Page:The Power of Sexual Surrender.pdf/254

 only a sense of its importance and the knowledge of a few minimal facts.

One method of preserving spontaneity is to prevent love-making from always occurring at the same time. Evenings in most homes tend to follow a pattern. Supper must be cooked, dishes must be done, children must be put to bed. And then there's television or guests. I have had many men and women defend the proposition that, since love-making tends to make them sleepy when it is finished, the last moments of the day are by necessity the time for love.

But this is making convenience a necessity. And love is too beautiful, too centrally important to be domesticated so. If it can laugh at locksmiths, it can also, once every week or two, laugh behind locked bedroom doors. Children have homework to do or a television program to watch, and anyhow, it is good for them to realize that Mother and Father spend some time alone and love to.

Dishes can wait occasionally, too, at least in the name of love. And a television program is rarely so good or demanding that a delicious sleepiness won't improve it.

Desire often arises unbidden and for no apparently rational reason. Men are more subject to outside stimuli than women and are perhaps more uninhibited, so the inception of love-making at unroutine times may most frequently originate with them. But women, too, when they feel the urge should realize that they can initiate a passionate interlude and should not prevent themselves from doing so. It is proper and good that a woman should do this. And her husband will love it.

I am assuming that the partners in such delightfully off-*hour trysts are sensitive to each other's responses. What every man and woman must realize is that it is perfectly all right to say no if one is fatigued or preoccupied. But the nay-saying must be gentle, and if it is so and the partner