Improve Love Making By Knowing Yourself

“I’m through with this marriage,” insists Angie, 27, a medical secretary who’s been married to Peter for five years. “All the responsibilities fall on me: I mow the lawn, do the gardening, housecleaning and painting. I choose the furniture, get the car serviced, pay the bills, make our medical appointments and buy all the presents for family members, including Peter’s family, even though I never get a thank you. Peter thinks our home is a hotel with maid service.” And he still expects her to be ready for sex at the drop of a hat.

“Peter is oversexed,” Angie continues. “He reads porn magazines and believes every word of them. Minutes before guests are due to arrive, he’s ready to make love on the living room floor. I have to get dressed behind a locked door in the morning or I’d never make it to my job on time.

“I was wildly in love with Peter, but we waited until we were married to have sex,” she explains. Once they did, she was rarely able to reach orgasm.

“Right now, I’m so uptight about sex and afraid of failure, I don’t think anything will ever work.”

“What’s so wrong with enjoying sex and wanting to please my wife?” asks 27-year-old Peter, a Website designer. Peter thinks Angie’s sexual hang-ups are all due to the fact that she has rigid ideas about everything, “sex included,” he says.

“She was determined to be engaged at 21, married at 22, and we were. Within a year, she badgered me into buying an old house, much in need of repair - though I’ve never been handy at that sort of thing. Her plan now is fix up the house then start a family. If things don’t go like clockwork, if I forget to do one thing she asks, she has a fit. She’s even more of a dictator than my parents were.”

“When we do make love, she barely responds, and I can tell her mind is a million miles away,” he reports. “She never talks about sex, never tells me what she likes, and when we’re in bed, she never climaxes. That bothers me - a lot. It makes me feel that I can’t please my own wife.”

Peter is also tired of hearing that he’s oversexed: “I love my wife and I want to make love with her. I want to share my fantasies in bed and not feel like some sort of monster,” he declares. “Angie is paranoid about the girlie magazines I keep under the bed, but I’ve always been curious about sex. It doesn’t mean I don’t respect her. Why can’t she see that?”

Making Love Better

“Angie expects perfection in every area of her life - and lovemaking is no exception,” notes Jane Greer, Ph.D., a sex therapist in New York City. “Her high expectations and inhibitions from childhood, coupled with her resentment for Peter’s failure to carry his share of the household responsibilities, are preventing her from enjoying sex as much as she could.”

Of course, there is more to sexual fulfillment than just that one moment of climax and many women are satisfied with other expressions of lovemaking. Still, if a woman can become more aware of what works for her sexually, she will be able to reach orgasm more often. The following five-step plan helped Angie:

Adopt the right attitude. Women who are consistently orgasmic are women who say, “I’m in charge of my own orgasm. I’m not waiting for someone to give it to me.” They become experts on the physics and feelings that add up to orgasm and have developed a confident mind-set.

Know your body and know yourself even better. That means touching yourself. Masturbation is not only essential to learning how to achieve orgasm, it is also an effective way to identify what kind of touch works best for you.

Know what turns you on. Once you recognize the factors that arouse you, you can communicate them to your partner.

Don’t hold yourself back. Many women are inhibited by their lack of knowledge about sex and their belief that enjoying it means they are not being a good girl. Learn to say, “I want” in bed - and remember that your partner really wants you to.

Clear the air. If you are upset with your spouse about something, it will come between you in bed. Decide to either let it go or bring up the subject directly, and resolve it.

For Angie, that meant sitting down with Peter, making a list of household responsibilities and dividing them up. As she saw him become more responsive to her outside of the bedroom, she became more responsive inside.