I didn't hear from Christopher for a week. Finally I called him and asked, "Can we talk?" We met for dinner, and talk we did. He was very forthright. I learned that Christopher's idea of sex was seducing a woman, notbeingseduced. Furthermore,
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his biggest turn-on, he told me, was not for the woman to be flamboyant and seductive, but to resist.
Christopher, it turns out, wanted to feel like the virile seducer. Not, as he said, like "some lonely repressed guy who pays to see cheap women dance around."
Wow! What an eye-opener that was for me. I resolved, at that moment, never again to make any assumptions about a man's sexual desires. Every man is different. (So is every woman, and we'll talk about that later.) On the surface, it may seem like all men just want one thing but, as I learned, there are many recipes to cook up that one thing.
Sex Is Like a Steak
Have you ever been hungry for a nice big juicy steak? Let's say today you are famished for a truly great one. As a gourmet steak lover, you know there are sixty-eight shades between very rare and well done, but tonight you want perfection. You go to the best steak house in town. You are very precise when placing your order.
You tell the waiter, "I'd like a filet mignon, please."
You painstakingly describe how you'd like your steak charred on the outside, fairly rare, but definitely not blue in the middle. You tell him, "Make sure it's pink throughout and hot, not cool, in the middle." The waiter listens patiently until you finish. Then he turns toward the kitchen and shouts, "Gimme a steak for table six!"
That's the way many of us are about sex. Even when our Potential Love Partner madly hints at some erotic turn-on, we dive into bed with the finesse of a cannonball smacking the beach. Your Quarry may enjoy the sex. You may think it's great, too. But for him, without your understanding of his sixty-eight different shades, the experience is not gourmet. It does nothing for the goal of making him fall in love with you. The saddest part is, he'll never tell you why he lost interest.
If you dig deep enough, no matter where you are on this earth, you will find water. Dig deep enough into any man's
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sexuality, and you will find a unique twist, a special spin. Hidden in that tangle is the key to his heart.
The Number One Sexual Wish
There is only one sexual fantasy all men and women share. It is to find someone wonderful in bed.
Question: Who is wonderful? Answer: Someone who fulfills all our sexual desires, someone who likes to give it just the way we like to get it, and someone who knows how to give it just the way we like to get it.Without our having to give step-by-step guidance .
Many lovers are hesitant to map out detailed directions for their partners about their sexual needs.
They sincerely believe that ''when the right person comes along, he or she will 'just know' what I want.''
I once had a friend named Chip. One Christmas eve, he and I were laughing about our childhood experiences and how we used to believe in Santa Claus. Suddenly Chip's face fell flat, and he said,
"Santa never brought me the presents I wanted."
"Not even after you found out that Santa Claus was really youmr other ?" I asked him. "Nope." "Well," I asked, "why didn't you give your mother hints?" "Because," Chip explained, "if shereallyloved me, she'd just know what I wanted."
Most of us are that way sexually. We may not believe it consciously, but most people cling tenaciously to the dream that some day, out of the blue, the right partner will sail right into our lives. And we will live happily ever after.
If these same hopefuls hurled a thousand-piece puzzle on the staircase, they wouldn't expect the pieces to jump out of the box, find each other, and fit together. Yet they dive into a sexual relationship assuming all the pieces will fit. The odds that their and their Quarry's sexual desires will fit snugly together are one in a million.
In the beginning of a new relationship, as all the bits and pieces are still swirling about in the air, sex is exciting. The nov-Page 268
elty, the discovery, the conquest carries the night. It's only a few weeks, months, or years into the relationship—when the puzzle pieces start smacking the staircase at odd angles—that sexual disappointment surfaces.
"Why Did He or She Lose Interest?"
Huntresses, he stops calling. Hunters, she suddenly develops other things she has to do on Saturday night.
Why? What went wrong? Why did your Quarry lose interest? There are, of course, as many answers to that question as there are men and women in the world, but we can make some fairly accurate generalizations.
A survey we took at The Project asked single and divorced men and women why their previous relationships had ended. Whenever the respondent was the partner who initiated the breakup, we further asked, "Why? What went wrong with the relationship?" The woman wanted out, usually due to general disappointments in her partner—his personality, habits, or lifestyle, or the way he treated her. However, when the man was the one who wanted to break up, sex was pretty high on his list.
The next question in our survey was: "Did you tell your partner the reason for your wanting to end the relationship?" Overwhelmingly the answer was, "Not threalreason." The men said, "I couldn't tell her that sex with her wasn't, well, you know. . . ."
A woman usually wants to go out with a man because he is interesting, attractive, a turn-on, and someone with whom shemight want a relationship. A man usually asks a woman out