The production line broke down at the plant, two team managers called in sick, and you almost ran out of gas on the way home from work. At home, your wife has had her own management problems: Your eight-year-old son punched the neighbor girl, the toilet flooded, and the baby has an eye infection. Now, plan a loving time for the evening.
A TOTAL-PERSON RELATIONSHIP
Getting in tune with each other or meshing each other’s worlds is a total-person process. It is becoming “one flesh” as the Hebrews saw it—uniting spirits, emotions, and bodies. All three are necessary to a satisfying relationship. Sex that is just a union of physical bodies cannot be a satisfying communion experience. God intended sexual intercourse to be much more than just physical release. When total togetherness is missing, trouble usually ensues!
Spending time together enables two people to mesh. Having been together, you will be more likely to have a sense of each other’s feelings. Meshing takes more effort, care, and tenderness when you have come from separate and consuming outside places. You may need to spend time chatting—catching up with each other’s worlds. If you have concerns that are difficult to put aside, it might help to share these concerns with each other and in prayer with God. Together praising God for joys, accomplishments, and excitements of the day is a way of being one. What you have experienced in your day will affect the time and effort needed to feel together in each sexual experience.
Eliminate Barriers
Tackle any barriers that prevent the two of you from feeling free with each other. Perhaps one of you has some negative feelings toward the other that have not been resolved. You need to talk these over.
Oftentimes aesthetic or physical barriers also stand in the way of true togetherness. Many people are repelled by bad breath, bodily odors, or certain aspects of the partner’s appearance, yet they find it difficult to discuss these barriers. If there is something physical about your partner that makes it difficult for you to feel one with him or her, it is best to share it.
When possible, a physical barrier that is a sensitive topic should be discussed at a time other than the actual meshing time. For example, if bad breath really turns you off and your spouse has bad breath every time he eats onions, pick a comfortable time to talk about how that bothers you. Then the two of you can come up with a loving way to discuss the situation so it does not interfere with your meshing process. Develop a prearranged symbolic message that will communicate the need to do something to reverse the interfering negative situation. Something like, “I think we need a mouthwash break,” or “A mouthful of peanut butter would help things a lot right now.” The message will be better received if delivered in a lighthearted and nonoffensive manner.
Vaginal odors or infectious discharge can certainly get in the way of sexual togetherness. Keep freshly washed. Try wearing all-cotton underwear, which gives the vaginal area more opportunity to air out. Sometimes blow-drying the external genitals or the use of a heat lamp after baths or showers can help keep the vaginal area dry and free of discharge. (Naturally, you will need to be careful not to burn yourself.) If these precautions don’t correct the situation, see your gynecologist for assistance.
If being freshly washed is important to you, but it is not important to your spouse, take the responsibility to let your need and desire be known. Don’t play the game “If he loves me, he will remember.” It probably has nothing to do with his love or lack of it. It is simply a difference in what is aesthetically important to each of you. Avoid placing demands on your spouse to remember what is important to you. It will make the atmosphere much more relaxing if a system has been prearranged in which the one who remembers has a humorous way to remind the other to bathe, or whatever is needed.
It is best if each of us can realize that our spouse will sometimes forget the messages we have communicated about what we like. Usually that is not an indication of lack of care. Rather, it is an outgrowth of the fact that sexual pleasure and satisfaction are internal experiences. In the process of learning about her sexual needs, Suzanne discovered that having her breasts stimulated when she was lying on her back felt repulsive. She had always assumed that all breast touching was negative, but found that she really enjoyed having her breasts fondled and kissed when she was on top of Jerry. During one positive pleasuring experience, Suzanne and Jerry were lying side by side on their backs. They were relaxed and enjoying each other. In this comfortable state, Jerry reached over and started expressing his warm, affectionate feelings by caressing Suzanne’s breasts. He was not thinking of her previous request, nor did he intend to violate her in any way, yet she became irate because he did not remember such a specific request. To Suzanne, it was a clear message that Jerry did not value her. She felt violated. Her reaction placed incredible pressure on Jerry. The message he received was that he’d better be vigilant and on his toes at all times.
If Suzanne had been able to incorporate this attitude, she could have responded with: “Let me get on top of you so I can enjoy your touching me,” or “Right now I do not feel like moving into a more comfortable position for breast play, but I would love to have you roll over and we could just hold each other.”
