Book Review: Passionate Marriage, by David Schnarch

You may have noticed that it’s been a while since I’ve last posted. This piece is the entire reason why: it has taken me quite a long time to write, I cared a lot about how it turned out, and I wanted to include a lot of ideas from the source material in the finished essay. I hope you’ll excuse me for quoting liberally from this book in the piece that follows.

It’s not very often that I read something that immediately changes my habits, so taken with its thesis or prescriptions that I immediately apply them. It’s difficult to review in some ways - even though I knew I badly wanted to write this piece, share at least some of the insights I liked so much - because the way I feel about it seems so unserious, nearly religious, zealous, evangelical. I’ll share it with that caveat, so readers don’t expect a serious grappling with its flaws.

Schnarch’s central concept is differentiation, which I’ve mentioned on my twitter account as I have tried not to just live tweet the entire book. Differentiation is your ability to be separate from your spouse - to look after your own interests, needs, and responsibilities. It is simultaneously the ability to be truly close to your spouse: aware and considerate of their desires, beliefs, and will without feeling bound by any of them.

It’s only possible when your sense of self is an internal affair - you’re not dependent on a spouse, a friend, a career, an income, to manage your own ego and know that you’re worthwhile. It might be compared to a Kegan Stage 5, in which a person’s sense of self is resilient and flexible enough to tolerate seeing themselves as they really are, and making decisions accordingly. As Schnarch puts it: “Highly differentiated people have strong emotional bonds. They don’t require physical distance, infrequent contact, or totally consuming careers to maintain their separateness or moderate their reactivity to others.”

I first heard of Dr. Schnarch from an LDS therapist who has a popular podcast in my childhood community. This therapist frames differentiation in a specific way: we all tend to develop physically before we develop emotionally. We’re capable of getting ourselves food and securing our own living space long before we’re capable of managing our own self-knowledge, independent of other people’s perspectives. The emotional development to refer to our internal compass first, incorporating external feedback when appropriate, is what makes genuinely transcendent relationships possible.

This is a book full of both pleasantly uncomfortable self-recognition and wildly funny scenes from a therapist’s office. One of the first things this book asks its readers to grapple with is the idea that we rarely, if ever, have partners who are at different level of differentiation or development than we are - Schnarch says such couplings tend to break up very quickly, if they happen at all.

More often, we're drawn to people who aren’t significantly more or less emotionally mature than we are, and this remains true even when we’re locked in extremely painful altercations with those we care about. It may feel like if your spouse would only see reason, everything would be perfect, and in a way that’s true: if you have a spouse who takes ownership for their bullshit without an agenda, you quickly sober up - there’s no ego to defend about who’s right anymore - and realize how much bullshit is left over with your name on it.

It’s actually very easy to get along with someone considerably more emotionally mature than you are, because they do all the heavy lifting. When you find yourself at loggerheads with your spouse, you can be nearly certain that you are doing something to contribute to your dynamic. This has a positive side, as well, as Schnarch notes: “One partner’s efforts to become more differentiated push the other partner to develop to an equal level. This is the ‘people-growing machinery’ of marriage.”

Two of the major keys to differentiation (and in turn these possibilities for growth) are self-soothing and self-confrontation. Self-soothing is for your anxiety; anxiety runs relationships when people are “emotionally fused”, a phrase Schnarch uses to describe minimal differentiation. A lot of relational behaviors are people trying to manage their own anxiety through their partners - we want our partners to tell us we’re wonderful, we want them to tell us we’re attractive, we want them to tell us we’ve never disappointed them even once. We want our partners to have sex with us in a way that makes us feel good enough. In short, we want partners who never make us feel uncertain about ourselves.

The effects of this normal and seemingly innocuous expectation can be difficult to understand without case studies. An interesting example of multiple levels of differentiation came from one of Sasha Chapin’s recent posts. He describes two different situations with two different women; in both cases, sex was progressing, but then he had to communicate that it wouldn’t happen that night. In the first case, the woman responded with high reactivity - she cried, criticized him harshly, “freaked out”. In the second, the next woman responded relatively neutrally - “she would calmly take care of her own needs and allow the evening to continue, unperturbed. It was clear that she still liked me either way.”

