The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love (21 page)

In the next chapter we will go into this problem in detail, even offering several methods for overcoming it, but here we would like to mention just one method, advocated by Masters and Johnson. They suggest that the wife and husband get alone for a protracted time for what they call “squeezing exercises.” The wife should caress her husband’s genitals until his penis reaches an erection. Then, as she moves her hand up and down the shaft and lightly on the glans (head of the penis), he will quickly start toward ejaculation (the husband must keep the wife informed of his progress). By holding the penis with her thumb on the underside and her two fingers on either side of the ridge which separates the head (glans penis) from the shaft, she squeezes her thumb and fingers together with a very tight squeeze for three or four seconds as soon as her husband gives the signal he is about to ejaculate. She then waits fifteen to thirty seconds as his tension subsides before repeating the light, stimulating movements up and down the shaft. When he signals he is about ready to ejaculate, she again repeats the squeezing process for three or four seconds to prevent his ejaculation. This procedure should be repeated for fifteen to twenty minutes or more. If the husband accidentally ejaculates, the couple should wait forty-five minutes to an hour. Then they may start the exercises again.

When they have learned a degree of control, the wife should get astride her prostrate husband and insert his penis into her vagina
without movement
until he gets used to the new sensation. Sometimes it is necessary to remain motionless for up to two minutes. This will provide the husband with greater control. Then the wife should move up and down very gently, arousing the husband toward climax. At his signal that he is close to ejaculation, she should raise her body and repeat the squeeze technique for three to four seconds. When the feeling has subsided, she should put his penis back into her vagina and repeat the procedure. With much patience, a wife can help her husband learn control that will be a source of great satisfaction to them both. For the husband, it will be the satisfaction of mastering an important aspect of inadequacy; for the wife, it will mean that his controlled delay enables her to reach orgasm.

If at the first consideration this exercise should seem offensive to some wives, they should recognize that premature ejaculation is a heartrending problem to both husband and wife, and it will not improve by itself. A loving wife will realize that it is well worth the investment of a week of vacation or two or three weekends alone in a motel. Three to fifteen such experiences usually suffice to teach the husband ejaculatory control. A couple will earn lovemaking dividends from such an investment for many years to come, besides enriching their intimate relationship.

All learning takes time. A husband and wife will find this learning experience enjoyable and profitable for the time spent.

7.
Fatigue
. All normal body functions are weakened when a person is fatigued. A tired wife is not likely to be an amorous, responsive wife, thus lessening the chances of orgasmic fulfillment. For that reason, lovemaking should be reserved for those times when both husband and wife are rested; and for that same reason, lovemaking should be spontaneous.

A wife should greet her husband at the door with a warm kiss that may predict the future. Through tender words and touch, they can keep themselves in an animated lovemaking mood all evening, which becomes an exciting preliminary to lovemaking if they don’t retire too late.

Since opposites tend to attract each other, I have noticed that couples are often opposites in their metabolism (the process by which energy is provided for the body). Early birds, whose good hours are from 6
A.M.
to 8
P.M.
, often marry nocturnalists, whose strongest hours extend from 10
A.M.
to midnight. Consequently a nocturnalist husband may find his motor running wide open at 10:30
P.M.
only to discover that his wife, who was amorous at 7
P.M.
, is sound asleep or, worse, is half-asleep and incapable of full response.

Two things can help to equalize this metabolic mismatch. One suggestion is for the early-bird husband to nap as soon as he gets home from work so that he can feel vital at bedtime; the early-bird wife can learn to nap around three or three-thirty when the children are small, and earlier when they are in school. Years ago I learned the secret of a twenty-minute nap lying on the floor with my feet up on the bed to let the blood run back into my head. Many people have asked me, “How can you preach five times on Sunday after losing three hours’ sleep coming home from a seminar where you have been speaking for eight hours on Friday night and Saturday?” My answer points to the twenty-minute Sunday afternoon nap with my feet elevated, the equivalent for me of two to three hours’ sleep at night lying flat in bed.

Spontaneity Rewards

A second way to equalize your metabolic mismatch is to be spontaneous with your lovemaking. What is wrong with enjoying love when you
feel
like it? Sure, dinner may have to be warmed over if the fancy strikes when the husband first comes home, but I’ve never heard a husband complain about a cold dinner for the sake of lovemaking. What’s wrong with the children being assigned to dinner dishes while mom and dad go to their bedroom and lock the door for thirty minutes to make love? Rarely will you discover love at its most exciting by synchronizing watches and meeting in the bedroom by appointment. Ordinarily you will find that the most enjoyable lovemaking experiences are spontaneous. Analyze the activities that interrupt or delay lovemaking, and you will discover they are usually not nearly so important as the act of marriage.

8.
Illness
. Not only fatigue but also illness stifles lovemaking and leads to orgasmic malfunctions. Although medical science is not my field, I have known cases in which physical problems, hormone imbalance, and even low-grade vaginal infections have kept women from climax. For that reason any woman with a problem of this kind should see her family doctor and probably a gynecologist.

9.
Overweight.
An attractive but grossly disproportioned president of a Christian women’s club engaged me in conversation at a luncheon where I was to speak on “How to Get Your Husband to Treat You Like a Queen.” After ten years of marriage, she still found sex repulsive. What really interested me about this woman was the fact that she had learned orgasmic fulfillment early in their marriage five years before becoming a Christian. She declared, “Now that I’m on fire for the Lord, I’ve lost my fire in the bedroom.” When I told her that being a Spirit-filled Christian doesn’t extinguish a person’s natural, God-given desire for sex in marriage, but actually increases it, she was startled.

