What's Your Sexual Style?

How a couple can share desire, pleasure, and satisfaction.

by Barry W. McCarthy, Ph.D.

Shifting Gears

Exercises to Enhance Your Sexual Desire and Satisfaction

Helping couples develop a sexual style that integrates intimacy and eroticism is a major contribution of sex therapists to both couples and clinicians. This concept positions a couple as an intimate sexual team. Read More

Preventing Extra-Marital Affairs

The most common way that people end a dating relationship is to begin dating (or at least flirting) with another person. When married most people (80% or more) assume that they will have a traditional monogamous marriage. However, the couple does not engage in an explicit discussion about extra-marital affairs (EMA). Read More

Sexual Recovery from an Extramarital Affair

During the last ten years there has been a revolution in understanding and treatment of extra-marital affairs driven by the seminal research and clinical work of Snyder, Baucom, and Gordon. Their book "Getting Past the Affair" is the gold standard of self-help books on this topic. Read More

What 60-Year-Old Couples Can Teach Young Couples About Sexual Desire and Satisfaction

Our culture, especially movies and music videos (not to mention porn sites), puts a premium on youth, illicitness, eroticism, and "hot sex". This is a seductive, enticing image, but is it true? Read More

Sex Scandals and Healthy Sexuality

The media is overflowing with reports of sex scandals-affairs, compulsive sexual behavior, child sexual abuse, and sexual assault. The number of ways that sex can destabilize individuals and couples is seemingly endless. Read More

Sexual Recovery from an Extramarital Affair

Guidelines for Revitalizing and Maintaining Sexual Desire

The prescription to revitalize and maintain sexual desire is intimacy, pleasuring, and eroticism. Read More

Bridges to Sexual Desire

Among American couples the average intercourse frequency is between 58-61 times a year, a little over once a week. This data on relatively low rates of intercourse surprises most people as does the data that married couples have more sex than either dating or cohabitating couples (who have been together 2 years or longer). Read More

Can Sexual Desire Remain Vital and Satisfying in Long-Term Relationships?

In R-rated movies and novels sex is a major theme, but it's never marital sex. "Hot sex" is either with a new partner or an extra-marital affair. The meta-message is the best sex is spontaneous, dramatic, both people are turned-on before touching begins, and sex always culminates in intercourse and orgasm. Is this the right model for couples in marital or serious relationships? Read More

Is there sex after marriage?

In movies sex is always spontaneous and highly charged. Both people feel powerful desire and are turned-on before touching occurs. The sex is short and intense, and everyone has multiple orgasms. Of course, it's always a new couple or an extra-marital affair - marital sex is almost never depicted in the movies. Married couples are not supposed to be "hot." Read More

Is it really men who stop couple sexuality?

The word on the street is that male sexual desire is automatic, erections are spontaneous, and intercourse frequent. Another assumption is that men are easily frustrated by women's inhibited desire and their difficulty to reach orgasm. Read More

What Is the Right Couple Sexual Style for You?

When most people begin a relationship the sexual chemistry is strong and sparks fly. Sex is frequent and intense in the romantic love/passionate sex/idealized couple stage of the relationship. However, this sexually-charged phase is usually short-lived lasting around six months or so - and up to two years if you're lucky. Read More