Page:The Power of Sexual Surrender.pdf/107

 you gradually lose faith in yourself and then you lose interest in making love."

Another man, whose wife has just come to me and who has never been able to have an orgasm except clitorally, recently said: "I may sound unsympathetic and petty, but if I felt there was no end in sight to this kid stuff, I mean this form of having to stroke endlessly, I think I'd give up on the sex part. It's lost all its fun."

He'll get his fun back, for his wife, knowing a lot more than she did when she started, is very intent on helping herself. And the husband is not unsympathetic or petty in his complaints. He is simply human, and there's a limit to human endurance.

The wife's denial that the husband is bothered by a clitoridal problem, I have found, is based on a deeper fear—the fear that the marriage is being endangered by her problem. Both of the women mentioned above (and many others I have treated) finally admitted that they had come for help because of their fear that their marriage was headed for trouble, that their husbands were close to leaving them. The fact is, though, that many men seem to have a very high tolerance for this problem in their wives. I have yet to find any man who has broken up his marriage for that reason. Indeed both the men I have quoted above had reassured me that they could and would go on taking their frustrations. They just strongly preferred not to.

No, the danger is not from the husband. Real men rarely leave women for that reason. The danger is from the woman herself. She it is who, because of her immaturity, will do the rejecting rather than face her problem. The real danger is that she will force the man away from her without even realizing that she has done so.

You begin to see, then, that the chief characteristic of women with this type of problem is evasiveness, hiding from