Upon further questioning I discovered that she had not always been overweight but had gained seventy pounds during her last pregnancy and was unable to lose them. Not surprisingly, she had lost interest in sex and found orgasms impossible for the first time in her married life. When I asked, “Does your being overweight bother your husband?” she replied, “No, it doesn’t seem to, but it sure bothers me!” That was her problem. With the increase in weight she experienced a decrease in self-image. For the first time she was embarrassed to undress in front of her husband. When I convinced her that her love life would improve and her orgasmic capability would return with the loss of weight (not to mention greater energy, health, and self-acceptance), she decided to follow my advice and make an appointment with a weight specialist. Within nine months I received a letter telling me that she had seen improvement in four months and that her love life was now back to normal. She had lost sixty of those demotivating pounds.

Losing weight is hard work. I know that personally, for I’ve been working at it all my adult life, but it is well worth the effort spiritually, mentally, physically, and emotionally. Most overweight Christians must realize that their problem is not overweight, but overeating (the Bible calls it gluttony). Many of us seem more concerned over the penalty for this sin (being overweight) than the sin itself (overeating). Such people must come to realize they can never indulge in eating all that the appetite craves. Stop eating so much and trust God to give you a joy in knowing you are obeying Him; allow Him to make you more attractive to yourself and your mate.

One thing I have learned that has been beneficial not only for keeping the weight down but also for producing better health is recognizing that what you eat is as important as how much. By cutting down on fat grams and eating less beef and more fish or chicken, you can avoid going through life hungry all the time. Also, substituting fruit for desserts is a simple but beneficial habit to get into. I recommend to those with a weight problem to get a booklet that lists the fat content of foods and keep track of everything they eat for one month. By that time they will be familiar for life what each food item costs them. For example, I formerly loved a double Big Mac hamburger with cheese until I found it had 56 fat grams—an entire allotment for four days! Four good salads may not seem as tasty at first, but they are certainly more healthful.

Choleric Dominance

10.
Sexual surrender vs. choleric dominance
. The very nature of the act of marriage involves feminine surrender. For most women this comes naturally in the early stages of marriage, because they love their husbands and enjoy giving them pleasure. After they learn the art of orgasmic fulfillment, it is a small price to pay for such an ecstatic experience. But to a strong-willed, choleric woman, surrender in any way is difficult. Consequently she will often subvert her sex drive and responses to avoid surrender. I have found that only when her marriage and family are threatened with collapse will she seek help.

Married to a passive, easy-going husband and the mother of four lovely girls, a choleric woman came into my office with a rather unusual symptom that led to the discovery of a common problem. “I just can’t stand to have my husband fondle my breasts,” she began. “He likes it very much, and for years I let him, but I can’t take it any more. Instead of exciting me, it just turns me cold.” Upon further questioning, she revealed that she had never reached an orgasm and really didn’t enjoy lovemaking. The more she withdrew from her husband (cholerics are quite transparent and cannot hide their feelings), the more he crawled into his passive shell. Mistaking his quietness for acceptance, she erroneously assumed that everything was all right. Then one day he quietly said, “I’m leaving you next Saturday.” To her question why, he responded, “It’s obvious you don’t love me anymore, and I can’t take a sexless marriage.” That’s what motivated her to visit my office.

Typical of many choleric women, she resented being a woman. She liked to lead, make decisions, and dominate everything. It was difficult for her to understand why God had made her a woman instead of a man. Only after facing the sin of self-rejection was she able to gain God’s forgiveness. Then we talked about her need to accept her femininity. When she finally accepted herself as a woman, she could accept her breasts as a vital and exciting part of her sexual apparatus, regardless of whether she thought they were too small or too large. Gradually she learned to experience orgasmic fulfillment and saw her husband’s love return. As an interesting sidelight to her recovery, her passive husband became more aggressive and thus easier for her to respect and admire. Her sexual self-acceptance made it possible to find his lovemaking exciting, which in turn transformed his self-acceptance.

Dr. Marie Robinson explained it well:

The ability to achieve normal orgasm can be called the physical counterpart of psychological surrender. In most cases of true frigidity it follows on a woman’s surrender of her rebellious and infantile attitudes as the day the night. It is the sign that she has given up the last vestige of resistance to her nature and has embraced womanhood with soul
and
body.

The achievement of orgasm, usually, is the last step in the process of growing up. If one reviews in one’s mind the actual orgastic experience it is not difficult to see why this is so.

For a woman orgasm requires a trust in one’s partner that is absolute. Recall for a moment that the physical experience is often so profound that it entails the loss of consciousness for a period of time. As we know, in sexual intercourse, as in life, man is the actor, woman the passive one, the receiver, the acted upon. Giving oneself up in this passive manner to another human being, making oneself his willing partner to such seismic physical experiences, means one must have complete faith in the other person. In the sexual embrace any trace of buried hostility, fear of one’s role, will show clearly and unmistakably.

But there is even more to the psychic state necessary for orgasm than faith in one’s partner and readiness to surrender. There must be a sensual eagerness to surrender; in the woman’s orgasm the excitement comes from the act of surrender. There is a tremendous surging physical ecstasy in the yielding itself, in the feeling of being the passive instrument of another person, of being stretched out supinely beneath him, taken up will-lessly by his passion as leaves are swept up before a wind.
¹⁹

One wise woman commented, “A woman is the only creature that can conquer by surrendering.”

11.
Weak vaginal muscles
. In the next chapter we will investigate in detail what has recently been recognized as one of the most common causes of orgasmic malfunction. It is estimated that two-thirds of the women who cannot achieve orgasm have this problem. Interestingly enough, the remedy is very simple, inexpensive, and achievable in a relatively short time. So far every woman to whom I have suggested the Kegel exercises to cure this problem has gone on to orgasmic fulfillment.