You can’t make love from the waist down, and keep your heart and your head out of the equation, without a lot of personal pain.

      Luckily experience is a great teacher. A friend of ours separated from her husband after twelve years of marriage. She went through a rapid series of lovers – perhaps to reassure herself that she was lovable, or to capture the adolescence she felt she had missed. Then one day she told us of a new man. She proudly told us ‘I am not going to sleep with him just yet. I think this relationship is the one I really want, and I am going to do it properly’.

      Junk sex

      Junk food is quick, easy and looks better than it tastes. Just as quality cooking takes time and care, quality loving means getting to know your partner as a person. Junk sex, like junk food, leaves you malnourished. Junk sex is not limited to singles either – many long-standing couples have given up on nourishment and just settle for a diet of relationship pizza.

      Putting It Altogether

      The phrase ‘making love’ has come about because it describes so poetically an ideal we all seek. When you get sexuality right, making love is exactly what you are doing. It’s not the same as just fucking (though it includes the vigour and earthiness of this lovely Anglo Saxon term). Nor is it the rather fey-sounding ‘bonking’ of the postmodern gender neutral generation. Your heart opens (softens and beats more powerfully), your genitals open (moisten and enlarge), your mind opens (sharpens and sparkles), to let the other person in at every level. Achieving this is rarely rapid, and can never be a passing thing.

      Once you have made LOVE, then just ‘having sex’ will never do. Teenagers ‘fall in’ love; adults ‘make’ love. It is a flame which a skilful human being learns to kindle. In a day-to-day relationship the flame flickers, dies down and flares up again, as we learn to tend it skilfully. Our efforts are rewarded. Love starts as a blessing, even a fluke, but it continues as an achievement.

      PRACTICAL STEP 4: REMEMBER YOUR FRIENDS

      In the excitement of becoming a couple, people make a serious mistake: they forget about their friends. The role of friends in making life happier and easier has been badly neglected in our culture – especially amongst men. Friendships are often seen as almost a casual thing, people to fill in time with until one finds one’s ‘true love’. The post-war nuclear family was supposed to be totally self-sufficient. Friends were for chatting to at barbecues, to sell Tupperware to, and have over for a game of bridge. Then we began to discover the dramatic fact that the couple or the family in isolation does not work. A family on its own is about as stable as a tent with no pegs. The steep rise in both marriage break-ups and single parenthood soon led people to realize that friends were like insurance – they would be there when marriage failed or was just in a stuck spot. Lack of friends may even cause a marriage break up: it places too much strain on couples and leaves too few support networks in the event of hardship, illness, the death of a child. Today this tide is changing. People are valuing friends more. Men, and women, meet in cafes to chat once a week. The rise of men’s groups, and the willingness of parents of young children to build strong and intimate friendships with their neighbours, has begun putting some ‘village’ back into our lives.

      Friends help you to continue to grow as an individual – not just one half of a couple. Long-term friends remember the teenager you once were, what you’ve loved, lost, tried, and achieved. And they remind you of your authentic self. This strengthens you and prevents you from losing yourself, and so the marriage itself is made stronger.