When I Say No, I Feel Guilty (44 page)

In the next training dialogue, I have the women learners practice assertively coping with a sexual difficulty often reported in clinical settings—an act of love without much loving. Women patients often complain of mates who simply have intercourse with them, but nothing else. Although this behavior could be an expression of complete indifference of the husband toward his mate, or ignorance of her wants, the “quick start” habit is also a frequent pattern of sexual behavior of male patients who are clinically treated for difficulty in maintaining an erection over an extended period of time. Many of them have a history of losing their erection during extended foreplay resulting in an inability to penetrate when requested by their partner. After such a sexual fiasco, they have some anticipation of embarrassing failure again. Many of these patients also report that their sexually naïve partners, while not putting them down, also did nothing to re-arouse their sexual excitement level during extended foreplay. Typically not being assertive enough to request some type of
sexual teasing or titillation when premature detumescence occurs, they prefer quick foreplay and maximum sexual stimulation as soon as possible to avoid failure. While indifference to one’s mate may be a result of repressed anger or sexual ignorance, I suggest to my women students that they assume initially that this difficulty is due to a “hidden anxiety agenda” about performing poorly during foreplay which their mate has difficulty in assertively requesting help with. Although the male partner may not like his mate probing into this embarrassing area, my clinical experience in treating this problem has indicated that the sexually hurried husband is more likely to
passively resist
his mate’s probing into his sexual performance and
not manipulate
her into accepting the status quo. I have seen countermanipulation by the husband, however, if his mate manipulatively (instead of assertively) tries to get him to do what she wants sexually.

Dialogue #33
A wife tells her mate
she wants more
foreplay in sex.

In learning one way to cope with this potentially emasculating problem, I have my students assertively practice their verbal skills in the following situation.

Setting of the dialogue: Jill has good relations with jack, but she feels something is lacking in the way they make love. Typically, if she or he initiates the sexual act, Jack penetrates and begins sexual intercourse very quickly. After his climax, he makes relatively little physical or verbal contact with Jill and usually drops off to sleep. After dinner, Jill sits down with Jack on the sofa and speaks to him.

JILL
: Can we turn the TV off, honey? I want to talk to you.

JACK
: Sure. (Gets up and switches the set off) What is it?

JILL
:
I really don’t know how to start talking about this. I guess I should know
, but
it’s a bit uncomfortable for me to talk about
. [SELF-DISCLOSURE and NEGATIVE ASSERTION]

JACK
: Okay, what is it?

JILL
: I really love you, Jack, but
there is something about our sex life that bothers me
. [SELF-DISCLOSURE]

JACK
: Our sex life is perfectly normal.

JILL
:
Of course it is
, but
there is still something about it that bothers me
. [FOGGING and BROKEN RECORD]

JACK
: (Silent for a few moments) Do we have to talk about it right now?

JILL
:
No
, but
I’d like to. Do you want to talk about it after you watch the news?
[FOGGING, BROKEN RECORD, and WORKABLE COMPROMISE]

JACK
: No.

JILL
: Okay. When we make love,
I would like it better if we spent more time fooling around before and having fun instead of just jumping into it. I think I would get turned on more that way. Maybe I’d even come more
. [SELF-DISCLOSURE]

JACK
: We don’t just jump into it. You make me sound like someone who only cares about his own pleasure.

JILL
:
Maybe I do
, and
you’re right; we don’t just jump into it
. Still,
I think if we had more foreplay and fooling around than we usually have now, I would enjoy it more
. [FOGGING and BROKEN RECORD]

JACK
: We used to do that and both of us were usually late for work in the morning.

JILL
:
Now that you mention it, I remember we did oversleep a lot
. But we used to spend a lot of time making love in the middle of the night when we were just married. [FOGGING]

JACK
: I’m not superman. I have to work the next day you know.

JILL
:
You’re right, I don’t want you to have to be superman
, but
is there some way we could arrange
things so that we have more foreplay and you don’t get so tired?
[FOGGING and WORKABLE COMPROMISE]

JACK
: I don’t get tired, just sleepy.

JILL
:
I know it makes you sleepy
, but
are you sure there isn’t something about foreplay that you don’t like or would make you tired?
[FOGGING and NEGATIVE INQUIRY]

JACK
: There were a few times when we were first married when I was too beat to have sex. You remember?

JILL
:
You’re right. We did have trouble then. Am I pushing you too much on this? Would you rather talk about it later?
[FOGGING, NEGATIVE INQUIRY, and WORKABLE COMPROMISE]

JACK
: No, I’m fine.

JILL
:
Is there something about my wanting more foreplay that would make you feel beat?
[NEGATIVE INQUIRY]

JACK
: Well, when I was tired before, I couldn’t get it up, remember?

JILL
:
If we had more foreplay like I want, do you think that would happen again?
[NEGATIVE INQUIRY]

JACK
: I don’t know. It may.

JILL
:
If you lost your erection, what’s so terrible about me getting it back up for you?
[NEGATIVE INQUIRY]

JACK
: (Looking worried) How?

JILL
: (Smiling a Masters-and-Johnson smile)
You want a demonstration now?
[WORKABLE COMPROMISE]

JACK
: (Smiling now himself.)

JILL
:
If we have more foreplay and you lose it, would you like me to get it back for you?
[WORKABLE COMPROMISE]

JACK
: Sure! (Getting serious again) But how about getting to work in the morning if we spend all night making love?

JILL
:
Why don’t we try it more in the evening like
now?
I think we’d recover by morning. Don’t you? [WORKABLE COMPROMISE]

JACK
: Right on!