It’s anxiety-inducing, insecurity-stoking, as Sasha considerately notes, to have someone change their mind about sex with you. It’s not that the two situations had meaningfully different degrees of anxiety, it’s that the first woman saw her anxiety as her partner’s job to fix, the second tended to hers herself, and in the latter case, the experience and the entire relationship were far smoother.

This does not excuse a partner from the obligation to communicate with kindness and care for the other, of course; it is a recognition that even kind and careful statements can make us feel sad or anxious. We have stronger relationships when we take responsibility both for managing our own anxiety and for communicating gently.

Soothing yourself so others don’t have to do it for you is a legitimate gift to your loved ones - many people know what it feels like to have a parent who places strongly felt emotional expectations on their children to make them feel less anxious, whether that’s by doing fewer risky things, or complying more with parental expectations for their life choices. Parents who more clearly manage their own anxiety around these (very real!) challenges of growing children will have better relationships with them over time.

I've noticed this in myself, a desire for partners to assume more responsibility for my hard emotions than I even do for myself, or wanting my partners to respond exactly as I would like to what I say. The stronger (and harder) path involves taking on the responsibility for handling their humanity, while still being vulnerable/saying what I need to say anyway. I see this as a tenet of a broader pattern: we all tend to start out with some passive assumptions that our partners can/will/should love us like parents; this breaks down very quickly.

Self-soothing is even more important when you’re confronting your partner - people can tell themselves that avoiding conflict, not rocking the boat, and not telling their partner about problems is taking the high road, and good for your marriage. The problem with this approach, however, is that your internal self revolts against a sense that you’re selling out your own interests over time. Resentment flourishes where we don’t advocate for ourselves.

Again, the antidote for this is not to yell at or harangue your partner (this is more like trying to punish them into compliance, which is also generally an anxious, undeveloped response). It’s taking the responsibility for soothing your anxiety about sharing your feelings and sharing them in a way that is considerate of their partner without compromising honesty.

Validation, and the lack of it that sometimes manifests in relationships, is a framework Schnarch discusses in some detail, upending a lot of currently (or at least recently) popular talking points. We all like validation, and validation is a good and healthy part of a functional relationship. It’s an error, however, to assume that if validation is not present, our partner is necessarily doing something wrong. Taken to extremes, an expectation that your partner must validate you no matter what can lead to partners who demand that their spouses validate them even in decisions that are hurtful. We should be able to validate our own desires and perspectives in a robust way, so that we’re not dependent on our partners for these internal positions to be stable. It’s natural and at worst neutral to appreciate when others validate our perspectives. We are necessarily weaker if we can *only* maintain our own positions if they are validated by other people.

Your partner cannot actually make you feel okay about who you are, which is what *seeking* validation is pretty much always about. Your partner will also resist the sense of boundarylessness they feel from you if you’re trying to suck your sense of self from them whether they want to give it or not. Only recognizing your own responsibility for your sense of self can soothe insecurity long term. People who are capable of validating themselves - people who are clearly intrinsically motivated even under duress - often paradoxically get more validation than those who demand it more often.

Self-confrontation is another key to differentiation (and it requires self-soothing as well). If we are to be motivated by an obligation to ourselves, rather than resentfully participating in a contract where someone else is constantly demanding things of us, we can be more capable of recognizing when we fall short of our own expectations and then do something about it. I particularly like Schnarch’s evocative language around couples who fail to see their marriages as something they willingly enter into, but rather a “mutual deprivation pact,” where their spouse is more jailer and prosecutor than anything else.

Resentment happens, according to Schnarch, because we are not exercising the full set of our own choices. It’s a natural result of treating your relationship as if it’s something that happens to you rather than an obligation that you took up yourself and can also choose to put down.

Particularly insightful, in my view, is Schnarch’s observation that it is the very things that make marriage so difficult and unexpected that make it so worthwhile and so capable of making us kinder, stronger, more virtuous, self-respecting people. Marriage puts us directly in contact with the great differences between us and another person, and it requires us to make space for *both* ourselves and our loved one to thrive.

Often we’re surprised by the demands of close relationships and marriage. Schnarch returns many times to the idea of a couple who is surprised by how difficult marriage is, how much they fight, how little they can seem to agree, and he consistently asks the same question: who gave you the idea that it would be any different? You’re merging your life and future with someone who you were likely drawn to *because* you are not the same as they are.

