Page:The Power of Sexual Surrender.pdf/247

 As I have pointed out, frigid women have little knowledge of what men are really like. Basically they see men as "powers," without worries or fears. When they learn from their husbands' own lips their real feelings, these women are very greatly aided in changing their underlying attitudes.

One woman told me that her whole marriage-long conception of her husband had been completely altered by one emotional confession from him. She had told him that she had finally realized her frigidity had been the cause of the problem between them and that she had determined to attempt to change herself. He listened quietly as she talked and was silent for a moment when she finished. Then he said in a low voice: "I have been terribly lonely without you." This honest communication reached past all her neurotic defenses, informed her simply and directly how important her decision was to him, how human and needful the husband she had feared and rejected really was.

It is in such real, such personal exchanges with his wife that a man most often begins to reap the rewards his wife's decision to change will bring him. As he expresses himself more and her security in him deepens, he begins to encounter the depths of tranquillity that have always lain beneath her defensive exterior; he begins to feel her great capacity to give him something that he has missed, missed terribly—a companionship, support, and love that ask for nothing but to be needed. In this way a new and profound mutuality develops and, cleared of the fears that have impeded it, the real marriage between these two people can begin to flourish.

In the sexual aspect of the marriage, as in its psychological aspect, sensitivity is also the key word for the husband who wishes to help his wife.

In every case of frigidity that I have encountered the sexual life between husband and wife has, through the years, become an extremely self-conscious one. The wife generally is