THE DESEXUALIZATION OF THE AMERICAN MARRIAGE/A SEXUAL-SYSTEM EXAM: “COMING” TOGETHER
We try. We try. He slows down, I try to hurry up. We just seem to miss it. We just cannot seem to come together. It was easier when I faked it. I’m sorry now that I ever told him that I faked it.
WIFE
I wish now she would just fake it. I don’t think we will ever come together like everyone else.
HUSBAND
It is not possible to experience simultaneously any human physiological response. The complexity of genital responses, with all of the associated feelings and thoughts, makes any effort to match them in time not only a wasted effort, but counterproductive to spontaneous intimacy.
The word entropy means to become more diffuse, more distant. It comes from physics, and is referred to as the second law of thermodynamics, meaning that molecules tend to become more and more distant from each other, that the world is becoming more and more “apart.” Neguentropy means the opposite, to come more and more together through a complex series of changes that look singularly as if they signal a falling apart, but really relate to a complex, infinite joining of all elements of the universe.
The world that we can see and touch is governed by the rules of thermodynamics, by entropy. The world of intuition, the world of feelings and awareness beyond see and touch, is governed by the rules of neguentropy. The word’ ‘super” in super marital sex refers to this world, to the “beyond, over, and transcendent” aspects of our life, to being at one with the universe by being at one with our marital system.
Is your own marriage getting closer and closer, seeming to merge into a “oneness” (neguentropy)? Or does it seem that you are becoming more and more distant, somehow parting (entropy)?
The couple in my example scored toward neguentropy. Their pattern of despair unfortunately was becoming solidified, almost unchangeable by the time they came for help. They were forming what I call a compensated marriage, one that gets more and more fixed through their mutually supported personal dissatisfactions. Couples who are fixed are the most difficult of all couples to work with, because they are unable to “breathe,” to expand, and to grow. Attempts to help them grow result in a form of implosion, a cracking of a solidified system that has no room for expansion and contraction.
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