Book Summary: Resurrecting Sex by David Schnarch

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Resurrecting Sex (2002) is David Schnarch’s book on sexual problems in committed relationships. It has an introduction, four parts, fourteen chapters, and six appendixes. It applies the approach of his earlier Passionate Marriage to arousal, orgasm, desire, and medication.

The book: Resurrecting Sex by David Schnarch

Introduction

Schnarch opens with two frogs thrashing in a pail of buttermilk until their struggling churns it into butter they can stand on. A couple’s struggle with a sexual problem can work the same way.

Once a problem has lasted a while, he says, it shapes the relationship, and the relationship shapes the problem. He calls his method a second-generation approach. Masters and Johnson defined the first generation in the 1960s.

Part I: A Crash Course in Sex

Chapter 1: A Second Chance at Sex

Sexual problems are common, and most people hide them. Schnarch cites estimates that 10 to 52 percent of men and 25 to 63 percent of women have sexual problems. In the 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey, 43 percent of women and 31 percent of men reported a sexual problem in the prior year. Believing you are defective is normal too.

Chapter 2: How Sex Works

This is the mechanics chapter, built on the Quantum Model. Erection, lubrication, and orgasm are reflexes. They happen when your total stimulation rises above your body’s response thresholds. Total stimulation includes physical touch and also your thoughts and feelings. Thresholds rise with age, but Schnarch says aging itself doesn’t destroy the capacity for sex.

Chapter 3: What Is Happening When You Can’t Get Aroused?

Wendy and Jonah have been together ten years. He has had erection trouble throughout the marriage, and now she struggles to get aroused and hides that her mind wanders. Schnarch separates genital response from feeling turned on, and also covers desire problems and sexual pain. The long case is Phil and Mary. For over twenty years he lost his erection, she consoled him, and the second try worked. Her support kept the problem going.

Chapter 4: Do You Have Difficulty with Orgasms?

Kinsey compared orgasm to a sneeze. Schnarch says the reactions people build around it are far from simple. Orgasm happens when total stimulation exceeds the orgasm threshold. He calls rapid orgasm the most frequent sexual problem men have. He separates people who have never had an orgasm from those whose orgasms faded later in life and those with intermittent or situational trouble. He treats orgasm as an interpersonal event even when you are alone.

Chapter 5: Twenty-two Ways to Resurrect Sex

Schnarch gives twenty-two suggestions in three groups: optimize your body’s ability to respond, your physical stimulation, and your thoughts, feelings, and emotions. They begin with a complete medical evaluation and a warning not to push for the diagnosis you prefer, since some people want a purely physical cause so the problem isn’t their fault. Later ones include doing whatever works and operating from the best in you. Along the way he separates genital prime from sexual prime. Genitals peak in adolescence, but people don’t reach their sexual prime until their forties, fifties, or beyond.

Part II: How Sexual Relationships Work

Chapter 6: Changing Is Often Difficult, and Worth It

Part II makes the relationship the subject. Where Masters and Johnson tried to reduce anxiety as much as possible, Schnarch argues that a relationship’s dominant patterns are more likely caused by things going right than by things going wrong. He covers two-choice dilemmas, gridlock, and borrowed functioning. Peter and Judy show the “test and fold” process. Peter hints at sex, Judy gets nervous, and he backs off for months. Alexia and Martin show the high-conflict version, “test and attack.” That first failed test is the opening act of change, not the end.

Chapter 7: Hold On to Yourself!

The size of the problem, how long it has lasted, and how bad things have gotten matter less than your ability to hold on to yourself and do what needs to be done. Schnarch recommends a giant step over baby steps, and says bravery requires anxiety. Holding on to yourself involves four basic activities:

1. Staying clear about who you are when your partner or the situation challenges you.
2. Calming yourself down, soothing your own anxieties, and licking your emotional bruises.
3. Remaining nonreactive when your partner gets anxious, reactive, or provocative.
4. Tolerating discomfort so you can grow.

Part III: Medical Options

Chapter 8: Sex Devices and Surgical Procedures

Schnarch reviews vibrators, constriction and vacuum devices, vascular surgery, and penile implants. He notes that bionic solutions appeal most to people who hope technology will let them ignore their marriage, or who want a fix they can use without involving their partner.

Chapter 9: Sex Drugs: Better Loving Through Chemistry?

Viagra and similar drugs try to lower the body’s response thresholds and amplify its response to stimulation. He also covers injected drugs, recreational drugs, and the early research on women.

Chapter 10: Can Medical Options Improve Your Marriage?

The issue, he writes, is not what these drugs will do to us but how we will learn to use them. Viagra improves erections for about 70 percent of men. For the rest, the easy fix disappears. When it didn’t help Harry, he and Patty faced questions they hadn’t expected, including whether she would stay.

Part IV: Couples in Search of Solutions

Chapter 11: Solutions for Arousal Disorders

The earlier material becomes a plan for arousal problems, in the same three areas: medical care such as checkups, medication reviews, and testosterone; physical stimulation; and thoughts and feelings, including desire discrepancy.

Chapter 12: So You Want to Have an Orgasm

Having a first orgasm, or having them more readily, more slowly, or more enjoyably, all involve the same solution: getting total stimulation well above the orgasm threshold. That means removing physical complications, building more relaxed and varied sex that isn’t aimed at a goal, and changing your sexual style. Directed masturbation is one of the methods he covers.

Chapter 13: Synchronize Your Pelvis and Your Inner Mental World

Many people use trigger fantasies to reach orgasm, and some find theirs disturbing. Schnarch discusses whether those can change. The second half is rapid orgasm. He rejects the hypersensitivity theory, citing a study that found no significant difference in penile sensitivity between men with rapid orgasm and men who lasted longer.

Chapter 14: What Will It Take to Change Things?

Anxiety can be a turn-on. The approach is also for couples in which one or both partners have been abused, not only for people in good emotional shape. Schnarch says everything in the book has been about differentiation. The more partners depend on each other to regulate anxiety and identity, the darker the relationship. He writes that marriage holds your partner’s happiness hostage, and the ransom is your own growth. The choice is never only “Do you want to resolve your sexual problems or not?” It is also whether you will let the problem fall on your partner.

Appendixes

The six appendixes are reference material: referral resources, including Schnarch’s Marriage and Family Health Center in Evergreen, Colorado; medical conditions that cause sexual problems; drugs linked to sexual side effects; and organic conditions that lower desire.