiner-Davis says some
marriages should end in divorce, citing cases in which domestic
violence or chronic substance abuse is present. But she and some
respected sociologists, such as Paul Amato of the University of
Nebraska and Linda Waite of the University of Chicago , note that
many failed marriages with relatively little conflict could have
been saved if couples had been taught better skills and learned
the scientific ebb and flow of marriage. "In the same way
we know that 2-year-olds act a certain way and teenagers act a certain
way, marriage also has developmental stages," Weiner-Davis said.
"Most couples get married and they're clueless about this. At certain
years and certain times in their marriage, they're going to hit
bumps in the road that are predictable. If they know this, it normalizes
it and they can see they can get through it."
So the Divorce Buster
is branching out, trying to help couples long before the love fades.
And part of that effort has her talking--a lot--with couples about
sex.
Love lessons
Increasingly, she is using
marriage-education seminars to help couples build better communication
skills. She says men in particular find the seminar format less
intimidating than private counseling.
A couple of weeks ago--even
though she considers herself a liberal--the Bush administration
asked her to present a sample of her "Keeping Love Alive" marriage-education
seminar to a group of state social-welfare officials from around
the country.
"She is not the only one
out there doing marriage education from a skills-based approach,
but she is a good example," said Wade Horn, assistant secretary
of health and human services. "She certainly is someone who has
a national reputation and has been doing this awhile."
Part of those communication
skills is, obviously, talking about sex with your partner.
"To this day, it blows
me away," she said, relaxing with her husband of 25 years, Jim Davis,
a real estate developer, in the living room of their home in Woodstock
.
"I'll work with couples who have been married
20, 30, 40 years. And many of them have never had a conversation
about their sexual relationship—what they like, what they don't
like."
So she's switching gears,
moving from Divorce Buster to Sex Myth Buster. For instance,
in the traditional thinking about sex, desire leads to arousal,
which leads to orgasm. But Weiner-Davis found that, with some of
her clients, the first part of the order was reversed. When a spouse
wasn't really interested in sex but agreed to make love anyway,
he or she often found desire followed arousal. That lined up with
a study by Rosemary Basson, an internationally known sex researcher.
"I can't tell you," Weiner-Davis said, "how many people have sat
in this office and said to me, `You know, I really wasn't in the
mood when my husband approached me; I just decided to go along with
the program. But once I got started, I really enjoyed it.' I wish
I had a dollar for every time I've heard that."
The desire myth
Another myth about sex-starved
marriages is that it's almost always the wife who has less desire.
Weiner-Davis admits she used to believe that one herself.
"I wrote an article in Parade magazine on low sexual desire in women,
and I got hundreds of letters from irate women," she said, laughing.
"They'd say, `There you go: another professional perpetuating the
myth about low desire in women. When are you going to start talking
about low desire in men?'"
Weiner-Davis' book speaks
to both spouses--those with high desire and those with low desire--without
pointing fingers. She says that investing in intimacy can help couples
who have found themselves stuck in neutral when it comes to nurturing
other facets of their relationship. "Our culture teaches us
that if you talk, if you go on dates, if you spend time together
as a couple, the physical relationship will just fall into place,"
Weiner-Davis said. "I've discovered the opposite is true too: When
people start to invest more energy into their physical relationship,
all of a sudden it triggers feelings of closeness and connection."
There is certainly a connection
in her own home. As a photographer gets ready to take her picture,
husband Jim leans in close, talking quietly to her and kissing her
on the cheek. She dissolves in joy and laughter.
Exhaustion cools couple's
chemistry
Rich and Tracy (they asked
that their real names not be used) say they didn't have a sex-starved
marriage. But they do say Michele Weiner-Davis helped them see how
important the physical aspect of their relationship was.
The South Elgin couple
went to see Weiner-Davis to get some help with communication problems.
(Rich, 38, works in sales; Tracy , 34, is a stay-at-home mom with
three kids ages 9 and younger.) But toward the end of their sessions,
they dealt with a common sexual stumbling block for couples: a busy,
tiring lifestyle.
Rich wanted sex more than
Tracy did, and he also wanted her to be more aggressive in the bedroom.
"Guys don't like to be the one who always initiates things," he
said. "I didn't feel like I was wanted." From her perspective,
Tracy was exhausted by the end of the day between child care and
chauffeur duties with all the sports the kids were involved in,
from soccer to gymnastics to flag football. Weiner-Davis helped
them find a middle ground, they said. "She's got three kids
who are poking and prodding her all day," Rich said. "She doesn't
need to be poked and prodded by me all the time. I realized that
maybe I needed to cool my jets a little bit. I learned about trying
to put the other person's happiness ahead of ourselves."
"Both partners need to
be open to meeting each other's needs, and it does take a partnership,"
Tracy added. "Even though you're tired at the end of the day, I
think it's important to still make time to connect with your spouse
no matter how tired you are." They also learned to be more
creative in carving out time for intimacy ~ grabbing short opportunities
when the kids are out of the house, using the lock on their bedroom
door, getting the kids tucked in bed earlier than their usual bedtime.
"It's made me realize
that if we don't put our marriage first, then we have nothing to
give to our children," Tracy said. "If you are happy as a couple,
your children will be happy. They know when Mom and Dad are happy.
They can sense it."
--Patrick Kampert
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True or false?
A government report issued
last July by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed
what private studies have been concluding for years: Married couples
have more sex -- and better sex -- than singles. Take a true-or-false
quiz based on marriage therapist Michele Weiner-Davis' new book
to test your sexual IQ.
1. "JUST do it" is
the slogan for Weiner-Davis' philosophy on jump-starting marital
intimacy. (True or false?)
2. For men, SEX is
primarily a biological urge, like scratching an itch. (True
or false?)
3. Husband and wives
are doing a much better job of communicating about their sexual
needs and desires. (True or false?)
4. Spontaneity in the
bedroom is possible after children come into the picture. (True
or false?)
Time to score answers
to sex quiz
1. True. Therapist
Michele Weiner-Davis borrows the Nike slogan to encourage couples
to see how sex can revitalize their relationship. "If they can get
their feet moving and watch what can happen as a result, not only
do they feel physical pleasure, but they start to think of themselves
differently--that they're not sexless beings, they are sexual people,"
Weiner-Davis said.
2. False. "More
often than not, it is about them feeling close and connected to
their wives," Weiner-Davis said. "It is about them feeling like
men, it is about feeling loved, it is about feeling wanted. And
I don't think many people with low sexual desire really get that."
3. False. "Sex
is a taboo subject," she said. "Even for couples who have been together
for years and years. But when I get them talking about it and focusing
on touching each other, the relationship starts to fall into place."
4. True. But it
is a little different. "You may not be able to jump each other's
bones when the mood strikes," Weiner-Davis said. "You need to do
more planning to make sure you have the privacy you need. But once
you get alone, you can be as spontaneous as you desire. Consider
it planned spontaneity."
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