Sexual Intelligence: The Groundbreaking Study That Shows You how to Boost Your Sex IQ and Gain Greater Sexual Satisfaction

It is impossible to love and to be wise. -- Francis Bacon, Essays At twenty-nine, Natalie was only months away from getting her Ph.D. in political science, a goal she had been working toward for seven years. She was being considered for a job at a prestigious university, and she and her fiance were about to close on a house. Their wedding was planned for the week after graduation. After years of struggle and hard work, Natalie was finally close to having the life she had always wanted -- and she was about to lose it all by sleeping with one of her students, an eighteen-year-old enrolled in one of her sections of Introductory Political Science. It was clear from the beginning of the semester that Mark, her student, had a crush on her. At first Natalie was amused and mildly flattered; he was tall, good-looking, and, at eighteen, already an accomplished jazz musician who played trumpet in a local band. By midsemester, her detachment had vanished. She thought about Mark constantly, even dreamed about him at night. He was in the habit of stopping by her office nearly every afternoon to chat; on the days when he didn't appear, she was miserable. Lately, he had once or twice mentioned a club where he was playing at night and suggested that she stop by. And if she did? What would happen at the end of the night? Natalie knew she was risking losing her job, her entire academic career, and her fiance, whom she loved. "Some days I tell myself, this is crazy, don't do it," Natalie told us, "and other days I think I'll go mad if I can't touch Mark, just once. I feel like I'm losing my mind. Why does sex have to be so difficult?" Natalie is not alone in her despair over sexual feelings that seem unmanageable, perversely at odds with her own wishes -- not to mention her best interests. Natalie is a smart woman and highly educated. If brains alone were at issue, she wouldn't have a problem. But so many smart people struggle either with passions that lead to disaster or with sex lives that are frustrating and disappointing -- or nonexistent. If you're like most people, sex is anything but simple. Most of us, no matter how liberated we are about sexuality in general, could name at least one sexual issue we are grappling with right now that is difficult, painful, and disruptive. You might be struggling with a powerful attraction to a person at work, an attraction that you know you shouldn't act on. Or be facing another Saturday night alone, wondering if you'll ever make love to anyone again. Perhaps you're in a happy marriage but the sex has become routine, and you're afraid that the price of a good marriage is the end of the kind of passion that makes you feel alive. Whatever you're struggling with, you probably have very few people you can talk to about it. Perhaps you haven't talked to anyone. For all our society's apparent sophistication about the subject, sexuality is still treated as a disruptive force best not too openly discussed. We slow down to view the wreckage of other people's sexual misadventures, it's true, but we gossip about them; we don't talk about our own compelling and sometimes difficult feelings. When it comes to sex, America today wears two faces. On the one hand, we seem obsessed with it. Wherever one looks -- from men's and women's magazines to television talk shows to round-the-clock assessments of one president's interpersonal exploits -- we are besieged by sexual images and sensational, superficial gossip about sex. Sex, it seems, is everywhere. Yet, at the same time, there is a powerful force within our culturein the form of old attitudes about sexthat enforces silence, shame, aConrad, Sheree is the author of 'Sexual Intelligence: The Groundbreaking Study That Shows You how to Boost Your Sex IQ and Gain Greater Sexual Satisfaction' with ISBN 9780609606407 and ISBN 0609606409.