Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Sex and marriage: Authors suggest turning to Bible to recover lost marital passion

From: The Salt Lake Tribune -
by Peggy Fletcher Stack. 

On Valentine’s Day, sexual love will be celebrated almost everywhere but in the bedroom.

We’re too busy and overmedicated, some therapists say. We bring our laptops and cell phones to bed, we’re bored and we have low self-esteem. We’re told to relax, meditate, make dates and get over it.

Several religious writers have noticed the trend.

In a new book, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi suggests couples revisit ideas from the Bible and age-old wisdom about eroticism, while a Catholic author who teaches marriage enrichment courses points to the story of Jesus as a model for love.

“What happened to that magnetic force that we call desire?” asks Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, author of the just-published volume The Kosher Sutra: 8 Sacred Secrets for Reigniting Desire and Restoring Passion for Life . “When you think of how powerful the sexual drive is, the idea that it has been lost between two people in the same bed every night is truly shocking. Sex is supposed to be hot, about yearning and deep lust, not a sedative to help you sleep.”
Boteach has written some 20 books, including the New York Times best-seller Kosher Sex.

So-called sexless marriage is a topic he meets time and again as a marriage counselor and on his national television show, “Shalom in the Home,” a Jewish version of “Super Nanny.” In fact, he says, the show’s third season will focus almost exclusively on problems in the marital bed.
 
The phenomenon of DINS (dual income, no sex) was first reported in a 2003 best-seller, The Sex Starved Marriage by therapist Michele Weiner Davis, and in a Newsweek cover story that same year, which offered mostly anecdotal evidence to support the belief that about 15 percent to 20 percent of couples have sex fewer than 10 times a year.

University of Utah psychologist Donald Strassberg disputes such an extreme conclusion, noting that most reputable sources suggest only about 13 percent of couples make love infrequently. He would like to see the survey questions and the way they were evaluated.  Still, Strassberg welcomes any effort by religious leaders to address the problems of sexuality in marriage.

Every faith tradition has faced complex theological questions surrounding sexual behavior; some are even on the brink of splintering over them. Yet U.S. seminaries and rabbinical schools fail to prepare the next generation of clergy to deal with such issues.  “Sexuality courses are largely absent from most seminary curricula and degree requirements,” according to a report issued last month by the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing in Westport, Conn. “At most institutions, students can graduate without studying sexual ethics or taking a single sexuality-based course.”

The report should be a “wake-up call” for the country’s religious leaders, Martin E. Marty, a religious historian and commenter, said in an online essay at sightings.com.  “It is hard to get around the observation that, overall, sexual issues—be they biological, theological or moral—are the most controversial subjects in religion today,” Marty wrote. “Like it or not, understandings of human sexuality combined with issues of authority—who decides about practices?—concern everybody from Mennonites to Greek Orthodox.”

Bible-based eroticism
Those concerned about lost marital passion often start with the Good Book. After all, it includes an entire book, The Song of Solomon, which is an erotic love poem.  Eroticism is really “the psychological and spiritual drive to penetrate the mystery of life and to attach ourselves to the source of all being,” Boteach writes in his book’s introduction. “Eroticism, that thirsty desire to uncover the mystery of life and the complexity of existence, is the liquid that must be injected into our bloodstream.”

Too many religious couples view such eroticism as somehow unholy, as if a kind of sisterly familiarity were more righteous.
Baloney, says Boteach, known fondly as just Shmuley and a close friend of Southern Utah University President Michael Benson, whom he met when the two were students at Oxford.  It’s essential to bring back lust into a marriage, he says. Love may be beautiful, but it’s not enough.

“If [marriage] feels stultifying, then the emptiness comes from you,” concludes Boteach, who has been to Utah more than 30 times. “The solution is rediscovering your inner erotic charge. Eros is the human ability to rediscover infinite curiosity in everything under the son.”

The golden triangle
As the Rev. James Healy sees it, sexual problems in marriage are not so much about technique as about relationship.  “It’s all about the golden triangle of work, children and household management,” says Healy, director of the Center for Family Ministry of the Catholic Diocese of Joliet, Ill., and president of the Illinois Catholic Family Ministries. “When couples come for counseling, most of the time how they negotiate and work together in that golden triangle will have a direct impact on their romantic relationship. Most of the time, it is a question of how deeply the couples are giving to each other.”

Like Boteach, Healy, who will be in Utah for a Valentine’s Day workshop on marriage enrichment, believes boredom is killing passion.  “The thing that puts a damper on marriage and sexuality is routing, taking each other for granted,” he says.  He urges couples to add an extra five seconds for a goodbye hug and another five seconds for a hello.

“It is the very small, daily rituals of life that keep love alive,” Healy says.

Catholic couples should look to three episodes in the life of Jesus as a model for their marriage—the transfiguration, the crucifixion and the resurrection, he says.  The transfiguration was a “mountaintop” experience for Jesus and his three disciples, much like a honeymoon, he says. When Jesus came down from the mountain, he was hung on a cross, and that is what awaits every couple sometime in their marriage. A child is born and the dynamic changes. Or no child comes. Or a job is lost. Or an identity is smothered.

“But if we are faithful, we will rise with Jesus again. And it doesn’t happen just once in a marriage, but over and over,” Healy says. “If we can handle that, nothing can separate us from God.”

Peggy Fletcher Stack writes about religion and spirituality. Contact her at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach offers eight secrets for married couples looking reignite their desire. They are:
1. Innocence—living honestly, openly, without pretension or fears from previous experiences
2. Novelty—do crazy, out-of-the-box things
3. The Chase—erotic obstacles build up tension, delay gratification and increase the power of sex
4. Forbidden-ness—marriage is way too open, way too legal, way too available, which is why it needs self-imposed limits
5. Opposites attract—couples need tangible differences, covert and overt, for erotic polarity to function
6. Reckless abandon—experiencing life at its rawest and most intense, bringing out the inner animal
7. Unquenchable yearning—longing and lusting after someone in front of you but whom you can never quite reach
8. Beyond the body—sex is the key to spiritual awakening that can happen within us