Having taken care of aesthetic barriers, you can start at your present positions and then move together. This tends to create a new mood for each experience. Each time of coming together has discovery in it. Sometimes it may evolve into fun—silly, giggling events. Other times might be sad but close, or tender with much vulnerability. Intense, passionate expressions will occasionally predominate your lovemaking; some of your times together might seem like raw erotic expressions. Then there will always be times that seem rather functional. That is, one or both of you need the physical or emotional closeness and release, but you experience little more than that. These functional sexual experiences are acceptable and need not be seen as a negative sign about your relationship—so long as they don’t become your primary sexual expression.
Communicate
What role does communication play in the whole meshing process? Effective verbal and nonverbal communication can enhance the process of becoming one. To feel one with each other, it is critical that each partner feel heard by the other. This requires empathy, which is a major part of active listening. Empathy is more than a mechanical technique. It is the ability to enter into another person’s feelings instead of defending your own. In addition, it is the ability to communicate with the other person in such a way that he or she feels you are in tune.
It takes discipline to practice empathy and active listening, to achieve an awareness of our own feelings and reactions. We discipline ourselves to acknowledge our own feelings, to be real about them, but not to let them interfere with hearing and being with the other person. The more emotionally difficult an area is for us, the more disciplined our practice of empathy has to be. The best way to practice empathy is to reflect and clarify. Reflect what you have heard and sensed from the other. Listen and observe with all your senses. Sort out your own reaction and set it aside. Then feed back what you’ve heard and seen. After that invite the other person to clarify and expand the original communication.
It is most difficult for us to remain nondefensive and be in tune with the other person when that person is talking about us. Following is an example of how you might practice empathy even when the message is about you:
Bill: You’ve gotten so much better—you used to want to have sex right when you felt like it. If it couldn’t be right then, and if I didn’t get an erection right away, then you’d pout.
Linda: You’re feeling less demand from me. (Good reflection and focus on his feelings rather than on what he is saying about her.)
Bill: Yes, it seems we’ve both learned that if one of us isn’t turned on, we can enjoy cuddling and that’s okay.
Linda: So there is more relaxation in realizing our pleasuring times can be an end in themselves, rather than having to lead to intercourse.
Bill: That has really made me want to get together with you more often.
With Linda’s consistent reflection of Bill’s feelings, he was able to move from talking about her to talking about himself. For many of us, being an active listener when we are hearing negative messages about ourselves is not easy.
This disciplined, effective, verbal communication does not work well once sexual excitement begins. So this work has to occur before or apart from sexual arousal. We do not hear as accurately when we are aroused by intense sexual feelings. Getting with the sexual process is really flowing with your own internal experience, so it is contradictory to work on empathy once you are into a sexual experience. This does not mean that you switch to being cruel, selfish, or insensitive at the expense of your spouse. Rather, you focus on the enjoyment and pleasure of the moment, respecting the guidelines previously established about what is violating to your partner. We will build on this principle in the next chapter.
Because verbal communication is not at its best during sexual excitement, sexual decisions must be made away from the lovemaking event. In the process of making decisions about what is best for each of you sexually, it is helpful to develop a nonverbal signal system. This can then be used during sexual experiences to follow through with decisions made previously.
Here’s an example of how this might work. One common discomfort for women is the man’s tendency to manually stimulate the clitoris too directly, too intensely, and for too long a time. Usually the man has no idea that what he is doing is uncomfortable or painful for the woman. After she has shared that she frequently experiences discomfort from manual stimulation, the man will still need ongoing guidance to know what does feel good. You can have an instruction time where the woman shows the man and talks about it. But once you are into a sexually arousing time, that type of instruction will tend to kill the sexual feelings. Instead, use a prearranged nonverbal message that can flow with the feelings of the moment. For example, the woman might gently lift the man’s hand to reduce the pressure, or move his hand to another location that feels hungry for touch. This is much easier for a man to take than the verbal message, “You’re doing it too hard again.”
When there is a particular kind of touch uniquely negative to you, you might decide that a tap on your spouse’s shoulder is a reminder that those negative feelings are occurring. One man experienced his wife’s touch as ticklish. Another woman could not stand to be kissed on the neck, yet when her husband was enjoying himself he might forget. Both of these people developed mutually accepted methods of signaling a need for change.
A positive, nonverbal cue can ask for more of a specific action that feels good. A woman might push her pelvis toward a point of stimulation that is bringing her pleasure. A man might move the woman’s buttocks when she is in the top position if he needs more movement to keep his erection, or he might stop her movement to control ejaculation. There are many ways we can communicate with each other without using words. The important ingredient is that both the sender and receiver attach the same meaning to the nonverbal message. When positive nonverbal systems are developed within a couple’s sexual relationship, the meshing of your worlds can be a beautiful, harmonious process.