Enduring Desire

Your Guide to Lifelong Intimacy

Michael E. Metz, Barry W. McCarthy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781136891274
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the 2011 AASECT Book Award!

Co-authors of Men's Sexual Health, Michael Metz and Barry McCarthy have come together to inspire and motivate readers in their newest book, Enduring Desire. Real-life examples and clear, helpful individual and couple exercises allow readers to reach for realistic and high quality sexual satisfaction as a couple. Throughout the book, the authors promote positive, realistic sexual expectations without commercialism and the hyped, exotic promises that only set people up for disappointment. The message is down-to-earth and full of joy for all couples from their 20s to their 80s. The authors advocate the variable, flexible "Good Enough Sex" (GES) model, which validates the inherent variability and flexibility of couple sexuality and examines the biopsychosocial, multidimensional, and comprehensive roles, functions and meanings of couple sexuality.

1

Real Sex for Couples

The New Way of Thinking

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Why are so many people unhappy with their sex lives? Does it seem to you that nearly everyone else has great sex compared to you? Is anyone really satisfied or is sexual satisfaction such a moving target it seems unattainable? Does anyone over 30 have great sex? And why is sex so important? Too often people chase great sex in the wrong directions and listen to the wrong sources. Great sex is not magically found in a pill, although sometimes chemistry can help. Great sex is not primarily found by making yourself “beautiful” or “handsome,” although that can help too. Great sex is not automatic or found by “fortune.”

Mark Twain’s remark many years ago seems very true today— especially about sex: “The problem isn’t that people know too little, but that people know too much that just ain’t so.” Do you “know too much that just ain’t so?” Test yourself about what you “know” about quality sex by completing the following quiz:

Quiz: What You Know About Quality Sex

This is a couple sex-myth test. According to the best research and professional experience, all of these items are “no” or false. In the chapters to follow, we’ll guide you to understand the facts, but more important, we’ll teach you how to build attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that ensure your sexual and emotional relationship will continue to flourish and be all it can be.

It is very difficult to get accurate, meaningful information about intimacy and quality sex. This book will help you do that. Our message is that sex is natural and healthy and can contribute to your overall enjoyment and happiness with life regardless of age. Developing positive attitudes, psychosexual skills, and emotional expressiveness is important, and varies for each couple. In a real way, molding satisfying couple sexual intimacy is a special “do-it-yourself” project that brings challenges and joys at every age and stage of your relationship.

BUILD ON WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE FOR LIFELONG SEXUAL SATISFACTION

Whether you are in your 20s, 40s, or 60s, the ten sexual growth features presented in Chapter 2 will affirm what is already healthy in your relationship and describe how to ensure optimal quality sex in the future. This includes:

• Cooperating with your partner as an “intimate team” to provide a healthy climate for quality sex;
• Optimizing your comfort and confidence with sex;
• Feeling proud of your sexual self and sexual relationship;
• Understanding your body’s need for relaxation to enhance pleasure;
• Balancing pleasure with sexual function;
• Accepting variable, flexible sexual desire and experiences;
• Ensuring comfort and confidence by realizing that sex has multiple purposes and arousal styles;
• Affirming that sex can fit into and enhance your life with playfulness and special feelings.

Understanding these features inoculates you against sexual dysfunction and other sexual problems.

HEALTHY THINKING ABOUT SEX

Of course, we want fantastic, incredible, “great” sex all the time, spontaneously and everywhere—sex that just blows your mind! We want to ride the wave of excitement, soar like the eagle, and become delirious. And we want to instantly escape the humdrum pace of everyday life, feel intensely connected to that moment of ecstasy. This makes for a great sex fantasy but not real-life quality sex.

The fantasy approach to sex leads to thoughts such as:

• I must be missing out because I don’t have great sex like I see in movies. What’s wrong?
• My sex life is routine, even mediocre at times; it’s second-rate, pretty much the same all the time, uninspiring, dull.
• I feel that everybody else has much better sex than I.
• Don’t we love each other anymore?

Such thoughts are common. Accept that we all have these or a variety of other satisfaction-sapping ponderings. Our innovative way of regarding sex will help you develop healthier, realistic sexual thinking that will enhance your pleasure and satisfaction. Pursuit of “perfect sex” is natural, like the surfer who seeks the perfect wave. Yet we would do well to appreciate that riding the perfect wave is relative to riding and appreciating the ordinary waves. Without the variation, even the “perfect” wave is boring. Sex is enhanced by appreciating its healthy variability. Researchers (Kleinplatz, Menard, Paradis, Campbell, Dalgleish, Segovia, & Davis, 2005) have learned from older couples that optimal, exceptional sex experiences and lackluster ones exist in the same relationship. Mature couples can find great pleasure, solace, eroticism and intimacy with their bodies.

SEEKING QUALITY COUPLE SEX

Our new way of thinking about and approaching quality couple sex will seem peculiar at first, but read on. With our ten guidelines for sexual growth, you will develop an enduring quality of erotic sex that is gratifying, sustaining, and self- and partner-satisfying. We call this approach to real-couple sex, the “Good-Enough Sex” (GES) model, which seeks optimal sexual experiences based on a realistic appreciation that variations over time are healthy and necessary. Otherwise we set ourselves up for disappointment and disillusionment.

Our “Good Enough Sex” (GES) model is the best approach for real couples.

GOOD-ENOUGH SEX? YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING!

Are you thinking, “Good Enough Sex? Get out of here! You’ve gotta be joking!” We can imagine what your first reaction is since we hear it often—the incredulity of settling for sex that is “mediocre,” “boring,” “get-by,” “mechanical,” and other lackluster notions. But not so; hear us out.

