Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship by David Schnarch Read Free Book Online

relatively short-term cycles.
    Helen came to a conclusion you probably don’t want to hear: Romantic love is time-limited and doomed to fade. Your brain cannot maintainthis revved-up state for long. “Many of us would die of sexual exhaustion if romantic love flourished endlessly in a relationship. We wouldn’t get to work on time or concentrate on anything except ‘him’ or ‘her.’ … Romantic love did not evolve to help us maintain a stable, enduring partnership. It evolved for different purposes: to drive ancestral men and women to prefer, choose, and pursue specific mating partners, then start the mating process and remain sexually faithful to ‘him’ or ‘her’ long enough to conceive a child.” 26
A FOURTH SEXUAL DRIVE: DEVELOPING AND MAINTAINING A SELF
     
    Having long admired Helen Fisher’s work, I met with her in 2002. Needless to say, we had an incredibly exciting conversation. We spent a delightful afternoon at the restaurant on the lake in New York’s Central Park. I proposed to Helen that humans had developed a fourth “evolutionary strategy” that now drives desire:
Our drive to develop and preserve a self
. When the human self emerged millions of years ago, we embarked on an uncharted path no animal’s sexual desire had ever taken before.
•
Your sense of self: A core part of your sexual desire
     
    In my clinical experience, issues of selfhood control sexual desire as much as (and probably more than) lust, romantic love, and attachment. How you see yourself, how your partner treats you, and how you think your partner sees you profoundly shape your sexual desire. Struggles over sexual desire and struggles of selfhood go hand in hand in love relationships.
    Your sense of self permeates your sexual desire. When, where, how, and why you have sex in an ongoing relationship is determined by more than lust, romance, and attachment. “Self” issues shape sexual desire as much (or more) than testosterone, oxytocin, and vasopressin. 27 Your hormones may be pumping, and you can be horny as hell, but one sharp put-down from your partner can bring things to a screeching halt.
    There’s more to romantic love than a dopamine rush from the reward centers in your brain. Loads of selfhood processes are involved. We love being in love because it makes us
self
-aware. We feel tremendously alive in the whirlwind of infatuation. 28 One moment we’re flying high, and the next moment we’re crashing. Our sense of self inflates and deflates in response to a look or a word from our partner. This emotional roller coaster, itself, motivates us to develop a more solid sense of self. And after lust, romantic love, and attachment have run their course, this solid sense of self provides stability in long-term relationships. (We do miss the intensity and emotional excitement nonetheless, and Part Four will show you how to get it.)
•
Selfhood is a drive. We are driven to develop a self
     
    Maintaining your sense of self is a need, a profound urge, a motivational system that propels you toward (and away from) an intimate relationship with your partner. Just like with lust, romantic love, and attachment, self-preservation, preserving our psychological “self,” is a driving force in human nature. But it is a force that is tenacious and difficult to control.
    This is all possible because your brain has the physical capacity to support a complex sense of self. Your self even has a definable pattern of brain activity! The self possesses an incredible drive to preserve and expand itself. At times this dominates all other drives, superseding even our urge for biological preservation. Some people choose to die physically in order to preserve their psychological integrity. (Some lie to themselves to maintain a deluded sense of internal consistency.) For better and for worse, we are driven to preserve our self.
    That’s why your ability to maintain your sense of self in your relationship plays a pivotal role in your sexual