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Saturday 10.11.12 | guardian.co.uk

We had sex every day for a year Readers sex tips Erotic books

When couples have been together for a long time what happens to the sex? Inside, readers provide some surprising answers, while Stuart Jeries kicks o our special issue by asking if conventional coupledom inevitably means the end of passion

Is monogamy dead?

here are about 4,000 mammal species on Earth, but only a few dozen form lifelong monogamous pair bonds. The bonobo chimpanzees of Congo, for instance, eschew monogamy because they use sex as a social activity to develop and maintain bonds with male and female chimps. And monogamy is hardly the norm for humans. In his jaunty paper Alternative Family Lifestyles Revisited, or Whatever Happened To Swingers, Group Marriages And Communes?, family relationships professor Roger

12A

COVER BY ANDREW STOCKS

Rubin reports that only 43 of 238 societies across the world are monogamous. Many Toda women in southern India marry several brothers. Abisi women in Nigeria can marry three men on the same day. In rural Turkey, a man can marry more than one wife and each one takes on a dierent role. Even in the west, non-monogamy is actually the norm. Which is quite a surprise, given the psychosexual stranglehold the seventh commandment (you remember, the one about not committing adultery) has on Judaeo-Christian cultures. But it is the norm that dare not speak its name. In the US, 60% of men and 50% of women reported having extra-marital aairs. It takes the

form, as Meg Barker, relationship counsellor, sex therapist and senior lecturer in psychology at the Open University, puts it of secret, hidden indelities rather than something that is openly known about by all involved. Thats to say, polyamory is all around, but socially inadmissible. It is interesting, writes Barker in her new book Rewriting the Rules: An Integrative Guide to Love, Sex and Relationships, that we readily accept someone loving more than one child, sibling or friend without their love for one of them diluting the love for others, but when it comes to romantic or sexual love most people cannot accept it happening more than once at a time.

She isnt suggesting that we junk monogamy, rather that we realise that long-term monogamous relationships as currently congured arent so much fullments of loves young dream as disasters waiting to happen. In such circumstances, mere monogamy surely cannot bear so much weight. Should we adjust our parameters? Should we pursue what relationship counsellors call the poly grail? Does sex matter to the health of a long-term relationship? Is it OK to give it up? We increasingly look for lots of different things in one place namely the monogamous relationship, says Barker. Why? Because we have become more and more atomised, work has become

more precarious, community bonds have weakened and there has been a decline in religion, so we hope to get everything from one other person. But thats surely impossible. In her book Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic, the therapist Esther Perel distinguishes between warm and hot relationships. The former involves absolute candour, togetherness, equality and, quite possibly, devising a mutually satisfying rota for picking up the kids from school and cleaning the toilet. The latter involves non-politically correct power plays and, if the book jacket is anything to go by, transgressive shoe fetishism as part of a sustainable sex life.

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2 Family Saturday Guardian 10.11.12

Is monogamy dead?
Can one relationship be hot and warm at the same time? It seems, to put it mildly, unlikely. Does good intimacy make for hot sex? asks Perel. Again, unlikely: they dont sound like dierent rules, but dierent sports. Conjugal felicity didnt used to be so conicted, argues Alain de Botton in his new book How to Think More About Sex. Before the bourgeoisie introduced the idea of love-based marriage in the 18th century, he argues: Couples got married because they had both reached the proper age, found they could stand the sight of each other, were keen not to oend both sets of parents and their neighbours, had a few assets to protect and wished to raise a family. The new love-based conception of conjugal felicity, involving being physically aroused by the others appearance, wanting to read poetry to each other by moonlight and yearning for two souls to fuse into one, changed all that. Later, increased sexual expectations necessitated that the physical arousal and great sex you had at the start of your relationship be continued over years of your monogamous relationship even though, frankly, most nights youd rather watch The Great British Bake O in old undies than tear o your partners lingerie with your teeth. Such expectations explain why youve got The Position Sex Bible: More Positions Than You Could Possibly Imagine Trying by Randi Foxx (possibly not a real name) unread on the shelves next to the unwatched DVD of Dr Sarah Brewers Secrets of Sensational Sex. And so it was that monogamy became made up of two equal parts one involving endlessly deferred good intentions, the other nostalgia for When It Was Better. If it ever was. De Botton applauds monogamys unsung heroes, writing: That a couple should be willing to watch their lives go by from within the cage of marriage, without acting on outside sexual impulses, is a miracle of civilisation and kindness for which both ought to feel grateful every day. Spouses who remain faithful to each other should recognise the scale of the sacrice they are making for their love and for their children, and should feel proud of their valour. Of course, not all monogamous couples have kids, neither are they all middle-aged, middle-class or heterosexual: but all of them, De Botton argues, deserve medals. That said, De Botton also counsels that extra-marital aairs may be necessary. Its a thought shared by other anatomisers of that modern malaise, monogamy. Former London School of Economics sociologist Catherine Hakim argues the following in her new book, The New Rules: Internet Dating, Playfairs and Erotic Power: The fact that we eat most meals at home with spouses and partners does not preclude eating out in restaurants to sample dierent cuisines and ambiences, with friends or colleagues. Anyone rejecting a fresh approach to marriage and adultery, with a new set of rules to go with it, fails to recognise the benets of a revitalised sex life outside the home. If youre a 45-year-old woman or a 55-year-old man, you should probably stop reading this article immediately. Now is the peak time for you to have an aair. You should be on the pull for the sake of your marriage. Or whatever it is you call your relationship. akim cites two economists who estimate that increasing the frequency of sexual intercourse from once a month to at least once a week was equivalent to 32,000 a year in happiness. David Blanchower and Andrew Oswald also estimated that a lasting marriage provided the equivalent of 64,000 a year. If you add the two together, an aair providing lots of sex and an enduring marriage, thats a recipe for a lot of happiness, Hakim concludes. But this Panglossian summation of sexual happiness will only work if you keep schtum about your transgression. I am happily married, and I would hope that if my partner had an aair he would be so discreet about it that I wouldnt notice anyway, Hakim told Jane Garvey on BBC Radio 4s Womans Hour. So Hakim does not recommend open relationships. Indeed, she is Hope Springs seemed to assume that Kay and Arnold had to recapture their sexual relationship, rather than really exploring whether this was something that they wanted and, if so, why it was important, and the dierent possible ways of doing this, says Barker. When Arnold loses his erection, Kay assumes this means he doesnt nd her attractive. Later, when they have what Barker calls penis-in-vagina intercourse, their problems are resolved. Penis-in-vagina intercourse is represented as real, proper sex, and sex is seen as requiring an erect penis and ending in ejaculation, says Barker. There isnt, for example, the possibility of sex which is focused on Kays pleasure or the possibility of Kay and Arnold enjoying less genitally focused forms of pleasure. Also, erections are equated with attraction when these things may, or may not, be related. Quite so. Is she saying its OK not to have sex in a long-term relationship? For some couples that may work, but not others. One possibility I address in the book is making a yes, no, maybe list of all the sexual and physical practices that they are aware of, and whether they are interested in them. That may help. Barker counsels periods of solitude in order to work out what you want from a relationship or if you want out. Its easy not to think critically about whats happening. It helps to create space to reect on what you want. Sex may well not be the biggest problem in a long-term relationship. One of the biggest problems in a relationship is that it can be founded on someone validating the other, completing you by enabling you. So you have this idea that one partner in a relationship is a rescuer, or a mentor of a sweet young thing. Its in Fifty Shades of Grey the broken man I made better. Fixing somebody like that or xing yourself like that is to treat a person as a thing, which is always a mistake. If youre in a relationship for a long time its harder to sustain those roles. Indeed, Barker nds that a lot of couples come to her for counselling when these roles have started to fray. The challenge then is to remake the relationship without those roles. Tricky like rebuilding a boat at sea. But not impossible. Monogamy is not an easy option. Theres always going to be a sacrice because there is a struggle between freedom and belonging. And at the outset you dont really know how much of one youre prepared to sacrice for the other or if youre prepared to make any sacrice at all. Freud wrote about this in Civilisation and Its Discontents in 1929: civilisation, he thought, is a trade-o between security and freedom. We swing one way and then, disenchanted, the other. On and on we go, aiming for perfect equilibrium without achieving it. Monogamy is similar. Barker recommends that we abandon the old rules of monogamy and embrace uncertainty, guiding our relationships by means of creative negotiation. That way relationships can be made better if not perfect. This chimes with what the psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips writes in his book, Monogamy: All prophets of the erotic life are false prophets because every couple has to invent sex for itself. They are not so much making love as making it up.

