Book Summary: Passionate Marriage By David Schnarch
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Chapter 1: Nobody’s Ready for Marriage, Marriage Makes You Ready for Marriage
The book: Passionate Marriage by David Schnarch
The chapter opens with Karen and Ken, a couple in their fifties who came in about a sexual problem. Sex was routine, and Karen got lost in fantasies to reach orgasm. They found the problem was larger than sex. Karen kept her own preferences instead of managing Ken's feelings. Ken faced his low self-worth, bought three silk shirts, and liked them.
Schnarch argues that marriage is a system with rules of its own, and its sticking points push people to grow. He doesn't think childhood wounds drive marriage. To another couple, Bill and Joan, who feared they had married for the wrong reasons, he said: "Nobody’s ready for marriage. Marriage makes you ready for marriage!" The process that does this is differentiation, an idea from psychiatrist Murray Bowen's family therapy.
Chapter 2: Differentiation, Developing a Self-in-Relation
Differentiation balances two drives, one for individuality and one for togetherness. "Differentiation is the ability to stay in connection without being consumed by the other person." Its opposite is emotional fusion, where partners get swept up in each other's moods. Bill and Joan felt they had no connection. Schnarch pointed out that they went ballistic whenever the other disagreed, which showed how much each mattered.
With low differentiation we run on a "reflected sense of self" and need constant validation. Schnarch says people pick partners at the same level of differentiation. He calls growing it "possibly the most loving thing you can do," and he admits it hurts.
Chapter 3: Your Sexual Potential, Electric Sex!
"There’s no beauty in sex," Schnarch writes, and "the beauty is in people." You have to put it in. "We’ve confused genital prime with sexual prime." A teenager has quick erections, but a sixty-year-old "has more personhood behind his eyeballs."
His quantum model replaces Masters and Johnson's four-stage model. Arousal and orgasm happen when total stimulation crosses a threshold, and total stimulation includes your feelings and thoughts as well as touch. At the far end is what clients called wall-socket sex, which he says is most likely in old age.
Chapter 4: Intimacy Is Not for the Faint of Heart
You can tell the married couples in a restaurant because they don't talk. Schnarch says that's good communication. Each knows the other doesn't want to hear it.
He describes two kinds of intimacy. Other-validated intimacy depends on your partner's acceptance. Self-validated intimacy means you disclose and keep your own sense of worth either way. When partners rely on each other's validation, the one who wants intimacy least controls it. He says intimacy develops "through conflict, self-validation, and unilateral disclosure."
Chapter 5: Sexual Desire, Who Wants to Want?
Schnarch thinks low desire often reflects good judgment: "healthy people don’t want sex when it’s not worth wanting." Carol's desire vanished partway through sex, and earlier therapists looked to her childhood. He told her, "I’ve never worked with someone whose sexual desire didn’t make perfect sense." His rule: the person with the least desire for sex always controls how often it happens.
The deeper issue was not wanting to want. Warren, raised by an alcoholic mother, had learned not to want. When Schnarch asked who chose whom, Carol realized Warren had never had to choose her. When your partner becomes more important to you than your relationship with yourself, Schnarch sees four choices:
- Withdraw emotionally.
- Engulf your partner.
- Allow your partner to engulf you.
- Raise your level of differentiation.
Only the last keeps desire alive.
Chapter 6: Hugging till Relaxed
Most hugs last four or five seconds. Hugging till relaxed goes longer. You stand on your own two feet, put your arms around your partner, focus on yourself, and quiet yourself down, way down. If you lean on each other, one partner's wobble throws off both.
Of his own marriage to Ruth, Schnarch writes, "Now doing it for ten minutes is better than two martinis." After a month of practice, Warren finally calmed himself in the hug and began to initiate sex. "Choosing Carol meant that Warren had finally chosen himself."
Chapter 7: Love and Foreplay Aren’t Blind, Unless You Insist on It
A USA Today article passed on Schnarch's suggestion to open your eyes during sex, and many readers balked. He says couples often live by an unwritten contract: "I won’t really see you if you won’t see me." For him, "foreplay is where we negotiate the levels of intimacy, eroticism, meaning, and emotional connection" for the sex that follows.
