Laurie Watson | Taking Hot Sex from Fiction to Fact

Forty million American women struggle with sexual desire and withdraw from physical intimacy in their marriages for reasons that might even be a mystery to them.  They remember trembling at his touch.  They remember aching with need.  But somehow within 2 years about 20 percent of all marriages are sexless (less than 1 time a month) and another 15 percent are low sex (less than 25 times a year.)  How do we take the flower and the flame in the fiction romance novel and keep it alive and burning in a real long-term relationship?

The romance novel holds the seeds to the answers for long-term sexual happiness - mastery of the chase, great seduction technique, and anticipatory fantasy as the core of a woman's eroticism.

We marry primarily to fulfill our needs for closeness, sex, and love. Yet everyone also needs a balance of autonomy, respect for our purpose, and space as well. Pursue and let go are familiar themes of early courtship. Once they've caught each other, the partners tend to corner the market on separate ends of this dichotomy.  Stereotypically, the woman wants more emotional intensity, talking, and feels greater concern about home, hearth and security. That tall, silent, strong male, who was previously focused on her, now seems to find his intensity at work, wants to do not talk, and needs autonomy and adventure. If a power struggle ensues, she feels deprived and starved; he feels smothered and controlled. Sex becomes an electric field where the couple must work out the balance of closeness and distance. They often switch sides in bed with the emotionally distant male wanting closeness sexually and the emotionally pursuing female not wanting anything to do with making love.  The secret to balancing the chase in long term partnership is to give to your partner love the way they experience love. Talk to her. Make love to him. Commit for 6 months without checking to see if your partner is reciprocating. Contain the anxious thoughts inside that worry about being taken advantage of.

One effective way a man moves close to his partner is in seduction and good technique.  As all of you know, it's not rocket science but focus, intensity, words of appreciation for her beauty, and confident touch. Discouraged from rejection, men stop seducing and resort to a cool request, "Do you want sex?"  Women think about it and answer, "uhh... no I don't want sex."  He needs to be vulnerable and tell her he wants her. Putting the phone down at the dinner table and listening to her may be the first act of foreplay that she needs to feel like he's attending to her world.  Once in bed he'll need about 20 minutes of patience because women often don't really experience desire until they are aroused.  Then, when she finally feels her body catch fire she wants to do it.  Many women complain they are slow to arouse.  But most women in long-term relationships take 20 minutes of "change-your-mind-sex" where they let go of the cares of the day and then another 20 minutes of clitoral stimulation to reach orgasm. (Sorry - this is the only point of contention between romance writers and myself -- only 15-20% of all women reach orgasm through intercourse.)  A woman with low libido could really use a good seducer.

While women believe they were spontaneously more responsive early in the relationship, it's because they are thinking about sex so often.  They wake up, shower and shave their legs thinking about being naked in bed. They put on pretty panties and think about him taking them off.  They get their nails done at lunch thinking about scratching his back, etc.  All day long a woman builds a fantasy in her mind about their time together so by the time he touches her, she's wet. Reading a romance novel is also effectively a borrowed fantasy—yours! Yea!  I have fantasies that romance writers are the most erotic women on the planet. Because our testosterone is a fraction of our male partner, a woman's eroticism resides in her mind not her body and always has.  But often when married, she believes it's naughty to fantasize or best if she gets all her stimulation from the lovemaking of the moment.  Even a woman using a vibrator, won't be able to reach orgasm if her mind is thinking of the laundry list.  While men's desire comes from their hormonal surplus of testosterone, women's desire has always come from anticipatory fantasy.

With my two decades of experience as a marital therapist and certified sex therapist, my debut book WANTING SEX AGAIN - HOW TO REDISCOVER DESIRE AND HEAL A SEXLESS MARRIAGE is like sex therapy in a book. Too dry or too salacious, sex therapy books can turn off the more anxious low libido female. As a long time reader of romance novels, I honestly modeled my chapters thinking of how women might see themselves in the compound characters from my individual sessions and find their way back to erotic lovemaking with their partner.

Laurie Watson is a certified sex therapist and author of WANTING SEX AGAIN - HOW TO REDISCOVER DESIRE AND HEAL A SEXLESS MARRIAGE available December 4, 2012.  You can follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

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