We actually have been improving, but it's taken time . . .years, really, at this point. I still don't have sex as much as I'd like, and she still hears more about sex than she'd like, but we're both a lot happier. It hasn't been all about having more sex (though we have a LOT more sex now--this week she put me off all week until last night, and that was hard, but it used to be sex once a month, the day after her period ended, like clockwork--and if something made us miss that day, it'd be another month, guaranteed. We literally went over a year without sex at one point. We average 1-2 times a week right now, and the amount of pressure she feels in general determines a lot.) It's also been important that we can talk openly and treat honestly with each other now . . . we spent years locked into being unhappy, thinking there was nothing to be done about it, and thinking we knew what the other was thinking so there was no point in talking about it yet again. Getting past that was the real breakthrough.
I don't think I'd agree that Schnarch doesn't believe in "just doing it" as Weiner-Davis does. He certainly doesn't emphasize it the way she does, and he's very clear with low-desire spouses that they must have reasons for their low desire and they're not "wrong" to feel that way. Weiner-Davis teaches that, too, but it's not emphasized the way Schnarch does (or maybe I just found his way of saying it clearer.)
But both books have been important to me. My wife did eventually read Sex-Starved Marriage, and it did help a lot. I read Scharch on my own earlier this year when I felt like we were on a plateau and not making progress, and it made a HUGE difference to me. The biggest thing I took from MWD was the importance of taking my wife at face value and not assuming that I could read her mind (because when I did try to read her mind, she always turned out to be thinking cruel, hateful stuff about me and how much she hated being married to me--which would have made sense if she were more or less like me, but she isn't.) If I'd treated a woman the way my wife treated me, it would have meant that I didn't want to be with her anymore, but that's not what it meant when my wife did it. The biggest thing I took from Schnarch was the importance of "self-soothing" and differentiating myself. When I read it, I recognized that I had been trying to self-soothe when I was frustrated or frightened by her sexual rejections, but had only sporadic success. But remembering those scattered successes and reading how important Schnarch thought it was to soothe yourself and not look to your spouse to make things all better, I was able to set a clear purpose in getting better at it, learning it by systematic practice the way you'd learn any other skill. The amount of anger and resentment I was carrying around at all times was poisonous.
Evolve, am I remembering Schnarch wrong? I haven't read it lately, but I didn't remember him saying much about the "just do it" theories. I can tell you that doing that helped my wife simply because she really wanted sexual feelings back and she had worried that they were gone. And in MWD's book, she described the HD partner's frustration with the way the LD partner would be completely uninterested in sex for weeks, but when they had sex it would be great and she would gush about how great it was, but then put it off for weeks again. I don't know if you had that experience, but we sure did, and it made me crazy. She would put me off forever, then we'd have sex that would make her shout and writhe and sweat and leave her exhausted after multiple orgasms. For years I would go back to her the next day (and be told no if I was lucky, actually mocked for thinking she would have sex with me again if I wasn't) and I kept doing it because I just couldn't make it make sense in my mind that someone could be driven that wild, gush about how "talented" her lover was, and then just switch it off for weeks or months. I became convinced that all her enjoyment of sex was play-acting, though I never made sense of a motive for her to do such a thing.
She still sometimes says something like "I'm not really in the mood, but we can give it a try and see what happens." Once she says that, she never stops me, though she could with a word. Having admitted that it's possible she might be up for sex, she always finds that she is.
