Inquiring minds

[firecat]

via klwalton, an article called "Why Marriages Fail" (http://www.shrinktalk.net/archives/why_marriages_fail_1.phtml) contains the following quote:

couples that don't ever fight eventually don't have sex either. Why? They are both forms of passion. If you give up one form of intensity you'll ultimately leave the other as well.

Is this true in your experience?

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Comments

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I'm with jinian -- the author is clearly using hir own private definitions of words in order to be able to say this with a straight face. IME, there is nothing LESS conducive to sex than fighting; when I'm angry with my partner, I sure as hell don't feel like hopping in the sack! And that feeling tends to carry over for quite a while later, too. If the fight was about something important enough, I'm not going to be interested in sex until the disagreement has been resolved -- which doesn't happen while we're still fighting!

It should also be noted that my parents stopped having sex (they actually got twin beds!) when I was in college, but they never stopped having fights.

Fighting IME is going to happen occasionally in any relationship, and if it doesn't, then something isn't right. If the something is that one or both parties are suppressing their emotions, then I suppose the buildup of resentment from that would eventually affect the sexual arena as well. But this is a totally different phenomenon from what the author is claiming; it's not "abandonment of passion" at all, it's a symptom of something seriously wrong in the relationship.

It does occur to me to wonder whether there are people for whom it might be true -- people who find fighting to be sexually exciting, in the same way that some people find pain to be sexually exciting (which I am absolutely not wired for). If there are, then those people might find that lack of fighting eventually leads to lack of sex, but it's a huge mistake to generalize from isolated examples to the universe.

Bottom line: this author is pulling that hypothesis out of hir ass.

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