There are many decisions in marriage that test us, that demand for us to be both clearer on what we ourselves want, to share that with our partner, and to make space for what they want. The very same LDS therapist sums it up this way: you cannot have half a child, you cannot easily move halfway to a desired new state, you cannot half take a new job that will radically change your lives.

Making such decisions wisely not only requires self knowledge, generosity to our partner, and bravery, it requires comfort with the fact that we do not have infinite choices, and that we do not have infinite knowledge about our choices. Most of all, such pressures seem to improve most when we learn to *act* on behalf of ourselves and our desires (as well as those of our partner and the relationships), not just think, talk, or read about them.

It’s probably already clear that anxiety is a frequently-returned-to theme in this book, in particular, its capacity to interfere with our development if we’re not intentional about how we engage with it. As he says: “We have the fantasy that we have the choice between being anxious or not…our choice is between one anxiety or another. Do something scary - or face problems from not doing it.”

He spares no criticism for the comfort we often have playing within the limits of our anxiety: “The unspoken assumption that if people love you they’ll be satisfied living within your limitations.” Anxiety tends to drive avoidance, and when we give in to the desire to avoid, it tends to make anxiety worse - a vicious cycle. Schnarch goes so far as to say that our emotional growth goes exactly as far as our ability to manage anxiety does, a phenomenon that’s especially visible in sex: “All along I’ve said that normal sexual styles are determined by developmental tasks you’re trying to avoid, rather than by things you’re really dying to do.” He goes further, suggesting that sexual monotony is often specifically indicative of unexamined anxiety: “Our limited sexual styles create the rigid quality so characteristic of long term relationships.”

He’s also not gentle with our understandings of sex in marriage, which he often argues reflect the meta-conflicts we consistently play out elsewhere in our relationship.“In contemporary sex therapy there has been an implicit pressure on the partner with the low desire to learn to want sex more often. During the 1970s and 80s some therapists saw this partner as the one with the problem. Today some therapists know better - but the general public doesn’t…I always assume it makes sense when someone doesn’t want sex… I have also found - all things considered - that people want sex when sex is worth wanting, and they can afford to want it.” Men may find it easier to believe an unenthusiastic woman doesn’t like sex in general, because the notion that she could be enthusiastic under some circumstances would pressure them to ask themselves if any of their actions reduce her enthusiasm. [This is if anything more true when it happens with the genders reversed].

Marriage is an extremely high stakes investment - a single stock portfolio that you’re all in on. If you’re *bored* by it, you’re probably dumping a lot of energy into ignoring just how risky the promise you’ve made is. On several critical axes, monogamous marriage is much riskier than any iteration of polyamory, and it has the capacity to reward investors commensurate to that risk.

I sincerely loved this book and would recommend it to just about anyone, regardless of their relationship status. It begins by asking what makes us better people and applies that to marriage and sex in a way that’s illuminating even if you don’t have access to either.

It does have real flaws in that those who are given to being too hard on themselves already may struggle to see the way the book encourages them to look at both parts of the relationship - their partners, not just themselves. Those who are given to let themselves off the hook may also choose to focus on the elements which can be used against their partners. In both cases, I think truly thoughtful close reading is the solution, and the book itself makes at least some effort to cover these bases. I’m sure you can find more critical reviews of this book and I regret that I cannot offer it, wish you luck in that endeavor, and in your relationships in general.

As a personal note to close out this review, it was reading this book that brought home to me how many of my choices were taken in the hopes of pressuring someone else to do what I thought best. In particular, I noticed how many of my tweets were motivated by an irritation that other people held specific positions. Upon realizing that, I lost interest in tweeting in most cases. I miss my friends, but I’m grateful to have back the energy I spent in public frustration about positions held by people I hardly knew, in many cases.

One of the greatest gifts for me from this book was a reminder that grounded, emotionally developed people do not tend to defend themselves in aggressive, petty, or cruel ways. The way people deliver messages does not tell you whether or not they have a point, notably, this is merely a reminder that I use often when I recognize a desire to express something in a harsh or overbearing way. If I really believe what I’m saying and I truly know that other people have to make their own choices, I can definitely find a way to express my belief (even my strongest, firmly held beliefs) in the good in a grounded, gentle way.

I genuinely hope you find some time to read this book.