A GREAT MARRIAGE IS ONE IN WHICH YOU are both partners and lovers for life. Sex offers a powerful way to express your love and make your partner feel loved. It allows you to open up with each other and share intimacies that bring you closer than any other single thing you do as a couple. That’s why the expression for sex is making love.

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If you want a great marriage, you have to make the sex great for both of you. Great sex depends upon a physical and emotional relationship that totally satisfies both partners and makes you both happy you are together. It is not just the icing on the cake; it is one of the most important ingredients in the cake. In The Exceptional Seven Percent Gregory Popcak writes, “It is as if, through lovemaking, the husband and wife say to each other, ‘Look how well we love one an¬other, even our bodies work for each other’s good!’”

Partners in great marriages talk about their relationship as a lifelong courtship.

Sex is enhanced by daily demonstrations of affection between partners. With affection, unlike sex itself, frequency matters. More is better. Partners in great marriages talk about their relationship as a lifelong courtship. They go out of their way to touch and cuddle in the course of a day-as they say good-bye in the morning, as they pass each other in the hall, while they do the dishes even when they know most of these touches will not culminate in sex. Many couples say that if the sex is good between them, everything else in their lives has a way of working itself out.

“The chemistry between Karen and me has always been great,” Tom says. “Maybe it’s because we just enjoy being with each other and are willing to do whatever it takes to keep things loving. About ten years ago, when we’d been married for more than forty years, we attended a weekend Tantric sex workshop, just for the fun of it. It added another dimension and made something that was already great even better.”

With affection, unlike sex itself, frequency matters. More is better.

Happy Couples Make Time for Sex

The most important thing you can do to make sex great is to make time for it. No matter what. It may mean you get less sleep some times, or you have to skip lunch on a Saturday afternoon, but you’ll discover that such “sacrifices” turn out not to be sacrifices at all.

Over the years, you’ll find that many factors can have an influence on the quantity and quality of your sexual relations. Moods and hormones, the birth of children, your performance and your partner’s, and the ups and downs of work and family life can all play a part. But one thing should never change: happy couples insist that, through it all, they make time for making love.

Sandra, married three times over the last fifty years, has a wise perspective on sex and marriage.

“I have been widowed twice and I’m now on my third loving relationship, so I have been through my fair share of good times and bad, love and anger and grief. But in all three of my marriages, I would have to say, when the sex is good, we seem able to handle all the other problems.”

Practice Makes Perfect

Learn as much as you can about what pleases your partner and yourself. Read books on the subject, alone and together it can be enjoyable as well as instructive. Put at least the same energy and devotion into learning how to make sex wonderful as you would put into learning how to improve your cooking skills or your guitar playing or anything else you regard as pleasurable and important in your life.

Learning about having good sex together means being willing to let each other know, openly, what really gives you pleasure and exploring new things that make you both feel great. If you’re lucky, this learning process never ends. If you always make love in the dark, try it with the lights on or with some beautiful candles lit around the room. If you usually close your eyes when you kiss, try kissing with your eyes wide open. Try to reach each other intimately, with love, openness, and trust.

If you and your partner can talk together about your needs, wants, and desires, and can focus on what you both enjoy, your sex life will get better and better.

Jim and Cynthia, married fifty-two years, believe the secret to a happy marriage is to have sex often and to make it satisfying every time.

“Sex can be very different at different times.” Jim explains. “It can be athletic or gentle, playful or passionate, exciting or calming, or combinations of all of those things, and can change over the years. But the one thing it always has to be is satisfying for both partners. As far as I’m concerned, if sex doesn’t include an orgasm for both of us, one of us is being lazy or short-changed. End of story. You should be able to make your partner feel wonderful. When it’s over, I feel as if I love Cynthia even more.”

Good Sex Begins Outside the Bedroom: Touch Each Other Often

The path to great sex begins long before you both get into bed. It be¬gins with small gestures: cooking dinner for your partner, the way you look at each other when you say good morning or good-bye, the way you touch when you sit next to each other, the way you think about each other throughout the day.

Some books call these kinds of interactions the real foreplay to sex. “Foreplay is everything that happened between you and your partner since the last time you had sex. How you treat each other with your clothes on has far more impact on what happens in bed than carefully planted kisses right before intercourse,” according to Guide to Getting It On: The Universe’s Coolest and Most Informative Book About Sex.

The goals of good sex are to make you feel warm, intimate, and closer together as well as to give you pleasure.

Francine, married to Donald for thirteen years, says their love is reflected in their sex life together.

“I would say sex is the barometer of how healthy our marriage is. As you grow together and the love gets deeper, the sex gets better and better. I never believed that could happen. But I am happy to report that it’s true. Sex is the true expression of how you feel about each other.”

Great sex depends on real emotional intimacy and connection. That comes about in many ways touching each other lovingly plays a big part.

“I think the key to a good sex life is wanting to be touched,” says Carol, as Ronald, her husband for over fifty years, takes hold of her hand. “Your skin has to want to be touched by his skin. Ours does.” Ronald adds: “On a scale of one to ten, we’d rate our sex life an eleven!”

Intimacy Is a Lifestyle

Intimacy is more complicated than trying most of the body positions in the Kama Sutra and far more satisfying. It depends on striving each day to reach out and do more than touch your partner you need to really understand and pay attention to your partner, too.

That means being affectionate and being attentive to your partner’s moods and needs spoken and unspoken. Share your fantasies, experiment, but also respect each other’s boundaries and sensitivities.

Intimacy is more complicated than trying most of the body positions in the Kama Sutra and far more satisfying.

Josie, married twenty-five years to Jamie, say sex is always good, but sometimes it’s even better than others.

“Sex with my husband is the best when we both can let go and just be ourselves,” Josie says. “I can be the silliest person in the world or the sexiest. I don’t feel afraid to open up and enjoy whatever he does to me. And I feel free to try whatever pops into my head to please him and drive him wild. I don’t have to worry about him judging me or what I am doing because I feel completely loved. It feels so good to be able to show him that I love him this way, too.”

This article was adapted with permission from WONDERFUL MARRIAGE Copyright © 2008 By Lilo J. Leeds and Gerard G. Leeds. BenBella Books, Inc. 6440 N. Central Expressway, Suite 503 Dallas TX 75206. For more information about this book or information about the its authors Lilo and Gerard Leeds, Terrence Real and Susan Seliger. Follow this link Wonderful Marriage.

Other articles from the book Wonderful Marriage

• A Great Marriage Is a Lifelong Courtship
• Are You Really Ready for Serious Dating
• Build a Happy, Healthy Life Together 1
• Build a Happy, Healthy Life Together 2
• Fourteen Problem Behaviors

For more articles on relationships, visit http://www.divorcemag.com/articles/Relationships/

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