17 25 nov 2012 barbican.org.uk

framed film festival

A fantastic new film festival for young people, with special film previews, creative workshops and the chance to make and review films. The festival takes place at the Barbican and selected independent cinemas across London.

Supported by Film London through National Lottery Funding on behalf of the BFI and The City Bridge Trust

The Joy of Sex and other manuals reviewed by John Crace Page 5

dubious about them. All the literature I have read suggests they are imposed by men on women, or by promiscuous men on their gay partners. Instead, Hakim tells me that if youre going to have an aair, you must play by French rules. First and foremost, they must remain hidden at all times and never be visible enough to embarrass the spouse. Second, you never do it with someone in your own backyard neighbours, friends, work colleagues etc where the risk of exposure is greatest. But surely there are other risks of exposure? What if sleeping Mr Hakim lustfully groans the name of his lover in the marital bed, while Mrs Hakim sits bolt upright, eyeing him narrowly? At least a 64,000 reduction in happiness, is my guess. Hakims more serious point is that sexless, celibate relationships are unsustainable without some kind of sexual outlet. Across the Channel, sensible continentals realise that the answer to this condundrum is furtive indelity. This is the main reason behind the sudden expansion of internet-dating websites that focus on married people seeking aairs. Only two fths of Italians say aairs are completely unacceptable. One quarter of Spaniards do not regard sexual delity as important. The majority of the French two thirds of men and half of women believe that sexual attraction inevitably leads to intimacy. The incidence of aairs is informed by such tolerant attitudes. Meg Barker, for one, is sceptical of the deceit such tolerance entails. Why is deceit taken to be a good thing? The answer is to communicate. Today there are things like hook-up culture, friends with benets, relationships that are monogam-ish, lots of dierent polyamorous possibilities. These kinds of things are up for negotiation. What Hakim does, in eect, is uphold one of the bad old rules of monogamy that Barker seeks to junk, namely that the rules should not be explicitly discussed or negotiated. Barker, by contrast, nds in monogamys very indeterminate rules a space for confusion about what is permissible within a relationship. One person may think its all right to stay friends with an ex-partner. Another may think its all right to irt with or have sex with another person. Another may think its OK to look at porn. Whats important is communicating so you know what the other expects. How important is sex in a long-term

Esther Perel: Does good intimacy make for hot sex? Not necessarily

Catherine Hakim: Sexless, celibate relationships are unsustainable relationship? Barker says many of the couples who come to her seeking sex therapy expect that she will teach them how to have the great sex they had at the start of their relationship or have never previously enjoyed. Sex is our whole idea of the barometer of a relationships healthiness. So sex becomes this imperative. It neednt be. Sex is often portrayed as though, because youve had sex, your sex partner will know how youre feeling and respond perfectly to every situation in which you nd yourselves. This assumption that sex is the cause of and solution to any relationship problem is widespread in popular culture. In the recent lm Hope Springs, for example, Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones play Kay and Arnold, a sixtysomething couple who approach a therapist (Steve Carrell) because Kay is concerned about the lack of intimacy and sex in their long-term monogamous relationship. The therapist in

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Family Saturday Guardian 10.11.12

Jon Henley catches up with two couples who tried marathon sex regimes daily, for 101 and 365 days. Five years on, was it worth it? And are they still at it?

Whatever youre doing, double it

cant believe we did the whole thing. We had little kids, too our days were just exhausting. Annie and I were both shattered. How did we do it? says Douglas Brown. Do it they did, though: every day, for 101 days. Charla and Brad Muller, though, did better: they managed the full 365. Can you imagine? Sex, every day, for a whole year. Even when youre knackered. Even when youre barely speaking to each other. Even when there are lots and I mean lots of things youd rather be doing (hot bath/good book? Footie on the box? Clean the goldsh bowl?) Shortly after their respective, selfimposed marathon sex ordeals perhaps inevitably two books appeared. One was called Just Do It: How One Couple Turned O the TV and Turned On their Sex Lives for 101 Days (No Excuses!) and the other 365 Nights: a Memoir of Intimacy. When the books came out, this newspaper interviewed their authors, at some length; rst Doug and Annie, then Charla and Brad. But all that was ve years ago. So how are things going now? What eect have these two barely imaginable bonkathons have on the couples relationships? Are they all still at it? In short, the answer is yes. Not once a day, says Annie quickly, down the line from Denver, Colorado. Im 45 now the menopause is starting to rear its ugly head. In terms of life cycles, Im denitely on the other side of my sexual peak. We try for once or twice a week, but we have a really small house and the kids dont have bedtimes any more. There are weeks we dont manage it. But you know what? If we hadnt done 101 days, I dont think wed understand the importance of sex in our relationship. Thats the real thing. Annie explains further: When youre in the tunnel of childrearing and career-building, that whole side of

