[CHAPTER 3]
Don't you believe it for a minute. Sex provides an important time-out from the stresses and strains of a fast-paced world and adds a quality of closeness that is extremely important. Sex is a needed exercise in vulnerability wherein you allow your partner to get close. It is in most circumstances a mutual act of giving and receiving and sharing a symbolic act of trust.
I'm not saying sex is everything. If you have a good sexual relationship, it registers about ten percent on the "important scale" - meaning it makes up about ten percent of what's important in the relationship. But if you do not have a good sexual relationship, that registers about ninety percent on the "important scale." A good sexual relationship can make you feel more relaxed, accepted, and more involved with your partner. But if your life together is devoid of sex, then the issue becomes a gigantic focus of the relationship.
Sex can be of enormous symbolic importance: it can be the greatest single factor of disappointment in a relationship. It can lead to feelings of deep anxiety (a woman, for instance, believing she is not pleasing or desirable to her husband), inadequacy (a man not feeling he can perform at the expected or an inspiring level at the right time), and ultimately rejection and resentment. Once the sexual problems get to that level, any number of destructive behaviors can begin to emerge between you and your partner. One of you might think the other is trying to punish you by withholding sex, and so you decide to fight back - which causes, of course, even more destructive behaviors. Feelings of rejection by one or both partners in a relationship can be crippling and painful. Because sex is so intimate, so personal, feelings of rejection in this particular area are magnified a hundred-fold, as compared to your partner rejecting an idea or concept, a much less emotionally charged category.
Later, I will take up in more detail how to overcome sexual problems and reinstall sexual activity at a healthy level. For now, however, all I ask you to do is get this ridiculous myth out of your head. The belief that sex is not important in a relationship is a dangerous and intimacy-eroding myth. Couples who eliminate this important element of intimacy from their relationship make a grievous error in judgment. Take the sexuality away, and you may degrade the relationship to one devoid of uniqueness.
Sexual urges and needs are natural, appropriate and important to act upon. When I say that, I'm not just restricting myself to the act of intercourse. I'm talking about sex as a physically intimate experience, combined with a mental and emotional connection. In this context, I define sex as all forms of private (and to some extent public) touching, caressing, holding and any other means of providing physical comfort. I hardly believe you must return to the heated sexual stage that you might have had when the two of you first met - please refer to Myth #1 - but there must be a sexual bond between the two of you, a kind of chemistry that makes you two recognize that you are more than friends who share a life. You are mates.