SEXUAL HEALTH: When desires don’t match

Couples that are out of sync with each other will end up in trouble both inside and outside the bedroom. By Dr Joachim Osur

The driver of the salon car stormed into my office, shouting: “It is an emergency! Please help!”

“What is it? Where is it?” I shouted back as I picked up the phone to tell the nurse to mobilise the resuscitation team.

“I picked him up in the nick of time, he is in my car with his wife. He cannot walk out of the car,” the man explained. As I asked the nurse to get the resuscitation tray, the man interrupted, asking me to stop. “It is not about that,” he said. “Come out and see for yourself. Leave the nurse out of this.” I literally ran after him out of the clinic door and into the car park.

POSSIBLE PSYCHOSIS?

In the car was a scared-looking man with bruises on his face and what looked like mud all over his chest and tummy. He was also stark naked. I thought this was possibly a case of psychosis in its extreme form, causing the man to remove his clothes and go wild in the streets. There was a woman sitting beside him but fully dressed and equally distressed.

“He is a pastor but I don’t know his name. You can ask his wife there next to him,” the driver explained. “I am just a Good Samaritan. Get him out of my car so that I can leave.”

This was all very strange. I got some hospital linen for the naked man to wrap himself in, and then he walked with ease into my consultation room as his wife followed. The driver quickly reversed and took off.

“This is my husband; he is Pastor John,” the woman explained, “and he has just been rescued from an angry mob that wanted to burn him alive.”

John was in a hotel room with a woman when a mob came to the hotel and broke into the room. The woman escaped through the window into the thicket behind the hotel.

Naked John was flogged and pushed out of the hotel, the mob crying for his blood. They accused him of sleeping with one of his church members, a married woman.

They were getting ready to lynch him with a tyre when the Good Samaritan turned up and rescued him.

John’s wife, Jane, had already been called by one of her friends who informed her that her husband was in danger. She was walking out of the house to go to the hotel when the car carrying her naked husband arrived at her doorstep. She jumped into the car and ordered the driver to proceed to the sexology clinic. And so here they were.

“He is my husband but I think he is very sick!” Jane exclaimed. “He has betrayed the trust of the congregation, I am ashamed of him. It is not the first time this has happened.”

In fact, this was the third time John found himself accused. A full clinical assessment showed no abnormality.

In a few cases of hypersexuality, there may be excess levels of male hormone testosterone.

Hypersexuality is synonymous with sex addiction and I just needed to be sure that Pastor John was not suffering from it. John’s testosterone levels were normal. On further interrogation, the only abnormality I could identify was that the couple had uneven sex desire.

Uneven sex desire is a situation where sex partners have different levels of sex drive; one partner craves sex more than the other. It is many times caused by relationship discontent among couples, poor intimacy and power struggles in the relationship.

Once it sets in, it is itself the fuel that further worsens the couple’s relationship problems. It leads to suspicion and build up of anger as one partner demands and the other stays put in refusing sex more and more.

Pastor John and Jane had been going through this, with John being the one with greater sex drive. After some time of having his demands turned down, he gave up asking for sex and strayed off with married women whom he was counselling, leading to the current crisis.

Uneven desire is treated by tackling the root causes. In this case, the problem was that of failing intimacy.

They no longer gave attention to each other’s needs and instead got absorbed in their careers, purportedly trying to help other couples.

Jane was a counsellor and always arrived home emotionally drained. Pastor John was attached to a number of his congregants providing emotional support. John and Jane were emotionally distant even if physically close.

Sex was impossible under the circumstances.

After months of couple counselling, John and Jane got back their intimacy. John repented in front of his congregation and was reinstated as a pastor. It was yet another reminder that a functional sex life in marriage is key to all aspects of life, success in professional life included.