A daily kindness enters your relationship. Its like youre dating again

things just tends to get put on the back burner. People really dont understand that sex is the glue that keeps you together. The physical in a relationship is the foundation its built on. Doug, a journalist on the Denver Post, agrees: We did still have a sex life, he says. We communicated pretty well. But life just got in the way. Work, money, kids. Its easy to lose that time for each other in a relationship. The couple set o on their 100 consecutive days of sex it turned into 101, but thats another story after Doug covered a sex conference for his paper, at which he discovered the existence of a support group for men in relationships who have not had sex for at least that length of time. It was Annies idea to reverse that. But Doug says the experiment is still paying dividends. If couples get along well, at a certain point they can become just pals. Then the sex thing becomes kind of weird. But if you force yourself to do it, you realise how special sex is, how unique. Its dierent from anything you have with anyone else. And if that leaks away in a couple, its really sad. Self-enforced intimacy, Doug continues, created a familiarity between us but in a good way. A kind of mutual comfort. Each knows what the other likes. And its led to it not feeling strange or shaming for us to suggest things. Theres just a physical ease there, a naturalness. Thats stayed with us. Its great now when we both know its going to happen. It kind of feels like coming home. And it has really taken away the pressure. Thats a bonus, especially for a man, says Doug: Before, there was always that pressure to perform. Thats distracting and it can be dispiriting. The feeling that youre on stage, you have to perform. But when we did the 101 days, all that just kind of melted away. You realise you cant be on stage every day. Charla, who works in marketing, says that Brad, a salesman, feels pretty

much the same way. (As, mind, does she.) Youre no longer in it to win it every time, she says, on the phone from Charlotte, North Carolina. Doing what we did for a year removes all the embarrassment and awkwardness from the whole thing. It truly was a transforming year for us in every respect. In fact its hard now to know what our life would be like if we hadnt done it. Five years on, the biggest lesson from this couples 365-day marathon somewhat startlingly, the project was Charlas gift to her husband for his 40th birthday is that if intimacy every day may not be a long-term sustainable model, neither is no intimacy at all. he point, says Charla, is that: We all tend to have this picture that sex has to be spontaneous and romantic. But when you have kids and laundry and work and all the rest, the reality is that theres just not much in your life that happens spontaneously. You have to plan for it, schedule it consciously make a time and a place for it to happen: We thought having to pay all that attention to it would somehow distract from it, make it mundane. But it didnt. The other thing that year made me realise was that men dont need it more than women. Men might want it for dierent reasons. But I learned that I wanted it too. The fact is, Charla says: Everything just gets better when sex is a vital part of your relationship. Hes happier, youre happier, the whole house is happier. A daily kindness enters your relationship, a level of attentiveness for each other. Its almost like youre dating again ... Thats a real discovery. Not that Charla would necessarily recommend 365 consecutive days of sex for anyone else. You cant be prescriptive, Charla says. What worked

We did it! Doug and Annie Brown. Left, our 2008 interview. Below, Brad and Charla Muller Photograph by Andrew Testa for the Guardian for us wont work for everyone. But what I suggest is, whatever youre doing, double it. Then in a month, double it again. Just see how that feels. You might be surprised at what it brings. So, um, how often do they manage it these days? Not every day, she says, primly. But enough to keep a smile on both our faces. Doug thinks many couples might prot from a bit of enforced coupling. Its just so easy not to make that time for each other, he says. And even easier now. Five years ago there were laptops; now there are tablets and smartphones too. We have a conscious agreement that it is not acceptable to lie in bed and tap on a screen. But I think that if a couple can commit to a period of time and really plan for it, prepare for it, start engaging with it, theres a good chance theyll benet. Annies advice? Just make the time. Focus on each other, if only for one night a week. Take the time to nd out why you fell in love in the rst place. A good massage, says Doug, can do the trick just as well these days. Annie loves a good, long massage, he says. Just talking and touching, you know? Its almost as good as sex for her. Sensual, but not sexual. After all, were both ve years older now. Mind you, he adds, a shade wistfully, when we were doing the 101 days, there was a whole bunch of times when we did it outdoors. We havent done that since. I kind of miss that ... Just Do It: How One Couple Turned O the TV and Turned On their Sex Lives for 101 Days (No Excuses!) by Douglas Brown is published by Crown Publishing Group, 9.99. 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy by Charla Muller is published by John Blake, 11.99.

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4 Family Saturday Guardian 10.11.12

Looking for lust? Get a caravan

We asked how you keep the spark alive in your long-term relationship. Heres a selection from our bulging postbag
Get a room!
My husband and I are in our 40s and have been together for 17 years. We have three children (18, 15 and 11). Our sex life is fantastic but not without its trials. Here are our dos and donts to make it work: Do plan to have sex even if it feels awkward (relying on spontaneity is a naive mugs game); have a night away once every six weeks (Premier Inn 29! Book them up weeks in advance); have a sex night once a week at home. Dont get complacent; dont allow domesticity and child-rearing to obliterate your sensuality; dont sneer at the various self-help marriage guidance and/or tantric sex books available (read some and take from them what you feel is appropriate to you); dont reject all pornography out of hand because if you nd something you like it can really perk you up; dont feel ashamed of rude fantasies; dont worry if it goes wrong once in a while because you cant win them all. When the children were younger they went to sleep early enough for us to have an evening together, but as they grew older the evenings became too short. Trying to have sex while the children were awake or, worse, playing on the PS3 in the other room loud enough for us to hear was like a cold shower on our libidos. So now we have a cosy candle-lit caravan in the garden with a lock on the door and a heater. Bridget years since we were teenagers. Were in our mid-40s now and still manage to keep our interest in sex going often by being irtatious with each other and by using technology to do so. I often send her quite lthy texts when I know she is in meetings all day and may have someone looking over her shoulder. We still dress up for each other at the weekend, even when we know were not going anywhere and at night often tell each other very rude stories, involving other partners. That way we can get a bit of the playing away feeling but minus the heartache. Weve learned over the years that if our sex life is on the wane, it always means something else is awry in our relationship, so we have an unspoken rule always to talk to each other if were not making love for a week or so and, where necessary, are always ready to get the phone out to send each other some dark blue texts. JP

More sex, vicar?

Ive been married to a vicar for 11 years. We have an amazing sex life because we keep it varied. One day, after returning home from a rousing service at church, I put on a striptease act for him, to Michael Bubls Cry Me a River. He loved the fact that I was the preachers wife in public and a lady of the night in bed. Anonymous

Strictly
Very simply and in a word dancing. Over too many years to count, dancing, be it to jazz or something slow in each others arms, has always proved to be a turn on. Julia O

Is that the gear stick?

