For many Americans, sexual dissatisfaction is a serious problem — creating friction between couples, dividing households, and leading to a greater issue of complacency and boredom. In his new book, “The Kosher Sutra: Eight Sacred Secrets for Reigniting Desire and Restoring Passion for Life,” Rabbi Shmuley Boteach shares his guide to restoring passion, desiring your partner, regaining intimacy as well as creating a new energy for all aspects of one's life. Read an excerpt:
To live erotically is to recapture our fascination with the small stuff. It is to experience life’s magnetism and pull. To live erotically is to wish to make love to life itself.
Notice that, when it comes to lovemaking, the erotic charge is lost the moment orgasm is felt. Orgasm is a purging of erotic buildup. The same is true of life. Men and women who once seemed to be so enamored of life, now go through the everyday motions of existence robotically and predictably. The reason is the same. They have orgasmed in their lives. They have experienced what they believe is a peak, and now, after the peak, there is precious little to look forward to.
While I was writing this book, a monumental study was published by researchers from Warwick University in Britain and Dartmouth College in the U.S. They analyzed data on two million people from seventy nations. What they found was an extraordinarily consistent pattern in terms of depression and happiness levels. From Australia and Italy to Nicaragua and Azerbaijan, they witnessed how the midlife crisis was slowly becoming a universal phenomenon. People were happy at the beginning of their lives but became depressed beginning in their forties, with age forty-four being the worst year of all.
As the Daily Mail in Britain reported, many previous studies had suggested psychological well-being remained relatively at and consistent as we age. But the new study suggested otherwise. Using a sample of a million Britons, researchers found both men and women faced their biggest dip in happiness at 44, regardless of marital status, wealth or children. In the U.S., by contrast, there was a big difference between the sexes, with unhappiness peaking at about 40 for women and 50 for men. Warwick’s Professor Andrew Oswald said signs of mid-life depression are found in all kinds of people. Some suffer more than others, but in our data the average effect is large. It happens to men and women, to single and married people, to rich and poor, and to those with and without children. He said that what caused the U-shaped curve was unknown, but added: ‘It looks from the data like something happens deep inside humans.’
Well, let the mystery stand no more. I’ll tell you exactly what happens. We orgasm. We climax. We peak. We see our lives as reaching its apogee in our forties and then, somehow, the life is beat right out of us. The erotic spark is lost. We become the proverbial man who is comatose on the bed after about ten minutes of sex with his wife and one unsatisfying climax. That’s as good as it gets. It wasn’t erotic. It wasn’t exciting. And it wasn’t enough to awaken anything deeper. It was a life lived in the hollows.
I see this kind of burnout all the time. So many good, precious people are just shells of their former selves. They are lifeless, vacant, and often bitter. Life has put them through the rinse cycle and they come out shriveled and shrunk.
They move through life like a passing shadow. Few things animate them. Even their kids don’t seem to excite them. They long ago stopped living and now merely subsist. They get by. They pay their bills. And thank G-d for TV, YouTube, and sporting events. At least they have something to look forward to. Their bodies are intact and even healthy. But the spark of G-d has ceased to flicker within. The routine of life and the pain of everyday struggle slowly snuffed out their spirit.
For men, we used to call this a midlife crisis. It is no longer so.
Today it is something entirely different. A crisis means that you have hit a wall in your life. Your professional dreams have been shattered. You feel like a failure, like life has broken you. But for today’s men it’s not about a crisis. It’s about sheer, unadulterated boredom. They don’t look for the blonde and the Porsche. That would require far too much effort. It would presuppose that they feel still feel an inner surge of energy. It would mean that they would have to woo a woman again. Nah. It’s easier to find the blonde in Internet porn and the Porsche on a TV ad. They prefer the couch to an affair and a beer to kinky sex. Life can do them no more harm because they have already died within.
