It is not easy to read a book with the words “Cheat on your Husband!” emblazoned on its cover.
I got a lot of strange looks when I read it on the subway. When I first received the review copy of Andrea Syrtash’s latest book in the mail, I wondered what on Earth my editor had been thinking. My husband wondered the same thing.
But Syrtash, a dating and relationship expert, didn’t write a how-to on cheating. The book’s full title is Cheat on your Husband (with your Husband). How to Date Your Spouse, and offers tips for couples to re-ignite the passion in their marriages. It’s a lively, fun read, and Syrtash is a pleasant writer, who uses a lot of real-life examples to back up her advice. Her basic thesis is that if women can recapture the excitement that comes from extramarital affairs and the early stages of dating, it can help married couples break out of their routines.
Syrtash sets the stage by delving into the physical components of love and lust, including brain chemistry. When you first start dating, you’re close to delusional. At least, you see things through a different lens: what may later become your partner’s annoying habits at first seem like quirks or cute idiosyncrasies. Everything is a little more pleasant, due in no small part to changes in brain chemistry.
She then discusses how modern marriages are different than those of previous generations, in a chapter titled “This is Not Your Mother’s Marriage.” She writes that “modern marriage has new rules and different measurements of success.”
But, Syrtash notes, it’s easy to become complacent. No one goes into marriage agreeing that they’ll go long stretches without paying attention to each other, she notes. But it takes effort and commitment to keep the spark, that thing that drew you to your spouse in the first place. The most successful couples know marriage can be hard work sometimes, but they know it’s worth the effort.
While some of this may seem like familiar territory (and indeed, a lot of marital advice books have similar theses), Syrtash delves deeper. It’s not enough to have date night (although she says it’s a crucial component of any marriage revitalization). And it doesn’t have to be a costly exercise. Things like offering small compliments, or taking time for a long, lusty session of kissing can rekindle the romance that couples are likely to remember from that early dating stage, where kissing for hours and noticing every cute thing about your husband’s personality happened daily.
My one nitpick with this book is that most all the advice is aimed at the woman in the relationship. Yes, we need to take time for ourselves, and yes, we should make an effort to entice our husbands into feeling attractive and let them know we care. But husbands can and should be giving as much effort as wives into re-igniting the spark. Syrtash notes the old joke about what men and women say after marriage:
Him: “She’s changed!”
Her: “He hasn’t changed!”
Overall, however, Syrtash gives a lot of great insight and advice. It can be intimidating to think that you’ve lost something in your marriage, and daunting to think you have to recreate something that’s gone. But her take seems to be that the spark couples have when they first get together never really dies, but ebbs and flows, depending on the amount of attention they pay it.
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