We are about to celebrate our eighth and are going to go for a drive. It will last about an hour, squeezed into our busy working days. Feeling hot yet? I thought not. Going for a drive is a favourite. It began on the way to Cambridge last June. Put your hand there, he said on the A43 at about 60mph. Very naughty. We probably broke the law a bit but managed to stop in a service station with surprisingly useful hedges. Now we just recall that drive while in bed, moment by descriptive moment, keeping ourselves amused and aroused at the very thought! Mary and John

Stay focused on the job

Were in our early 50s and have been together since we were 16 and 19. We monitor our sexual activity, which sounds stuy but it was quite handy when my partner kept a tally on the back of an envelope next to the bed for several years. He then wrote a spoof research report (for my eyes only) with graphs and tables illustrating the ups and downs of our sex life. Interestingly, we could see retrospectively that we dipped during a relatives illness and during periods when one of us was stressed or preoccupied. Tips: It helps if you like and fancy

your partner. It helps if you like sex. A key to the bedroom door is handy. Trying new stu can pay dividends. Keep an open mind: arousal takes more eort as you get older. Sex toys and lubricant are the perimenopausal womans friend. Plan for sex. Commit to when and where and get on and do it even if youre tired, preoccupied, pissed or grumpy. Talk about it dont assume good sex will happen by chance. Talk about any problems. Get medical advice if the mechanics arent working or your libido takes a dive. Every missed opportunity is a nail in the con of enforced celibacy. Kate

Enjoy the warmth, the cuddling, the comforting feel of the familiar and the friendliness of fun with your best friend. K&M

Mother was right

My mother gave me two pieces of advice: not to refuse my husband if he wanted to make love to me and always to look my best when he came home from work. We remained blissfully married with ve children for 55 years until he died of a heart attack. In the beginning, it took a year to explore our sexual life, which was very important to us, and usually managed simultaneous satisfaction for the rest of our lives. At 38, I had my tubes cut and tied, which was one of the best things that ever happened to us. We were free to love anywhere at anytime. We remained mutually faithful and did most things together. At night we usually fell asleep in each others arms but woke up soon afterwards, boiling hot, and had to retreat to the sides of the bed. Anonymous

fancy me if I smell or have no personal pride? No thank you. I have many acquaintances who moan about their dismal sex lives and to look at them you think, well, make an eort. Im not suggesting high fashion or a gym obsession just make an eort on occasion and remember that you have a responsibility towards your partner to be attractive. My wife and I have a family and yet still nd time for a really good sex life. We are lucky as I work near home and when the house is quiet and the children are at school she or I will instigate a lunchtime union. She will wear some nice lingerie and I make sure Im presentable and all is well in the world. Anonymous

Fun for best friends

1 Dont make excuses. If its suggested that you pop upstairs for a bit of afternoon delight and even if you are enjoying The Archers go. It wont take long and will give happiness. 2 Blow jobs frequently important! 3 Try something new we had a few months of fun after trips to Ann Summers. 4 Make some time a weekend away, a special night in. 5 Dont worry if the earth doesnt shake any more, or not as much as it used to.

The one-month rule

Your partnership is your rst child and requires continual nurturing to keep the spark alive. So Ive always kept it on the top of my to-do list. That means: dont put sex o for more than a month at a time, even if you dont really feel like it, and dont let parenthood consume your very being. Also, dont keep yearning for those endless hours in each others company of the early days, but do try to slip into bed at the same time. Lastly,

Sexting keeps us keen

My wife and I have been married for 18 years but together more than 25

Keep it clean
Love me for what I am? Of course. But

5
exchange a brief cuddle most nights before falling asleep, regardless of any arguments during that day. Lotika

Make time
With teenage children and thinnish bedroom walls, we nd that redundancy works a treat with our kids out at school and university, we are suddenly alone together during the day for the rst time in 15 years. Emma

Reader, I shagged him

Should you turn to ction or the sex manuals for advice and ideas? John Crace does the research so you dont need to
ead wisely and widely, literature will usually provide answers to the great mysteries of the human condition. Except when it comes to how to maintain an active sex life in a monogamous relationship; on that the great and the not-so-great novelists are almost entirely silent. Until the end of the 19th century, sex was not something that was deemed appropriate reading matter for the middle and upper classes: chaste kisses and lingering looks that hinted at raging desires were about as racy as it got. Even if Jane Austen had been free to write about sex, it doesnt seem as if she would have had much enthusiasm for it. The pleasure in Pride and Prejudice is all in the social twists and turns, the will-they-wont-they-of-coursethey-will, with Elizabeth and Darcys wedding merely the pay-o. When novelists did turn their pens on married couples, it was almost invariably to examine the end of these relationships rather than to dwell on their fullment. Rather than looking for new ways to revive her marriage to the desperately dull Karenin as a modern-day therapist might suggest Anna eventually runs o to nd new levels of unhappiness with her lover, Vronsky. So too, Emma Bovary, who ditches her boring, provincial husband, Charles, for the more exciting Leon, only to end up dosing herself with arsenic when the aair has run its course. However much you may feel for these great heroines, death is the price they have to pay for having indulged their lust. The morality of the era demanded nothing less. Women fared little better even with the birth of modernism and protofeminism in the 1920s. Virginia Woolfs Clarissa Dalloway is stied within a moth-balled marriage; she does not seek to improve her relationship with Richard, nor does she surrender to the possibility of an aair. Rather she sublimates her desires into the niceties of proper manners: Mrs Dalloways punishment is a living death. Throughout all these novels, sex was still implicit, with the focus on the consequences rather than the deed itself. A blessing, perhaps, given how many writers have subsequently written so badly about sex. And when it was up for grabs as it were the future of monogamy didnt look any less bleak. Constance Chatterley longs for an integrated life a euphemism for a decent sex life but is denied it with her husband who has returned disabled from the war and she can only achieve it with Mellors, the gamekeeper a commoner who has not lost touch with the Earth, Nature and, most importantly of all, Capital Letters. Even with the sexual liberation of the 1960s, marriage was the kiss of death to most novelists. Couples typied by John Updikes Couples existed in ction primarily to be unfaithful to each other. One of the few modern writers to have attempted to portray a long-term happy marriage with a fullled and active sex life is Ian McEwan in Saturday. Almost certainly unintentionally, though, Henry Perowne, the neurosurgeon protagonist, emerges as one of the more annoying characters in 21stcentury ction as he does everything so perfectly including make love to his wife so they always have simultaneous orgasms that its hard not to dislike him. Other peoples sexual and emotional success does not always make good reading. And so, counter-intuitively for an act that is revered for its creative spontaneity, it has generally been to non-ction that the curious have been forced to turn for sexual self-improvement. The rst widely

Treat em mean ...

