Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer - Sex For Dummies

Turn off your phone: Just because there’s a ringtone or little chime telling you’ve got a new email or text message doesn’t mean that it always gets first crack at your attention. Sometimes you just have to decide that you won’t make room for interruptions. If the two of you have finally found time to sit down and have a conversation, interrupting those precious moments makes no sense. Nobody is more important to you than your spouse, right?

In the days when the only way to communicate over long distances was with pen and ink, people actually wrote to each other. Now that the typewriter is passé, and we have computers and e-mail to make writing easier, people do it less and less.

If you have half an hour, and your spouse isn’t around, write him or her a letter. Explain how you feel so you can get a jump start when you do get the chance to talk. How your letter gets there — via post office, text, or e-mail — is up to you.

You can also jot down brief messages on sticky notes and leave them someplace where your spouse is sure to see them. Just make sure that those short notes aren’t always passing on a chore, or your spouse will dread seeing them rather than view them as something to look forward to.

Writing yourself notes about what you need to communicate to your partner is a good idea. How many times have you said to your spouse, “I had something to tell you, but I’ve forgotten it”? If you’d written it down, you wouldn’t have that problem. So next time, do just that.

Letting communication between you and your spouse drift away into nothingness is very easy. Communication is something that you have to work at, and both of you have to put it near the top of your list of priorities.

Even though most people don’t state the word orgasm in their marriage vows, being able to derive sexual satisfaction with your spouse is certainly implied. But the sexual union between husband and wife brings more to a marriage than just the easing of sexual tensions. It also brings intimacy, which is another important component to the glue that holds the two of you together.

A marriage needs intimacy because it shows the world, and proves to the couple themselves, that they really have a special bond between them. That doesn’t mean you can’t set any boundaries, but the fewer you have, the more intimate you will be. And I’m not only talking about physical intimacy. Being naked together is certainly a good feeling, but you also have to let your partner see into your psyche. If you hide your hopes, your dreams, and your desires from your spouse, then you become strangers in some very basic areas, which is not good for a marriage.

You can also carry intimacy too far and think nothing of, say, burping loudly in front of your spouse as if he or she weren’t there. That’s not intimacy; it’s just gross. No matter how intimate you are, you should never lose respect for your partner. Now, if your intimacy stretches into the bathroom, then there’s certainly nothing wrong with exercising any bodily function in front of each other, but that notion doesn’t give you license to turn the rest of the house into a toilet.

What ruins the intimacy between a husband and wife is when they play games with each other, which means when they keep score.

He did that, so I won’t do this.

She didn’t let me do this, so I won’t let her do that.

Last year we didn’t go to the dance, so I won’t go to his family picnic.

Every time you look up at that scoreboard, you destroy a piece of your marriage. You aren’t supposed to be on different teams; you’re supposed to be on the same team. Remember, if one of you wins and the other loses, the relationship always loses!

Now, even teammates squabble. Perfect marriages don’t exist; things will go wrong, and you’ll have your ups and downs. But if your goal is to be perfectly intimate, to be as close to each other as possible, then you’ll work those problems out and continue to make progress. If you stop thinking that way — if you start believing that your relationship is a competition — then very soon it will become one, and it will cease to be a marriage.

You can find no better feeling in the world than being one with the person you love. During sex, the intensity of that oneness can be terrific, but that feeling is also a source of strength and comfort 24 hours a day. Work toward having the kind of marriage where you really do feel that you’re in this life together. You won’t regret it, I promise you.

And if your sex life isn’t what it should be, or what you’d like it to be, then I suggest you devote some time to reading Chapter 14on how to spice up your love life.

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