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Making Love The Way We Used To...Or Better

From Making Love the Way We Used to...Or Better:

For Carol, 46, it was a spring she wasn't likely to forget. Her sixteen-year-old son, possessor of a new driver's license, flunked Geometry at the quarter. Two math tutors in a row quit after he stood them up or just plain refused to cooperate with them. Worse, her thirteen-year-old daughter, always a pleasure, was suddenly sullen and secretive, and Carol was getting calls from her teachers, too.

"Let's just say that sex wasn't my priority," Carol admits. "You think sex will wait until the emergencies are over, and your husband will understand," she says. "But my husband said, "If Jeffrey flunks, he flunks-it'll be a good lesson for him to go to summer school. And leave Sharon alone. She's a good kid. Why are you overreacting?" "He'd reach for me at night, but I was just too tired. Sometimes we got started and I was so unenthusiastic, he just gave up. I said, "I need more affection." He said, "If you'd just relax, I'd show you some affection." Then I'd feel guilty. I'd really try the next time. I just never felt very aroused.

"Then both of my children finally went off to camp for eight weeks-Jeff as a swim instructor, Sharon as a junior counselor. I watched the bus drive off and thought, "This will do us all some good; we need to be away from each other for awhile." "We made love twice that first week. It didn't rock the world, but at least I wasn't consumed with thoughts about whether Sharon was doing her homework and whether Jeff was going to wreck my car. The summer flew. Then one day I realized five weeks had gone by and we hadn't made love again. I didn't want to mention it to my husband, because the truth was, I was never in the mood. Something about the way my husband was treating me was different, too. He was polite, even kind, but sometimes I would turn and catch him staring at me in a strange way. It was like he was looking through me, to something else. And that's when I started to get really scared."

It was a Saturday night, not long after their fifteenth wedding anniversary when Denise and her husband Brian were watching a movie on television. He started to massage her shoulders. When she didn't move away, it was their signal for sex. They moved to the bedroom. "It started out to be wonderful," Brian admits. "Then, we were in the middle of sex, and I don't know how to say this, but I "lost it." We fumbled around like teenagers for a few minutes and it became clear that nothing was going to happen. It was downright embarrassing. I thought, "Just don't say anything. Don't make it worse." I mumbled something about being tired and we went to sleep, back to back. A week later, the same thing happened again." Two months later, I was no longer massaging her shoulders in front of the TV. In fact, I was pretending to be asleep when she came to bed. She asked me if I was having an affair. I was thinking, "Why did I turn off to her? I used to just look at her and want to make love." I'm too scared to think about why this is going on. Now we've just stopped talking about it."

Felicia, 37, isn't talking about sex with her partner either. But she feels she's the one to blame. "I never thought I'd marry again after my divorce. I met Dale in the elevator of all places. Twenty-six floors down, I knew I was interested in a man for the first time in years. We had our first date that night and we were in love two months later. The problem is, Dale has a child with his first wife, who he never gets to see because they live two thousand miles away. He talks about wanting to have a baby with me. He doesn't know that I've been having trouble with my menstrual cycle for months. My doctor told me that I'm not ovulating regularly anymore because I'm in perimenopause. I thought, "Perimenopause! How could this happen so soon? I'm only 37!" "I worry that if I tell Dale, he's going to think I'm too old, even though he's forty-five. What if he says he wants a younger woman who he can have children with? Do I just marry him, and figure that once we're married and he finds out the truth, it will be too late?"

Sharon's trouble is her best friend's lover, Sean. She explains, "Janice went through a torturous divorce two years ago, so I'm really glad that she met Sean. He's attractive, funny, a totally charming guy. She's my best friend, and I want her to be happy, but the truth is, I get intensely jealous every time I see them together. Since we live next door to each other, that's a lot. When Janice tells me about their trysts in bedroom, I want to die. There's something about seeing two people so much in love that they can't keep their hands off each other, that makes you think, Why can't I feel like that about someone? "I love my husband. Still, I haven't looked at a man the way Janice looks at Sean since I was twenty. Will there never be another time that I feel so turned on by a man that I can't wait to be with him? The truth is, I have so much trouble getting excited with my husband. Sometimes sex even hurts. Even with messy lubricants, several minutes into sex it begins to feel like sandpaper rubbing against me. I find myself wondering when it will finally be over. But how can I tell him? He'd just get hurt and angry." The truth is, he is hurt and angry. "She makes a big deal about our silly neighbor and this hot affair she's having. Then she never wants to make love. Why can't she pay a little more attention to what's going on with us than what's going on with them?"

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