Break up on a fairly regular basis for no particular reason even though you are still in love and in lust. The ensuing fear of the shadow of another and desire growing out from deprivation means that when you do get together, the sex is hotter than ever. Its worked for us for seven years. Takes a strong constitution, mind. Anon

Every little helps

At the risk of embarrassing our three children, this is what has kept us happy in the bedroom: Good sex is not about tips, its a litmus test for the whole of your relationship. As with any kind of relationship there needs to be more give than take on both sides. Monogamy is not a trap and need not become a rut: what can be better than intimacy with someone who knows you and your body really well and, consequently, how to push your buttons? We still fancy the pants o each other and have taken steps as weve grown older to ensure that we are t and feel good about how we look, despite inevitable wrinkling. Everybody needs a bit of extra help from time to time and theres nothing wrong with consenting adults sharing a bit of tasteful erotica. Those who say that sex is not important in their relationship are deluded: it is the glue. Naomi

Colin Firth as Mr Darcy, putting the phwoar! into Pride and Prejudice read sex manual was Marie Stopess Married Love, published in 1918, a revolutionary feminist text in which womens sexual desires were treated on a par with mens. The book was banned in the US and scorned in the UK by its mostly male reviewers, but still sold 750,000 copies by the time the US censor allowed its publication in 1931. By todays standards, though, it is fairly tame. As a guide to informing women they had a right to expect more than statutory rape on their wedding night, it was invaluable; as a means of achieving sexual satisfaction, it was still groping between the sheets. It did, however, establish the sex manual as a genre. In 1934, the philosopher novelist Arthur Koestler, writing under the name of Dr A Costler, wrote the rst of a trilogy of sexual encyclopaedias, complete with monochrome illustrations and colour plates. Whether he was quite the man to be handing out this advice is rather more debatable, as he was subsequently revealed to be a rapist, who defended his actions in a letter to his second wife by saying, without an element of rape there is no delight. The real breakthrough for sex manuals into the mainstream came in the early 1970s when The Joy of Sex spent more than a year in the top ve of the New York Times bestseller lists. The aim of the book was to do for sex what recipe books had done for cooking, and bring a range of delights beyond the missionary position into the bedrooms of those who had heard of the sexual revolution but never encountered it. The style was chattier and less clinical than previous manuals less emphasis on inserting X into Y but there was still something quite joyless about The Joy of Sex. In large part this was down to the illustrations, which made it look as though adventurous sex was the preserve of a consenting woman in Birkenstocks and an earnest bearded teacher. Four years ago, The Joy of Sex was updated with a racier text and rather more joyful images, and it remains the basic textbook for anyone whose sex life may be stalling but is not yet ready to see a relationship counsellor. After opening with the point that sex is an expression of intimacy rather than something that might occasionally lead to intimacy if both partners have downed the necessary units of alcohol, it doesnt kill all the fun by going on and on about the importance of talking about your feelings at all times. Rather, The Joy of Sex is a cookbook, complete with a list of possible ingredients, appetisers, main courses and sauces and pickles, leaving you to pick and choose. If you want to avoid the ner points of ben wa balls (me neither) skin gloves and thimbles, boutons, ligottage and les anneaux, then the author isnt going to think any the worse of you. nd thats rather my problem with Dr Pam Spurr she of Loose Women and This Morning whose Sex Academy is one of the new generation of manuals that tells it as she sees it. Unfortunately, she recommends a series of lessons and rules that, for those of us whose school days were punctuated by failure and detentions, is a bit of an initial turn-o. But for over-achieving, competitive, alpha couples who like nothing better than to mark each others daily contribution to their sexual wellbeing, Dr Pam should tick most of the boxes. The less said about many of the other manuals that fell across my desk, the better. The Manhattan Madams Secrets to Great Sex should probably have been renamed, How Every Woman Should Be a Hooker in Bed, seeing as its subtitle is Expert Advice for Becoming the Best Lover Hes Ever Had. Thats right, women! Youd better shape up for us stud muns or youre toast! And dont even think of oering me advice on becoming the best lover shes ever had because I already am. Inevitably, too, Fifty Shades of Grey has spawned its own mini industry of How To guides. For those with an interest in BDSM, Fifty Shades of Play oers an in-depth guide to ogging instruments, electrostimulation, crotch ropes and torture. Step 50, by the way, is Aftercare. Thanks, but no thanks. Still you cant say that there arent now manuals on the market to cover every arcane sexual avenue. Sex manuals are now big business. Serious business. Though how serious is still, mercifully, up to you.

Tales of the unexpected

Its the unexpected opportunities that smash the thermostat and melt the walls. The cats out hunting defenceless birds, No 1 child is sleeping over at a friends, No 2 has just been dropped o for a karate lesson and an unexpected call from No 3s best friends mum has seen her whisked o to the zoo. Perfect storms, like perfect opportunities, dont pop every day so brook no excuses, abandon chores, throw caution and everything else to the wind and indulge your favourite passion each other. Yabadabadoo! Tony

Reconnect on a date
Date nights. My husband and I have been together for 18 years, married for six. We have busy jobs with long hours. Every week we either get a babysitter and go out on a Tuesday night or else we stay in and cook a meal together and eat it in the kitchen not on our laps in front of the television. The biggest diculty has been nding a pub that isnt doing a quiz night! That one evening a week reminds us that we love each other enough to want this life together when this hectic part of it goes by and allows us to reconnect our journeys. Imogen

PHOTOGRAPH: ALAMY

A fond kiss
It may sound trite and rather obvious but ... it has to be the right type of kiss. Where? Not the cheek, of course leave that for friends, relatives or colleagues. The neck at a pinch, but that can be a bit louche on a wet Wednesday night with work the next day. A kiss on the lips is the one. Duration? Not a peck that wont keep any res burning. Nothing too lingering and no tongues this is not a nightly seduction ritual. A medium is what the missus and I have dubbed it in our personal married argot. Thats a lingering contact of lips that lasts for a couple of seconds. Repeat once or twice if the fancy takes. Not very earth-shattering but it works for us. I always look forward to it. Her lips are very soft. P

I send her lthy texts when she is in meetings all day and may have someone looking over her shoulder

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6 Family Saturday Guardian 10.11.12

