Reignite the fire with ‘The Kosher Sutra’

For many Americans, sexual dissatisfaction is a serious problem — creating friction between couples, dividing households, and leading to a greater issue of complacency and boredom. In his new book, “The Kosher Sutra: Eight Sacred Secrets for Reigniting Desire and Restoring Passion for Life,” Rabbi Shmuley Boteach shares his guide to restoring passion, desiring your partner, regaining intimacy as well as creating a new energy for all aspects of one's life. Read an excerpt:

To live erotically is to recapture our fascination with the small stuff. It is to experience life’s magnetism and pull. To live erotically is to wish to make love to life itself.

Notice that, when it comes to lovemaking, the erotic charge is lost the moment orgasm is felt. Orgasm is a purging of erotic buildup. The same is true of life. Men and women who once seemed to be so enamored of life, now go through the everyday motions of existence robotically and predictably. The reason is the same. They have orgasmed in their lives. They have experienced what they believe is a peak, and now, after the peak, there is precious little to look forward to.

While I was writing this book, a monumental study was published by researchers from Warwick University in Britain and Dartmouth College in the U.S. They analyzed data on two million people from seventy nations. What they found was an extraordinarily consistent pattern in terms of depres­sion and happiness levels. From Australia and Italy to Nica­ragua and Azerbaijan, they witnessed how the midlife crisis was slowly becoming a universal phenomenon. People were happy at the beginning of their lives but became depressed beginning in their forties, with age forty-four being the worst year of all.

As the Daily Mail in Britain reported, many previous studies had suggested psychological well-being remained relatively at and consistent as we age. But the new study suggested otherwise. Using a sample of a million Britons, researchers found both men and women faced their biggest dip in happiness at 44, regardless of marital status, wealth or children. In the U.S., by contrast, there was a big difference between the sexes, with unhappiness peaking at about 40 for women and 50 for men. Warwick’s Professor Andrew Oswald said signs of mid-life de­pression are found in all kinds of  people. Some suffer more than others, but in our data the average effect is large. It hap­pens to men and women, to single and married  people, to rich and poor, and to those with and without children. He said that what caused the U-shaped curve was unknown, but added: ‘It looks from the data like something happens deep inside humans.’

Well, let the mystery stand no more. I’ll tell you exactly what happens. We orgasm. We climax. We peak. We see our lives as reaching its apogee in our forties and then, somehow, the life is beat right out of us. The erotic spark is lost. We become the proverbial man who is comatose on the bed after about ten minutes of sex with his wife and one unsatisfy­ing climax. That’s as good as it gets. It wasn’t erotic. It wasn’t exciting. And it wasn’t enough to awaken anything deeper. It was a life lived in the hollows.

I see this kind of burnout all the time. So many good, pre­cious people are just shells of their former selves. They are lifeless, vacant, and often bitter. Life has put them through the rinse cycle and they come out shriveled and shrunk.

They move through life like a passing shadow. Few things animate them. Even their kids don’t seem to excite them. They long ago stopped living and now merely subsist. They get by. They pay their bills. And thank G-d for TV, YouTube, and sporting events. At least they have something to look forward to. Their bodies are intact and even healthy. But the spark of G-d has ceased to flicker within. The routine of life and the pain of everyday struggle slowly snuffed out their spirit.

For men, we used to call this a midlife crisis. It is no longer so.

Today it is something entirely different. A crisis means that you have hit a wall in your life. Your professional dreams have been shattered. You feel like a failure, like life has broken you. But for today’s men it’s not about a crisis. It’s about sheer, unadulterated boredom. They don’t look for the blonde and the Porsche. That would require far too much effort. It would presuppose that they feel still feel an inner surge of energy. It would mean that they would have to woo a woman again. Nah. It’s easier to find the blonde in Internet porn and the Porsche on a TV ad. They prefer the couch to an affair and a beer to kinky sex. Life can do them no more harm because they have already died within.

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