This has never been a sex advice column, and it's probably in the best interests of everyone involved if that doesn't change now. But the world of sex-related self-help books is, of course, a vast one. And if most of them look pretty excruciating – hot-pink covers, overuse of the word "hot" and an odd fixation on 365 new things to do, one for each day of the year, as if most of us weren't busy enough already – they do occasionally contain psychological insights that apply beyond the bedroom. (And not just because tip No137 involves moving to the dining room.) So bear with me this week, please, as we furtively thumb through the pages of Intimacy & Desire, a recent work by the American psychologist and sex therapist David Schnarch.
Schnarch's speciality, though it sounds wrong to phrase it that way, is sexual boredom, that well-known curse of long-term relationships. Some people think of this as inevitable, others that it's the sign of an incompatible match, or a lack of imagination. Schnarch argues it happens because "sexual relationships always consist of leftovers". As he explains: you decide what you don't want to do; your partner decides what he or she doesn't want to do; and "the two of you do whatever is left over". This needn't be due to prudishness. Perhaps you harbour a role-playing fantasy involving a chance encounter at the Liberal Democrats' annual party conference, while your partner dreams of a threesome with your financial adviser. No matter how imaginative your preferences, picture them on a Venn diagram and you'll see that it's natural to gravitate to where they overlap. Very well then: the usual it is.
The fascinating thing about "everything is leftovers" is that it isn't really about sex at all. It's a structuring principle of all human relationships, romantic and platonic, personal and professional, so obvious that it's easy to miss. If you've ever bemoaned the fact that you always do the same predictable activities with your friends, that you cook the same recipes for dinner, or that your colleagues are always deciding to pursue the same boring projects, you might have blamed it on a lack of ideas, or dull friends, or a dysfunctional workplace. In fact, it's a problem that follows directly from something very good indeed: respect for one another's autonomy. The leftovers problem doesn't arise when one person can manipulate or pressure others into following a plan – but once everyone gets a say, decision-making naturally tends towards the humdrum. Three friends, fed up of heading down the pub, may each have wonderfully idiosyncratic alternative ideas for a fun night out. But the problem is that they're idiosyncratic: others are less likely to share them.
The lesson here, Schnarch notes, is that compromise isn't the answer; too much compromise generated the problem to begin with. The healthy alternative, in relationships, is what he calls "differentiation": for each partner to grow sufficiently secure in themselves that pursuing strange new directions doesn't seem like a threat. In life in general, it's an argument for alternating between preferences, rather than blending them: your weird restaurant choice this week, my obscure art-house movie next week. The exception is if you really do fantasise about the Lib Dem conference. In that case, maybe you should just feel ashamed.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com; twitter.com/oliverburkeman