FamilyLife
Snapshot Golden days of our silver wedding
Richard and I were discussing how to celebrate our silver wedding anniversary. A large party with many of our wedding guests? A small family lunch? A weekend in London? Then I had a bit of a brainwave. Why not go back to Andaluca, in southern Spain, where we spent our honeymoon in September 1987? September 2012 came and we walked through the door of our little rented cottage in Ronda. Outside the front, a pomegranate tree beside a fountain bore fruit turning a delicate shade of pink from the baking sun. Inside, as in most hot countries, the curtains and blinds were drawn to keep out the midday heat. But we ung open everything we could nd doors, windows, shutters. The two women who were nishing the cleaning muttered something in Spanish. Possibly something about mad dogs and Englishmen. We did indeed feel quite mad mad with excitement and anticipation. What to do rst? Should we shop for essentials such as bread and wine? Go sightseeing? We decided to check out the view from the Alameda del Tajo, a public garden built on the old city wall, perched high on a plateau above the plains below. It is some view across the hills to the west of Ronda. Parched yellow by the scorching Spanish summer sun, the elds are criss-crossed by little paths leading to farmsteads each with a glistening, highly inviting swimming pool. The view stretches on and on into the distance where dark ragged peaks of mountains jut in sharp relief against the endless deep-blue sky. On our last visit to Ronda, 25 years ago, we had a tiny room at the top of a tiny house that oered bed and breakfast, with a tiny window that looked west over the hills I really thought I would die with happiness. The view hasnt changed and I still love my husband so, yes, I think that death by happiness might still be an option. Our Big Day was 12 September, three days after we arrived. We exchanged cards and spent part of the day walking round the town deciding where to go for our evening meal. We eventually chose a small restaurant with great views over the gorge to the south. The meal and the view were so good that we went back again on our last night when it poured with rain. Outside, as we ate, a huge rainbow formed in front of a sky heavy with dark clouds, which partly obliterated the mountains behind. It was a wonderful end to a whole era of our lives, as well as the end of our holiday. Sara Barton-Wood

Playlist The song our family goes Gaga for

Bad Romance by Lady Gaga Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah-ah! Roma-romamamaa! When people think of songs that unite families, most would go with something classic such as the Beatles or maybe some Motown, but not my family. We all have weird musical tastes. My brother likes dub-step, my sister hip-hop, my parents the classics, and me indie rock. When it comes to picking a radio station to clean the house to, you can bet we are at each others throats. Yet one of my most

Snapshot ... Sara and Richard Barton-Wood, celebrating their silver wedding in Ronda, where they honeymooned in 1987

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favourite family memories is triggered by Lady Gagas Bad Romance. Somehow in her pop culture oddness, she hit all the right notes and beats that led to the only time my whole family sang along to the whole of the same song. Maybe it was the nonsensical syllables sprinkled across the length of the lyric that led them all to think that song was it on a stick, but whatever it was, all I have to say is, Ra ra ooo la la. Thanks, Gaga! Barbara Moreno

Doing it for Dad

Rebecca Ley
usually there, and I provide dessert. So everyone is happy. Recently, in an attempt to encourage the boys to eat the eort I call dinner, I told them that they were having Nanas dinner that day. I had prepared a roast chicken feast with scrubbed new potatoes, carrot and parsnip, roasted sweet potato chunks and minty peas. My endeavours were poked, prodded and played with before nally being pushed away. I blame their nanas gravy and my inability to reproduce it. If she didnt bother, the lads wouldnt know the dierence between mine and hers. Gwen Loughman

We love to eat Nanas dinner

Ingredients Juices from a roasted joint of meat (chicken/beef/lamb) Reserved water from vegetables A couple of spoons each of cornour and Bisto, mixed together with water to thicken the gravy Save the juices of the meat and deglaze the cooking tray by using some of the reserved vegetable water. Add meat juices and whisk in some of the cornour mixture until the gravy has thickened, using more of the vegetable water until you achieve the consistency you prefer. I am the mother of four boys and constantly trying to get the better of them for various reasons. I dont mind admitting I cant make decent gravy. Despite all of my best eorts, it is never a success. It is always lumpy, and I have long ago given up on it. Unlike me, the boys nana my mother makes delicious gravy. We eat dinner at my parents house one Sunday each month. My mother makes the gravy and there is always plenty of it for the 10 or more people who are

Wed love to hear your stories

We will pay 25 for every Snapshot, Playlist, We Love to Eat or Letter to we publish. Email family@guardian. co.uk or write to Family Life, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Please include your address and phone number

A letter to...
Great Grandad, killed in action
m your great grandson, Liam. You were killed in action on 23 September 1917. You never knew me but your son, Arthur, was my grandad. I guess I want to know why you volunteered to ght and how you felt. You were in your 40s did you want to be like the young men you knew? Did you think it would be a lark? You joined up in early 1915, perhaps too early for the real horror of war to have sunk in.You had only been remarried for a couple of years to someone who loved and cared for you. There were three sons from your rst happy marriage and a daughter from the second, all four of whom you adored. Why would you walk away from your loved ones? Did you want to make them proud? Did you feel that you had to do what was right? Or was it the sense of life passing you by? Did you just want an adventure? Or did someone compel you to go? Did they call you a coward and give you a white feather? Didnt they know you were past the call-up age? As a boy, I visited your cottage in that pretty little Devon village with the countryside all around and the sea close by. For years after you were killed, that same cottage was pictured on holiday postcards. I also met your children my grandad, my great uncles and great aunt. How could you have walked away from all that? I have seen a photograph of you in your army uniform. You look vulnerable yet brave. I see a haunted look in your eyes, though. Is it fear or is it sadness? You look like a man who has seen a lot. Was this the photograph of a man who had been to the front and seen that horror rst hand, or the man who hadnt been there yet and was afraid? Did you go because of your age? Or fear of a life not lived? At 53, I am past my soldierly sell-by date now as well. That makes me 11 years older than you were. I try to understand why

cant imagine Dad in a wheelchair. My mental image of him hasnt suciently recalibrated. But he uses one now, for the occasional outing he makes, wheeled down to the local pub for the odd pint, or taken on an afternoon stroll. Hes too wobbly on his feet to manage on his own. And when I visit him, I see this frailty rst-hand. He shues along the care home corridor, keels to one side, all at sea. Yet despite the evidence, when Im apart from him, I struggle to believe it. In my head, just out of sight, my Dad is as he always was. Tall. Strong. Always busy. Such physical decline seems like an injustice too far, heaped upon the rest. Just when wed conceded to the mental decay, theres this too. For me, Dad will always be the gure striding ahead of me on the cli path, Jack Russell at his heels. We would often go on walks together, usually around the headland opposite our house a route we referred to as the rockets and back because of a pair of cone-shaped markers on the clitop that look like nothing else, shooting 12 ft from the gorse. One is pink, the other black and white, and when sailors out at sea align them, they mark the position of a buoy on a particularly hazardous rocky pinnacle called the Runnel Stone.

