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“We used to always get a sitter and go out,” said the wife. “Now we get a marriage sitter. The sitter makes us dinner and puts the kids to bed for us. We just live in our house. The sitter does dishes and everything. Why waste a sitter on the kids? We should get taken care of, too.”

Marriages can learn to enjoy themselves at home as well as outside the home. I assigned a marriage sitter to all of the couples, and they reported it helped in organizing the house and provided a respite from the constant and hectic daily schedule. It’s a good idea to get the marriage sitter during the week. He or she might be able to help the kids with homework, too, while you two sit and do nothing or take your walk together. If you are very courageous, you might go up to your privacy place and put in a little practice time on the posture of the future while the marriage sitter protects your privacy for you.

“I think at first it blew her mind,” said one husband. “We had her come over one Thursday a month. She made dinner for all of us, put the kids to bed, and answered the phone. We had her do one household chore that we both hated, like fold clothes or something. She stood lookout for us while we were in the bedroom. She never said a thing, but I’ll bet her parents heard about those perverts who stayed home when the babysitter was there and even went into their bedroom alone. We got some strange looks from her mother at the grocery store the other day.”

It takes courage to make a super sexual marriage. You have to be willing to stand out as a marriage, to break away from the established pattern. After a time, however, my couples found that other marriages were coming to them for,guidance. In effect, they were being asked to expand their sex clinic. I told them to avoid telling anyone what to do, but to enjoy their new advisory status by talking about what they did in their own marriage. Tell them anything you like, but keep the posture of the future a secret. Although it does serve as a marital attention-getter, it’s a symbol for more basic and substantial marital and sexual changes. It might help others become curious enough to make their own changes and open their own sex clinic.

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Touch, hold, embrace, contact, but do not have intercourse. Do not use intercourse as the ultimate negotiable item, the key criterion in the relationship. Be sexual, have sex, but don’t mistake coitus for intimacy and closeness, or use it as some type of substitute or shortcut.

“I swear they have a chart pinned inside their door. Each man’s name is written in over this type of body chart. They mark where the man left off. . . like, Fred at the knee, Al at the breast, Steve at the nipple. They give it a little at a time.” This report from a husband recalling his courtship shows clearly the immaturity of the whole situation, the bartering instead of bonding.

There are people you will want to touch right away, to hold, to be close to. There are other people with whom handholding is a major sacrifice. Let the person and your feelings be your guide, not some sex chart of cultural or gender expectations. Once we learn that sex is more decision than impulse, start teaching that in the family, in church, and at school, then we will be free to touch instead of have “foreplay,” to experience sex as a process instead of a goal.

“I didn’t want to be a tease. I loved making out, but I stopped at that. The boys thought I was terrible. I would love to just kiss all night, and they would complain that they could die from this, perhaps from some type of internal genital explosion. One night I told a boy to go ahead and masturbate, and that when he was finished, we could go back to kissing up a storm. He thought I was nuts. He called me one of the ultimate names of the day, a ‘prick tease.’ I guess he felt I was only teasing that part of him, as if it had a mind of its own. It’s strange that you never hear much about a clit tease.” This report from one of the wives about her early courtship shows the degree to which we have genitalized our lovemaking.

As it is in courtship, so it may be in marriage. If we cling to the “time bomb” theory of sex, that once the fuse is set, there must be an ultimate explosion, we miss out on some of the most exciting and intimate experiences of human interaction: the freedom to touch and kiss and hold just for the sake of doing only that.

One of the wives reported, “Now that our therapy is finished, do you know what we like to do? I know this sounds strange, but we go out in the car at night and neck. Just neck. We get so turned on that the windows steam over like the old days. That’s all, we just do that. It’s great.”

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