Take a man in his forties who played the field while in his twenties, had a lot of girlfriends, and then “settled down” in his thirties. He is now into his first decade of marriage. He has two kids. He loves his wife but he feels bored in his relationship. He feels tied down by domestic responsibilities. His hair is thinning; his paunch is expanding. He struggles to have his trousers stay up as his belly protrudes. Professionally, he has peaked. He has a good job, but cannot really look forward to any serious advancement beyond where he already is. As far he is concerned, his life has climaxed. He has already peaked. The vitality of his once pent-up potential has been spent. His lust for life has been expunged. He has nothing important to look forward to. He longs for his lost youth, but too late. To his mind it is gone. Hence, he no longer really lives life so much as escapes it. Like a man who quickly falls asleep right after sexual orgasm, this man spends the rest of his life asleep as well. When he comes home, he plunks himself in front of the TV. His children speak to him, but he doesn’t hear them. He wife hugs him, but she cannot reach him. They have sex rather than make love. Her libido sleeps during the experience. He is oblivious to her pain. He becomes obsessed with professional sports as he lives vicariously through the feats of his favorite heroes. And so, the erotic energy of their marriage is lost.
The same is true of so many women who also look into a mirror and see a ghost of their former selves. In place of a smile they see lines. In place of a glow they see wrinkles. They wonder whether they married the right man, even as simple logic dictates that a good marriage is based primarily not on whom you marry but how you treat each other after you marry. They, too, have peaked; they, too, have climaxed; and they, too, have had their life’s orgasm. And it’s downhill from there.
I once counseled a woman who confessed to me that whenever she and her husband had sex, which was about once a month, she always cried herself to sleep afterward. She did not do so because the sex was bad, although it was awful. Less so did she cry because she felt her husband didn’t love her, because she was sure he did. Rather, she mourned her own demise. She was once passionate and alive. And now, she and her husband were dead.
But the same can be true of even teenagers. So many young kids are zombies. They seem energy-less and robotic. The hallmark of youth was once an inexhaustible reservoir of energy. This is no longer true. These kids have peaked at fifteen. It’s downhill for the next five years until they emerge from their cocoon and come back to life. They have lost their innocence. They represent Adam and Eve after they have been expelled from the Garden. They have been exposed to too much, have internalized corruption at too young an age, and they, too, have peaked. They turn to street drugs for the artificial high that real life cannot afford.
The solution is to learn to live erotically, to bring erotic excitement and interest to every area of life. Erotic living is achieved through the constant buildup of erotic energy without allowing it to dissipate. There are many ways to achieve this high station. But all are built around the idea of enhancing erotic consciousness without release. In America, our entire lives are built around achieving erotic release. Americans hate tension. Inner peace is what we crave. And we do almost anything to ?find a false sense of calm. Americans prefer to be dead than to be alive. We take antianxiety medication to feel numb. We down antidepressants to blunt pain. We take sleeping pills to fall asleep. Heck. We even medicate hyperactive children as a less gruesome form of modern lobotomy. And surrounding it all are the tens of millions of corpses that slink down for hours of TV watching every single night — mind-numbing, stupid, idiotic TV that blights the brain and suffocates the spirit.
If we could just learn to foster erotic interest without release, then our curiosity and longing for all that surrounds us would be immeasurably enhanced. In marriage, as an example, this can be achieved through learning to have lovemaking sessions that do not lead to orgasm. Sex without orgasm over a period of, say, a week, leads to significant erotic enhancement that is not diluted by disappointing climax. Erotic steam is built up through sex without climax. The more we make love to our spouse and prolong it by refraining from orgasm, no matter how much we feel we want it, the more we awaken the erotic energy within.
After a few nights of practicing restraint, our entire world changes. We begin to store huge reservoirs of energy and never get tired. We wake up early and never feel drained. We love our spouse more deeply than ever before because every night we are connecting with them without purging the desire from our heart. Our conversation with others changes as our curiosity for life increases. Whereas before the conversations were perfunctory and practical, they now spring from a deep desire to know and understand all that surrounds us. Our curiosity for life becomes insatiable, our enthusiasm for knowledge limitless, our desire to connect with everything around us unquenchable.
Reprinted from “The Kosher Sutra: Eight Sacred Secrets for Reigniting Desire and Restoring Passion for Life” by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach by HarperCollins (USA) Inc. Copyright (c) 2009 by Shmuley Boteach.