There was always a xed routine. First, Dad would decide which of his pairs of binoculars he was going to take. He had several, on a sliding scale of preciousness, with the Leicas in pole position. Once that decision had been made, wed choose which hats we were going to wear, from the pile in the closet. Itchy bobble hats when it was drizzling, over-large Panamas when the sun shone. Then wed set o down the lane in front of the house, followed by a motley succession of small animals including, at one point, the family cat, a particularly knowing Siamese. Wed pause, to gather sticks from the tamarisk bushes that are everywhere in the cove where we lived. Dad would strip them of their leaves, so they were like giant, pliable rats tails. Id get one too, always smaller than his. For some reason, Dad didnt like to walk without them. In those days it wasnt about needing one to lean on, rather more about some sense of what a countryman did, I think, and also as a useful pointing device.

And God, the pointing. Each walk was like a little lesson. He would quiz me on the names of various plants on the banks alongside the path. Pink campion. Wild garlic. Great orange drifts of montbretia. The boats visible on the horizon were also picked out, with the binoculars deployed to help. Oil tankers, shing vessels, the Scillonian ferry making her daily pilgrimage to the Scilly Isles all needed to be categorised and commented upon. n misty days such discussions would be punctuated by the spooky moan of the buoy on the Runnel Stone. And when it was clear, wed pause at the top of the steep ascent to look at the view: granite clis, sparkling sea, perhaps some dolphins or a seal if we were lucky. Then wed turn, on autopilot, steps tracing a route wed done so many times before. I struggle to comprehend that Dad will never make that walk again. Will never make any cli walk ever again. But I know that when I follow that route, for as long as I live, Ill have him by my side. Just out of view. Follow Rebecca on Twitter @rebeccahelenley

For me, Dad will always be the gure striding ahead of me on the cli path, with a Jack Russell at his heels.

you volunteered to ght but I cant, although at about your age I volunteered for service in the Gulf war. Not as a ghting man, you understand. Im no coward but Im no ghter either. I volunteered for medical duties with the Red Cross. Ambulance driving. I thought I was going to the Gulf, but they told me it would be Brize Norton. I would be ferrying the wounded. I wasnt needed. How do you feel knowing that your war to end all wars didnt end all wars? All those men died on both sides, yourself included, and nothing much changed. I wish I could talk to you. Why am I so drawn to you? What did you feel when you landed in France? You had never gone further than Exeter was the foreignness of it all a surprise? Knowing the army, you must have felt comforted by having made some good pals in your draft. What happened to you over the next 16 months? Did you ght? Did you kill? Did you help bury the dead? Did you help save the wounded?

Problem solved
Annalisa Barbieri
I am a 37-year-old woman, ve years into a relationship with a man 12 years older than me. We are best friends. We know each other extremely well. Hes been married before, to an older woman. We met around ve years after hed left her. We were drinking buddies. At times we felt attracted to each other, but always when we were dating someone else. However, we dont have sex. Weve talked about it, weve cried, weve been open. I just dont know what else to do about it. We did start o having sex. I was very sexually motivated, condent and enthusiastic. He was very old-fashioned and struggled with nervousness and performance anxiety in our rst months. He felt in awe and scared of a new relationship with a much younger woman. We also had a lot of stress with his nancial situation, divorce and business, so early on I blamed all of these things for our dwindling sex life and my dwindling enthusiasm. Last year, we managed it three times. He tries not to show his ardour too much. I try to at least feign interest in his genital region, even just in a friendly way. I feel I am doomed to either live out my days sexless and watch our great relationship wither and die, and maybe see the pain of aairs or just the diminishing of each others faith, condence and aection for each other; or leave the best man I could ever meet. Am I cheating him out of a fullling life with someone with whom he is sexually functional by insisting on trying to stay together in a sexless home? I have even talked to him about my passing thought of having secret sexual alliances but my conclusion is that we cant really do that in our sort of love aair. We are both faithful people. I dont understand how sex therapy would help when I dont like the way he touches me, and I feel that trying to change everything he does sexually would do nothing but break his selfcondence. Anon, via email Your letter was very long, and in it you mentioned marriage so Im not sure if thats happened. My rst thought was that you just dont fancy him, but on further reading I detect mixed messages. To me, your most telling line is that you were attracted to each other while you were dating other people. In other words, I wonder if you were both attracted to a fantasy. I think the rst thing you need to do is throw away that notebook in which you write every sexual encounter you have. I had performance anxiety after reading it. Second, although I contacted a sex therapist for you, I wonder if youre looking at this through the wrong end of the telescope. I think sex with someone you hardly know is so much easier than sex with someone you know well enough to build up resentment towards. And your longer letter hinted at a lot of resentment. I wonder if youre angry with him for turning you into someone you feel youre not, even though of course you have to take responsibility yourself. Sex is, after all, a form of communication and, by its absence, often used to convey anger. Janice Hiller is a consultant psychologist and senior academic tutor in psychosexual studies at the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships. She felt there were lots of positive things in your letter and it seemed as if you really wanted to be with him. She felt it was unclear which of you had really gone o sex, and wondered if there wasnt a fairly major case of miscommunication going on (which is very common apparently). Hiller felt some form of psychosexual therapy could really help you, and I agree. Find a therapist through the College of Sexual and Relationship Therapists (cosrt.org.uk/therapist_listings.asp) and ideally go together. If your partner wont go, then go alone to begin with as it may help you approach him. Hiller also suggested concentrating on what you would like him to do sexually rather than what youd rather he not do: a subtle but important dierence. Yes, of course if you say I hate it when you do this it would batter his self-condence. But saying, I really like it when you do that, wont. Negative feedback doesnt teach people. Follow Annalisa on Twitter @AnnalisaB

know you had at least one leave at home. Did Great Granny greet you like a returning hero? Was she proud of you? Did the harpies of the white feather brigade smile and say, Well done? Did your mates buy you drinks and ask unanswerable questions? Did anybody say thank you or ask you why you had joined up? Then you went back to France. Had you even heard of Passchendaele? I bet you wished you never had. I know a bit about the battle. I know it lasted from 31 July till 16 November. We had 250,000 casualties and the Germans had 400,000. It has been described as a hell-hole of mud and blood. I saw a picture of the battleeld. It looked awful. It rained solidly for a month. They say thousands of men died by drowning in that sea of mud. Thankfully, I heard you died of your wounds. I hope you felt no pain. I wish so much that I had known you and I think of you with respect and aection, but you left one question unanswered. Why did you go why? Liam Mulvin

I think your most telling line is that you were attracted to each other when you were dating other people

Your problems solved

Contact Annalisa Barbieri, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU or email annalisa.barbieri@mac.com. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence

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8 Family Saturday Guardian 10.11.12