If time is short in my classes because other areas of close conflict are covered in greater detail, I may only demonstrate this type of assertive dialogue as a way of coping with the mate who avoids foreplay. I do this with the help of a woman colleague or one of the better learners in the class. One of the questions that invariably is asked by some students after the demonstration (or practice) is: “How does the woman help her mate maintain his erection during foreplay?” If you are wondering about this same question, I suggest that you, like these students, read the sections of Masters and Johnson’s
Human Sexual Inadequacy
(Little Brown, 1970) dealing specifically with fear of loss of erection and then any of the popular “how to do it” sex books published in the last five years, particularly Dr. Alex Comfort’s
The Joy of Sex
(Crown, 1972) and
More Joy
(Crown, 1974).

When teaching people to assertively communicate their wants to their mates, I suggest that as an excellent learning exercise in dealing with all sorts of conflict in marriage, they practice coping with that most difficult of all marital sexual problems, a gradual decrease in frequency of sexual intercourse over a period of months or years. After some time, it becomes apparent from the most casual inspection that one of the partners never initiates the lovemaking or always has an excuse on why he or she is not in the mood. Although this pattern of sexual avoidance is clinically observed in the repertoire of both sexes, it has been the experience of both myself and my colleague, Dr. Zev Wanderer, that the male patient is much more ready to deny that there is a problem than the female patient. The women we see are generally more open and willing than men to admit they are having difficulty with sex. In this particular instance, I am talking about the male partner who retreats from his mate sexually and has no apparent, reliable signs of conditioned phobic impotence. He
does not frequently lose his erection or have difficulty being aroused sexually by other women, and he shows no signs of premature ejaculation. His behavioral history fits more with the anger model than with the anxiety model or mixed model of psychotherapeutic treatment. This sexual problem, then, is more a matter of what is going on outside the marriage bed than in it. The withdrawal process I am talking about is not short-term—what may happen over a weekend. I don’t know one married couple that I have seen clinically or have known socially on a long-time basis that have not told each other to go to hell occasionally and refused to have sex for a short period because of anger. In contrast to this occasional tiff, I am describing a typical clinical history pattern of gradual withdrawal of one mate from the other over a period of many months or even years. The obvious treatment of this condition under the anger model is to train the “identified patient,” the reluctant, withdrawing mate, to be able to be more assertive with a life partner about what is displeasing, or at least to show some anger about things and “blow off steam” occasionally to clear the air between them. But how to do it? That’s the important question, particularly in the case of the reluctant male. He is likely to deny there is any sexual problem, let alone allow someone to instruct him on how to change his personal style of coping with his wife. In some cases in a clinical setting where a wife has come in for personal psychotherapy and complained of this problem, I have given these women intensive training to make them more assertive; in particular, I stressed FOGGING, NEGATIVE ASSERTION, and NEGATIVE INQUIRY to allow them to cope with both manipulative and valid criticism from their sexually reluctant husbands. When they are sufficiently nondefensive about themselves and their former manipulative style, I have them approach their mates and prompt personal criticism from them about themselves and how they live with each other—personal criticism that their mates are reluctant to communicate to them spontaneously, prompted personal criticism that allows the withdrawing mate to say what
he doesn’t like about his wife and what she does that, in part, is causing the sexual withdrawal, prompted criticism that gives the reluctant male a radical new message about his spouse; she is not the fragile, easily hurt, very dependent, sometimes smothering woman he thought he had a realistic picture of. For some of these women, however, the effort to find a solution to the dilemma is, to their way of thinking, harder to put up with than the problem of a withdrawing mate. For these unfortunates, coping with some of the complaints of the spouse means changing much of their personal lifestyle, becoming more confident of themselves, developing their own ways of being happy, being less dependent upon what their mates can (or will) give them, being less manipulative and taking charge of investigating and executing their own portfolio of wants and aspirations, assertively examining their own negative feelings and worries and accepting them as part of themselves, or working out compromises with their mates to cope with these worries instead of manipulating their spouses into conforming with structured routine that would protect them from facing these personal insecurities. As I see it from a clinical viewpoint and not a political one, they don’t want to make the effort to be “liberated.” In my experience, these unfortunate patients view therapy as either a place to get a sympathetic ear to listen to how terrible their mates are and how unfair life is, or as a place to get a clever little set of tricks on how to change their mate’s behavior without changing themselves or without any work on their own part. The number of patients (both men and women) with this point of view is relatively small compared to those who are willing to sweat out developing new personal behaviors and ways of coping with the difficulties of living with someone else. The following dialogue illustrating some of the assertive skills which these women used to cope with their mate’s withdrawal is again a composite, shortened, and edited version drawn from classroom rehearsals and therapy sessions. The critique prompted by the assertive spouse is a sample of spontaneous criticisms given in rehearsals by
hundreds of learners. Their critique, probably drawn from their own experiences, covered just about everything that could go wrong with a marriage, at least from their point of view. The critique is not a male-vs.-female battle. Many times when we had more women learners than males in classes or in therapy sessions, two women would practice with each other and much of their criticism of their hypothetical mates was the same as that given by male learners practicing with women, and when they reversed the roles of asserter and withdrawer, again the criticisms were similar. The language and the details were different, but the male and female criticisms were about the same things. Many, but not all of the frequent criticisms from these learners (as well as from patients in therapy) are included in this dialogue. Even though the learners practicing this assertive way to cope with sexual conflict may not have a mate who withdraws from them sexually, you can see from the dialogue that the initial sexual problem is used as an interesting training vehicle for teaching people how to change poor coping in close marriage situations.