What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [88]
Direct sexual therapy treats all of the major sexual dysfunctions, except for retarded ejaculation in men, with high success rates—70 to 95 percent. Once successful treatment is accomplished, not much relapse occurs.30
Conclusion
The idea of depth organizes our erotic life and affects how changeable it is. Sexual identity and sexual orientation are very deep and don’t change much, if at all. Sexual preference and sex role are of middling depth and, accordingly, change somewhat. Sexual dysfunction is a surface problem that with proper treatment can change readily. This is the beginning of a global theory, and what depth really means and how it applies across all of our lives is the topic of chapter 15.
I want to end here with the most common and least understood sexual problem. So ordinary is this problem, so likely are you to suffer from it, that it usually goes unnoticed. It doesn’t even have a name. The writer Robertson Davies dubs it acedia.31 Acedia used to be reckoned a sin, one of the seven deadly sins, in fact. Medieval theologians translated it as “sloth,” but it is not physical torpor that makes acedia so deadly. It is the torpor of the soul, the indifference that creeps up on us as we age and grow accustomed to those we love, that poisons so much of adult life.
As we fight our way out of the problems of adolescence and early adulthood, we often notice that the defeats and setbacks that troubled us in our youth are no longer as agonizing. This comes as welcome relief, but it has a cost. Whatever buffers us from the turmoil and pain of loss also buffers us from feeling joy. It is easy to mistake the indifference that creeps over us with age and experience for the growth of wisdom. Indifference is not wisdom. It is acedia.
The symptom of this condition that concerns me is the waning of sexual attraction that so commonly comes between lovers once they settle down with each other. The sad fact is that the passionate attraction that so consumed them when they first courted dies down as they get to know each other well. In time, it becomes an ember; often, an ash. Within a few years, the sexual passion goes out of most marriages, and many partners start to look elsewhere to rekindle this joyous side of life. This is easy to do with a new lover, but acedia will not be denied, and the whole cycle happens again. This is the stuff of much of modern divorce, and this is the sexual disorder you are most likely to experience. I call it a disorder because it meets the defining criterion of a disorder: like transsexuality or S-M or impotence, it grossly impairs sexual, affectionate relations between two people who used to have them.
Researchers and therapists have not seen fit to mount an attack on acedia. You will find it in no one’s nosology, on no foundation’s priority list of problems to solve, in no government mental health budget. It is consigned to the innards of women’s magazines and to trashy “how to keep your man” paperbacks. Acedia is looked upon with acceptance and indifference by those who might actually discover how it works and how to cure it.
It is acedia I wish to single out as the most painful, the most costly, the most mysterious, and the least understood of the sexual disorders. And therefore the most urgent.
12
Dieting: A Waist Is a Terrible
Thing to Mind
I JUST HAD LUNCH. A really classy buffet—twenty-two dollars for all I could eat—my nemesis. I can’t resist trying everything