This “good-enough” concept emerges from a long tradition in psychology (e.g., Winnicott, 1964), which explains that concepts of happiness, satisfaction, and contentment are built on what Dr. Paul Dormont (2009) calls “relative nirvana”—the happiness of striving for growth blended with acceptance of real-life limitations, imperfections, and the diversity of human experience.

The GES we’re talking about is realistically great sex that serves a number of purposes in your life—pleasure, tension release, self-esteem, emotional intimacy, and/or reproduction. We’re talking real people with real lives with real responsibilities and pressures, real kids, and demanding jobs. We’re talking real sex that fits into real life and, reciprocally, real life that fits into your sex life with enduring desire and satisfaction.

The GES approach is based on the nearly 70 years of professional sex therapy, serious relationship and sex research, and the clinical experience of seasoned marital and sex therapists. We developed the GES model as a positive set of principles for long-term, committed couples who experience sex dysfunction. This model guides therapists in their creative design of sex therapy interventions to help distressed couples and facilitates couple reflection on the meaning and value of their sexual relationship. We soon discovered that these positive principles have wide appeal and are relevant to healthy couples who want to enhance intimacy and sexuality.

The GES approach is consistent with and supported by recent research advances in the area of well-being known as “Positive Psychology” (e.g., Seligman, Rashid, & Parks, 2006; Lent, 2004). The GES model emphasizes how positive dimensions of couple sexuality can promote aspects of happiness (e.g., Lyubomirsky Sheldon, & Schkade, 2005). This research corroborates that when you are (1) realistic and genuine; and (2) constructive and affirmative about life’s experiences, including sex, you are happier. This research proposes that we have a lot to say about our own happiness. Do you think your happiness is in your power? A choice you make? We do, and we want you and your partner to be happy and satisfied with your relationship, including sex.

In the GES model, self-understanding and sexual meaning are crucial. Sex is not viewed as an isolated fragment of your life; rather, it is integrated into your individual and couple daily life, as daily life is integrated into your sex life. Your daily life provides the opportunity to enrich sexual interactions in a subtle yet distinctively personalized way.

KEEP PERSPECTIVE

Do not get hijacked by words that over-promise and set up impossible and self-defeating expectations for sex. Don’t fall victim to marketing hype like “orgasms that last for hours” or “ecstasy every time.” To think you can have perfect sex every time in any circumstances is pure hype. No one has a perfect sex life. Hype sets you up for self-defeating performance demands and disappointment. Get real! Instead think: really good sex, enduring desire, realistically satisfying, high-quality, and genuine couple sex—sex that provides a positive energy and that most days gives support to your daily life. Sex provides a buffet of experiences: at times, sex is enthusiastic, cheerful, erotic, gratifying and at other times uninspiring.

The “Good-Enough Sex” (GES) guidelines advance your optimal couple sexual satisfaction while realistically blending healthy variations in quality.

Real sex can be experienced as pleasing, eager, impulsive, affectionate, tender, passionate, mechanical, intimate, warm, reassuring, distracted, joyful, enchanting, amusing, gleeful, lackluster, fulfilling, comforting, delightful, thrilling, affirming, contented, harmonious, playful. “Great” sex, especially in a committed relationship, is uneven and variable. What the best research suggests is that regular frequency and variable, flexible couple sex that is fully integrated into your real life is the best quality, most satisfying, wonderful sex for you as a couple.

IS GES RIGHT FOR YOU?

We’ll help you to think in a sexually healthy manner throughout the stages and adaptations in your life. We’ll show you how to act in a sexually healthy way to build a lasting and satisfying couple sexual bond. We’ll guide you to feel sexually satisfied, not in a fantasy world but in real life.

We don’t want to sound like we’re dispensing more hype, but judge for yourself whether our GES approach for enduring desire and sexual satisfaction is right for you. Consider what we’ve learned from our many years of combined experience as relationship and sex therapists, researchers, teachers, and group facilitators. By embracing the ideas laid out in our book, you have little to lose and a lifetime of solid sexual satisfaction to gain.

We explore how real couple sex works and how to have smile-on-your-face sex that is honest and wonderfully satisfying. We’ll explain how great sex actually grows and matures, and how to fashion an “intimate team” with your partner to integrate sexual pleasure and security into your real lives. Fast-moving, intense, demanding lives are not barriers to healthy sex, but rather situations in which you can find exquisite pleasures, joys, affirmation, acceptance, fun—even when distracted and exhausted from the responsibilities of contemporary living.

WE OFFER YOU REALISTIC CONFIDENCE

Our new model of exceptional sexual quality is relevant for women, men, and couples, whether married or in a serious relationship. Age is irrelevant. We write about sexuality for real-life couples, not for the perfect, beautiful, stereotyped couples who are portrayed in movies and music videos. Throughout this book, we will confront “sexual hype” that supposedly liberates you but instead intimidates you and makes sex a performance test in which you have to prove something to your partner or to yourself.

This book aims not to intimidate you but to empower you as individuals and as a couple. The cultural hype about sex creates dysfunction, dissatisfaction, and disillusionment. For example, R-rated movies show young, beautiful couples either in a new relationship or an extra-marital affair. They are in a highly desirous state before any touching begins. Arousal is extremely rapid and high, and everyone is multi-orgasmic. Great fantasy and entertainment, but exactly the wrong model for real-life couples. We tell our sex therapy couples that if you have Hollywood-type sex once a month you are doing better than 95% of the population.

The core of quality couple sexuality is a biopsychosocial (body, mind, relationship), multidimensional (thoughts, feelings, behaviors), comprehensive (multiple perspectives) understanding of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• References
• Appendix A: Choosing an Individual, Couple, or Sex Therapist
• Appendix B: Resources: Books, Videos, and Trusted Websites
• Request for Feedback and How to Reach Us