YOUR MARITAL HEALTH/FINDING OUT WHO’S THE MATTER WITH US: COLD
SEXUAL PROBLEMS – DECREASED AROUSAL
I can tell you now that I have lost my sex drive. I just don’t feel like it, want it. or really even want to talk about it.
There isn’t much time for that sort of thing anymore. My mind and feelings are on the kids right now.
The first report was a wife’s, the second from a husband. Five hundred eighty-eight men and 678 women in the sample reported some problem with the arousal axis of the sexual-response system. Some of these same persons at times experience hyperarousal as well, so life phase was an important predictor of sexual response. Most clinicians report that diminished sexual arousal (what they call sex drive) is the most frequent sexual difficulty. I found that there was no one dominant problem and that no one problem stood alone. At cold times, sexual arousal cools down as much as it may heat up at hot times.
A word of warning here. The hot and cold dimensions overlap. You can, as I have said, be “hothy cold” or “coldly hot.” You can be as vigorously depressed as you can be passively agitated. At such times, the apparently “cold” person may be showing the “hot sex problems,” including hyperarousal, while the apparently “hot” person may be displaying the “cold sex problems,” including diminished arousal. In operating your own sex clinic, and particularly at this step of understanding your marital relationship style and any areas you both wish to correct or enhance, you may want to read my book Superimmunity, in which I describe hot and cold life-styles and provide several tests related to these orientations.
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