Psych

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 cliches 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 McGuire declaring 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.

Sooner or later, a lot of these three-legged marriages wind up in gridlock: Each partner is increasingly frustrated by the other's apparent unwillingness to get on the same page -- and each becomes increasingly annoyed and worried about it. It's in this juncture, where the conflict between real intimacy and wishful thinking rears its head, that many of us notice the sex ain't what it used to be. But while we fear that this is the beginning of the end, Schnarch says it's often when things finally start to go right. It means marriage is beginning the relentless process of doing what it's supposed to do, nudging us away from the Renee-Tom model of partnership and forcing us to figure out who we are as individuals.

Real intimacy is frightening. It requires a kind of openness, honesty and self-respect that most of us aren't used to. But Schnarch's 30 years of counseling couples has convinced him that it's worth it. A truly intimate connection between adults is less volatile, because couples aren't ticked off about what their partner is or isn't doing to prop them up. It's more solid, because it's based on reality. "Ultimately, you get through gridlock and get to a place of more honest self-disclosure, where the focus is on being known, rather than being validated," he says. Best of all, the sex often becomes more relaxed, creative and connected. Literally and figuratively, no one's hiding in the dark anymore.

Learning the Language of Sex

When couples do try to address their sexual problems, they often focus on mechanics: Viagra, lingerie, trying out new positions. But sex -- even terrible sex -- isn't engineering, says Schnarch. It's a language, and its content is everything else happening in the marriage. The woman who doesn't say a word but barely opens her knees for her husband is actually speaking volumes. Ditto the man who is so intent upon pleasing his unpleasable wife that he frequently loses his erection. "Even the way couples avoid having sex is a window into who they are together," he says.

Often, sexual disconnect has a similar refrain: I can't show you who I really am. People's mistaken ideas about intimacy have made them overly reliant on a partner for their own sense of self. You demand that your partner approve of you, and you begin to count on him or her to reassure you that you're normal and that your feelings are valid. This makes it difficult to be completely open or honest with each other anymore. One or both of you begins to feel suffocated, and the intense vulnerability of sexual passion that was so easy in the early days becomes impossible.

Tammy, 36, and her husband, Jack, 34, struggled for years with mismatched sexual desire. Jack wanted to have sex all the time. Tammy avoided it. "I pretty much didn't care if I never had sex again," she says now. For her marriage's sake, she'd tried supplements and testosterone cream to increase her desire. They hadn't worked. Nor had a therapist who'd advised Tammy to try a little novelty -- like running a hairbrush all over her husband's body. "I already didn't want to have sex," says Tammy, still irritated, "and I definitely didn't want to do that." By the time they wound up at Schnarch's office, they were inches away