Book Review: Passionate Marriage

sort of a book review

Dear Dr. David Schnarch,

I can’t lie to you, doc. Originally, I was going to write a thoroughly harsh review of your book, Passionate Marriage. Truthfully no other book has provoked a similar reaction in me. Reading it, I was bedazzled and infuriated, pleased and upset. There were moments of scintillating beauty. At one point I lost half a night of sleep to irritation. While some of your advice might have improved my marriage, your prose style did not improve my blood pressure.

But writing a negative review, of the usual fashion, would be so lame. Who would profit from such a thing? Besides, you are nice. And also you are dead. You were a man with a scraggly white beard named Schnarch. Your name is a better word for ‘squelch’ than ‘squelch.’ And, despite that, you got a lot of people to pay you for erotic/romantic advice. You must have been doing something right. Also, you used to be a urologist. So at one point, you were Schnarch the dick guy. I am pleased by this.

It’s easy to skewer. It’s harder to embrace. I will here try to embrace you, Schnarch, despite my difficult relationship with your work, in the spirit of your idea that difficult relationships, especially marriages, are crucibles.

I love this idea. I love seeing the marriage as a person-growing machine, something that nobody is ready for—a saga whose learning curve creates new levels of emotional muscularity. Certainly I have found this to be true. Few people have the heart to tell you that marital conflict is normal. Fewer still tell you that it might be the only opportunity you might have to grow up.

Additionally, I enjoy the proposed solution to this learning curve, that virtue you call ‘differentiation': the ability to maintain your selfhood while compassionately holding space for others. This sounds like a really good thing to cultivate, and, true to your theory, my marriage has improved at about the same rate as my level of differentiation, as you define it.

I do, at times, though, worry that you turn differentiation into kind of a catch-all. Unless I misunderstand you, differentiation includes, or at least contributes to:

—Self-knowledge and self-compassion to the degree that you understand your desires
—The courage to speak those desires aloud
—The ability to calm yourself down when things get heated or your desires can’t get met
—The intimate confidence required to explore your sexuality deeply
—The forbearance required to mindfully put your desires second at times
—An understanding of how to intuitively locate the border between caring for your partner and lapsing into subservience

If a single trait encompasses all of these things, it’s probably not a single trait. But that’s not a fatal objection—you could say the same about ‘love,’ for example, but I still think love is a fairly good star to steer your life by, and you can meaningfully work towards being more loving by treating it as a clustered set of goals.

So, basically, these central points are just great. Your proposed cure for marital woes is plausible. But this is where the problem starts for me with you. You are so weird, my dude.

If I had the cure for all marital issues, I’d be pretty straightforward about laying it out. I’d tell you what it was and how to do it. Sure, I’d be digressive at times. But basically I’d aim for functionality.

This is not you. You do not do this. Instead, you engage me in the wildly circuitous Schnarchian Swirl. You know, that thing where you flummox us with lyrical paragraphs about the nature of love, then give us ten pages of therapy memoir, then rattle off some maybe-great rapid-fire advice that we’re a little too tired to absorb, and then regale us with folksy allegory. You tell me that self-confrontation is amazing—that to be a great husband, I have to confront myself. But before I’m told how this auto-duel is supposed to take place, in an expansive, detailed way, you veer off somewhere else.

At one point I realized in disbelief that it took you about 70 pages to clearly lay out your central claim about what I needed in my marriage. You just didn’t get around to it until then.

Why did I hate this so much? Well, partially I do just like it when people get to the point. But I’m also realizing with dawning horror that, perhaps, this is an example of Freud’s famous Narcissism of Small Differences, the hatred you have for a person who has the nerve to be similar but different. Schnarch, we are both talky Jews. We are both obviously pleased with our word-craft. We both talk to people for a living. We both have a chatty high-low diction and a certain crabby affection for the reader.

Thus, in your book, perhaps I glimpsed a distorted reflection of myself, a possible alternate reality in which I am a sexologist telling retired executives in the Florida Keys how to embrace. And, like all distorted reflections, this was hard to take. 

Also it bugged me how fond you are of yourself. You really enjoy telling us how great your therapy is. Sure, you’re creditably vulnerable about your own marriage—but you always come off sounding like a genius. It’s super weird how there’s a page-long digression near the end of the book about how one of your patients fell in love with you. But is it so wrong to be fond of yourself? Again, perhaps I’m disliking in you what I see in me. I, too, think I’m quite correct in my theories, and competent at my competencies. Sometimes I pat myself on the back, quite thoroughly, for weeks, after a session with a client goes beautifully. And I do admire myself in the mirror sometimes. I don’t talk about it in public, though. Shouldn’t I? Why be ashamed of my pride? You have a freedom I do not.

That freedom extends to all the porn you write. Wow, Schnarch. Mormon reviewers, online, warned me of your proclivity for erotica. But they did not prepare me. I was really surprised by the amount of this stuff, how page after page of your book contained sentences like “that’s when she tightened her vagina” or “the bruise he sometimes got from ‘hammering’ Betty was to become a thing of a past.” This is pretty wild: “George started intermixing thrusts shallow and deep. Then he stopped thrusting and tightened up his rectum. He felt his penis jump inside her.” Unless I counted wrong there were at least a dozen such accounts, which were typically longer, and more elaborate, than your directions on how to accomplish the lofty emotional feats you advocate.