Mary disliked how John rushed her and acted as if her body were partly his. She tried what Schnarch calls kissus interruptus, pausing mid-kiss to open her eyes and look. John kept his eyes shut at first. In the end the couple had the most intense sex of their lives.
Chapter 8: Eyes-Open Orgasm, Making Contact During Sex
A saleswoman at Frederick's of Hollywood once asked Schnarch, "Can your wife pull this off?" It led him to think about sexual vibes, which long-term couples often lose. Theresa and Philip, married almost thirty years, had sex weekly but felt alone in bed. Schnarch coached them to follow the connection between them and keep their eyes open.
Eyes-open orgasm takes enough self-acceptance that being seen adds to arousal. Chasing it as a goal backfires. When it happened for Philip, it "was the first time he’d ever seen the light of day in the middle of his orgasm."
Chapter 9: Where’s Your Head during Sex? Mental Dimensions of Sexual Experience
What you think about during sex reveals you. Stan admitted to Florence that he thought of other women during sex. When she admitted she did too, he was furious. Schnarch ties this to the reflected sense of self, since we want to be our partner's one and only, even in fantasy.
Drawing on psychologist Donald Mosher, he describes three mind-sets. Sexual trance focuses on sensation, partner engagement on the bond, and role play on drama. He says fights over these styles help, because they keep one partner's limits from running the relationship.
Chapter 10: Fucking, Doing, and Being Done, It Isn’t What You Do, It’s the Way You Do It
Schnarch uses the blunt word for a quality, "sex embellished with erotic virtuosity," that doesn't even require intercourse. Doing your partner means ravishing them with fervor and generosity. Being done means surrender and the power of receiving. Fucking "is the subjective experience of doing each other and being done simultaneously."
It's hard to do with a spouse, and some people only let loose in affairs. Of 150 therapists at one conference, fewer than a dozen said they knew it firsthand.
Chapter 11: Two-Choice Dilemmas and Normal Marital Sadism
Audrey felt pressured by her husband Peter. Schnarch refused to push her toward sex, because Peter would never feel wanted that way.
A two-choice dilemma is when you want two options but get only one. You choose between one anxiety and another. Schnarch calls these dilemmas "grindstones of differentiation." Normal marital sadism is the ordinary ways loving spouses torment each other while seeming unaware, such as withholding pleasure during sex. Admitting it face to face reduces it.
Chapter 12: Hold onto Yourself, Your Crucible Survival Guide
There is no way around gridlock, only through it. Clients use the mantra "Hold onto yourself!" Schnarch writes that "Holding onto yourself is a shorthand way of talking about differentiation." It means knowing who you are, confronting yourself, and soothing your own hurts instead of matching your partner's mood.
He cites research showing healthy mothers and infants are in sync only about a third of the time. His tips include slowing your breathing and taking breaks for repair, not withdrawal. Clean pain comes from facing the truth. Dirty pain comes from dodging it.
Chapter 13: Couples in the Crucible, Reaching Critical Mass
Marriage moves between a comfort cycle and a growth cycle. Critical mass, "the amount of energy necessary to create a self-sustaining reaction," is when gridlock forces change. At critical mass, partners settle down, the pursuer stops pursuing, and people talk straight. He suggests adding to wedding vows: "I’ll hold onto myself. And though I expect blisters, I intend to hold out for bliss."
Chapter 14: Sex, Love, and Death
Schnarch names four qualities he keeps seeing in clients who differentiate: heroism, generosity, spirituality, and lack of shame. A Couples Retreat shows them. Charlie, a quiet teacher, finally voiced his fear of his own aggression. Bud, a former special forces soldier, told Charlie he was more of a man.
A good marriage means one of you will bury the other. Julia decided she could tell her husband Morgan "You go first," and he died two days later. "Marriage is where you build the strength to love and soothe yourself through the loss of an irreplaceable life mate." The chapter closes with the last line of his earlier book, Constructing the Sexual Crucible: "May we all develop the strength to love well."
Key Themes and Ideas According to Readers
An appendix gathers themes from readers' online comments. The partner with lower desire always controls sex. Dodging a two-choice dilemma means stealing your partner's choice. Holding onto yourself means speaking up for yourself, not only calming down.