Endnotes
My family values Dr Ruth Westheimer Sex therapist
BENNETT RAGLIN/WIREIMAGE

know what had happened to them. We did not know about concentration camps until later in the war. The start of the end of my happy family life began 74 years ago. The night of 9 November to 10 November 1938 became known as the night of the broken glass [kristallnacht] when the Nazis burned Jewish stores and attacked Jewish synagogues. A week later, they picked up my father for a work camp and that was the last time I saw him. That night everything changed. I remember my father was picked up by the Nazis wearing shiny black boots. There was no shouting or anything but I remember my grandmother giving the Nazis money, saying, Take good care of my son. I was looking out of the window on the rst oor and I saw my father boarding a covered truck and turning round and seeing me at the window and waving and smiling at me. He forced himself to smile and that was the last time I saw him. In January 1939 my mother and my grandmother came to the railway station to say goodbye to me when I was sent to Switzerland and I remember my grandmother running down the platform. I could see them until the train went round the corner and out of sight. Thats the last time I ever saw them. The children at the orphanage became my new family. When the letters stopped all I felt was uncertainty and what gave us strength was that all of us children were together, so we became like brothers and sisters. We gave each other support and wrote diaries. I do remember all of the songs of my childhood and they helped us to cope with being orphans. But the memories of my parents in my early childhood and the solid foundations of socialisation and strong values that they gave me never left me for one day. I was left with a feeling that because I was not killed by the Nazis because I survived I had an obligation to make a dent in the world. What I didnt know was that that dent would end up being me talking about sex from morning to night. Orphan of the Holocaust ... Dr Ruth Westheimer and, top, with her parents, Irma and Julius Siegel, circa 1931

My introduction to sex was from a book called The Ideal Marriage by Theodor Hendrik van de Velde. My parents had hidden it in a bookcase and I knew where the key was. I was short Im only 4ft 7in now so I climbed up and found the book, but at that point I didnt know that I was going to end up working in family planning or make 450 television programmes talking about sex. I knew that I wanted to be a psychologist. After the war I was a sniper for the Haganah in Jerusalem before I got injured badly by a shell [during the Israeli war of independence]. I then ran a kindergarten in Paris while I studied psychology at the Sorbonne before emigrating to America and studying for a masters in sociology. So you can see that my fascination with the importance of family was at the root of everything for me. When Diane Sawyer came to interview me for 60 Minutes she asked my husband, Fred, who died 14 years ago, about our sex life. He answered, The shoemakers children have no shoes. I have two children and four grandchildren and speaking to my children about sex was not dicult as by the time I was doing my doctorate they were already old enough to understand. I think its vitally important to make sure that your children are sexually literate, but you should never pry. Make sure that your boys know about nocturnal emissions wet dreams and that girls and boys know about menstruation, but also know that children will not necessarily want to talk about sex with their parents. I would advise parents to bring a book home and leave it on the coee table. If your children have questions make yourself available but dont pry. And if you have problems in your family, dont give up. Talk about things. Work things out and if you need to, go and see a therapist. And it doesnt have to be me. Interview by Nick McGrath Dr Ruths Guide for the Alzheimers Caregiver is published by Linden, 10.59

Before I became an orphan of the Holocaust my early family life was stable. I grew up as a German Jew in Frankfurt, and I was in a household with two loving parents and an adoring grandmother who spoiled me. My mother helped my father in their wholesale business and they went to synagogue every Friday. My father took me as I was an only child, despite the fact that usually in the orthodox tradition its only boys who go. My father taught me to study hard and he sent me to a very good Jewish school. My mother was a very quiet woman and people say that she didnt get much of a chance to talk because my grandmother and I talked so much. I was separated from my family in 1939, aged 10, and sent to a childrens home in Switzerland that became an orphanage. I will never know how come my name was on the list for Switzerland because if I had been sent to Holland, Belgium or France I would be one of the statistics of one and half million Jewish children who perished. Still, up to 1941 I got letters from my parents and grandmother and the other grandparents. And then the letters stopped and I still did not

Tim Lott Man about the house

seven or eight rows. They are the same arguments repeated again and again, and their force only increases as the years pass because the frustration increases each time they are up again without being solved. Thus the mantra becomes You always do this or You never change or Why cant you ever listen?. The past builds up to act as a negative force on the present, eventually having the power to dissolve that present entirely. How can one come to terms with the past? After all, a past is inescapable the moment after you enter into a relationship, there it is. The rst and hardest thing is to be honest. Most unresolved arguments remain so because one or both of the people involved are not being truthful. For to be honest means to confront really face the problem and it often seems a lesser price to pay than to keep playing out the same drama over and over again. But honesty alone doesnt solve anything. It is just a step towards something more important the capacity for forgiveness. Everyone is capable of selshness, of stupidity, of not acting with the proper respect towards the other partner in the relationship. Yet we usually cast ourselves in our personal dramas as pillars of virtue, with our partners in our minds the supporting characters who always come up short. This renders forgiveness very hard to achieve and even if it is achieved it has a patina of self-righteousness that makes it unwholesome. For real forgiveness, I think one has to acknowledge the log in ones own eye before one can forgive the speck in anothers. Its pride that makes forgiveness hard. Even if pride is swallowed, forgiveness is only a possibility. The mechanism of forgiveness is mysterious. What one nds nearly impossible to forgive, another nds a matter of simplicity. And thus another layer of mutual misunderstanding arises. t is simplest to forgive someone when they acknowledge their fault. But, given the machinations of pride, they rarely do. So one key to a relationship is forgiveness, even when none is asked for perhaps even when the behaviour requiring forgiveness still persists. This is a tall order and one that carries no guarantees of success. Forgiveness may well go unrecognised, and all the eorts that might be made to achieve it. Thus it can add another transgression to the list of crimes to be forgiven. Yet in the end, lacking forgiveness is punishing yourself more than anyone else. Hate and anger and resentment lodge in the heart like cankers. However, for the past to become liberated from all its barbs and tripwires, this is the only way to go away from the past, into the present, towards the future. Follow Tim on Twitter @timlottwriter

Sex is part of nature. I go along with nature

Marilyn Monroe

friend of mine recently ended a 25year marriage. When I asked him why, he said, Too much past. It struck me as a sad but illuminating phrase that contradicts the mythology of marriage that time brings a deepening and an enriching of a couples life together. We share memories, experiences childbirth, tragedy, marriage itself that create a common ground that both wife and husband walk upon. Yet factual memories are, after all, phantoms, moments that have gone for ever and only remain as pale reections. Some people remember the good times, some remember the bad; but as supercial snapshots of times gone they lack power. The past that lives in the present is the emotional not the objective past the world of feelings. The reality of pain and conict tend to endure because they are often rooted in issues that remain unresolved. In a long relationship, every new moment of disharmony or disagreement can feed into a previous version of exactly the same argument. I sometimes think that couples only have

I sometimes think couples only have seven or eight rows. They are the same arguments repeated