For me it didn’t work. I don’t know, man. Sex is hard to write. There are like four writers who can do it as far as I know. I mean throughout history, four. The rest of us either do a bad job, or skirt the issue, briefly indicating the occurrence of intimacy rather than actually narrating from the sheets, maybe dashing off an elliptical sentence or two in the lovely but detached James Salter style, as from A Sport and a Pastime:

“The next morning she is recovered. His prick is hard. She takes it in her hand. They always sleep naked. Their flesh is innocent and warm. In the end she is arranged across the pillows, a ritual she accepts without a word.”

You on the other hand. You do not have time for such artfulness. You do not give a shit.  

And I can imagine the right kind of reader. He is clerical and attentive, tense and cowed. After years of loveless pseudo-union, he is irritated that his penis exists. His body is a sack he carries through days of spreadsheets and desperation. Then you come along, your tome recommended by a marriage counselor. You are just totally uninhibited in your discussion of your patients’ pubic hair. You talk about how it’s important to recapture the zealousness of Fucking, and you use that word.

I can imagine your unrepentant verbal bacchanalia being a revelation, for such a reader. You’d probably be an inspiration.

But I am not that person. So it just seemed gross and tedious, all the sex scenes. At times, it seemed self-consciously outré, like you really wanted us to know that you were okay with writing about the labia. I couldn’t help but scream: TELL ME HOW EMOTIONAL DIFFERENTIATION IS ACHIEVED. JUST TELL ME HOW TO DO THE THING THAT YOU SAY IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO DO.

Perhaps this, though, is the very thing. Maybe you can’t tell me how to differentiate myself, by virtue of the fact that nobody can. There is no grown-up, of course, who has lived with my mind before and my issues. No one will face precisely the crises that will shape me into a more steadfast human being. Begging you for advice might be a manifestation of the last vestige of my youth—the quiet longing for an adult to, still, tell me what’s going on. Somewhere maybe I still want to stumble upon, on some fragrantly dusty shelf, an instruction manual that doesn’t exist, the tome that will finally, once and for all, reveal what a man is. Nobody is in charge of me except death. Have I really faced this yet?

But, okay, you could’ve been a little more straightforwardly useful. You did ramble a lot. Like, a lot. And you saved your most helpful diagram, displaying the structure of marriage, for page 355. You finally start throwing a significant volume of frank advice at the reader right at the end, in giant walls of dicta that seem too brief and rapid-fire to be helpful.

And then out of nowhere you’d hit me with priceless stuff like this:

“Did I pick the right person? This question inverts the starting and ending points. We do not pick our perfect match because we ourselves are not perfect. The universe hands us a flawless diamond—in the rough. Only if we are willing to polish off every part of ourselves that cannot join do we end up with a soul mate.”

Or stuff like this:

“Self-soothing is critical to developing a more accurate picture of yourself and your situation. You need to self-soothe the embarrassment that commonly accompanies a more accurate picture (once you have it); the obviousness of it, in retrospect, makes you wonder how you managed to delude yourself so long. Typically, some chagrin accompanies every growth spurt.”

It was beautiful. I can’t overemphasize how much I was loving your book when I wasn’t hating it. I ended up wishing, Schnarch, that, rather than being an author, you were a sort of sexual/romantic dharma teacher, wandering the land, talking to miserable marrieds. See, dharma teachers don’t have to write their own books—they, like you, are not necessarily known for their editorial discretion. Their students simply print their best sayings, and all the dross is lost to history. 

Ultimately though, my prevailing feeling is that you were probably really good for the world. I keep thinking about an overheard encounter in Budapest. Me and my wife were at Rudas baths. We saw an old couple by the pool, pear-shaped and un-Botoxed, wrapped around each other. Around them were situated a frolicking pack of youngish Hungarian women, who were quite nice to look at, as Hungarians tend to be. “They’re so beautiful,” the woman said, with an obvious trace of wistfulness. “But not like you,” said the husband, without a moment’s delay. 

And you could be cynical about this and assume that he was just placating his partner. But it didn’t seem that way. I have engaged in romantic bullshit before, we all have, it’s a survival skill, so I think I know what it looks like. He appeared genuine: for him, her beauty was still singular, and he was wholly prepared to celebrate it. There’s no way to win life, but if there were, that would be it.

In your work, Schnarch, you probably helped many readers, and patients of yours, reach such a state. If you did, that would be a massive blessing for the world. Maybe you did that for me too. I don’t know, let’s see how my marriage is going in twenty years. I did leave your company with a fun tip or two.

But anyway, again, you’re dead. What do I think about that. Well, I don’t believe in hell. What I do believe in is the cleansing fire of knowledge on the brink of death. Finally, I think, we see it all, as we release our final sandpapered breath. We get a private tour of everything we’ve reaped and sown, ourselves as we really are. For some this will be painful, for some blissful. And then we get to rejoin the multiplicity and do whatever one does there. Maybe come back, maybe not, who knows.

Perhaps on your way out, in the cleansing fire, you saw everyone that was fucking thanks to you. I hope you enjoyed gazing upon that abundance of cellulite and passion.

In a way I find you quite lovable. Still I did not like spending time in your verbal proximity. And that’s fine, I don’t think anybody should feel bad about that. At the very least, me and my wife got a lot of pleasure out of saying the word Schnarch. In this way and many others, you survive.