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One Chicago graduate student, 37, now in her second marriage, echoes that uneasy change. Says she: "Many of us are unable to break the habit of self-absorption, unable even to live with someone else because it interferes with our own space." She still has trouble with commitment, but feels a push toward it because she wants children and does not care to have to raise them by herself. "I can still regress, but I don't want to," she says. "The only time I get really nostalgic is when I get stoned and listen to Pink Floyd and think about when everyone was everyone else's lover. But it just doesn't work." With her first husband, she experimented with open marriage. "The trouble is that emotionally you spread yourself too thin. What women who tried to break out of traditional relationships found is that it doesn't work."
Judy Meyer, a marketing executive for several Houston nightclubs, observes that "ten years ago, I would walk into a nightclub and be literally pinched by men, and guys would ask me pointblank if I wanted to get laid. Today there is a general softening in attitude. The days of the hard hustle are gone." Says Stephen Greer, 33, co-owner of three Chicago nightclubs: "If you don't work in a candy store, every piece of candy looks great. But today everybody works in a candy store—it's so easy for everybody to have sex. So people are becoming more selective: holding out for just the right candy, just the right person."
Manhattan Sex Therapist Shirley Zussman says that her patients these days complain about the emptiness of sex without commitment. "Being part of a meat market is appalling in terms of self-esteem," she says. "Fears, of both loneliness and intimacy, are a backlash against the 'cool sex' promoted during the sexual revolution." Psychiatrist Domeena Renshaw, director of the Sexual Dysfunction Clinic at Chicago's Loyola University, has a waiting list of 200 couples seeking help. "Many have tried group sex and the swinging scene, but for them it has been destructive and corrosive. Often the partner who suggested it first is the one who suffers most."
For sexologists these days, the new frontier is inhibited sexual desire (ISD). The problem accounts for 30% to 50% of the case load for many therapists. "We didn't look for excitement problems in the mid-'70s," says Therapist Stephen Sloan in Atlanta. "It was assumed that everyone desires sex." Some therapists, accustomed to reporting 75% to 90% success rates in treating other sexual difficulties, report a 10% to 30% success rate in treating ISD. Philadelphia Sexologist Harold Lief has estimated that 20% of all adult Americans are afflicted with ISD. "It is clear that we are talking about enormous numbers," he says.