To become better lovers, a husband and wife both need to study how to give and how to receive pleasure.

The second part seems almost absurd, doesn’t it? How could a person not know how to receive pleasure? No one has ever given me lessons in enjoying peanut butter ice cream, and I seem to be doing okay in finding pleasure in it all by myself. No one taught me how to find pleasure in reading good books. Oh sure, I have learned a lot about becoming a better reader, but I didn’t need to learn to enjoy reading. Why is sex any different? Because sex is intimately relational. It adds another person to the equation, an addition that brings all kinds of potential pleasure-inhibitors with it. Lovemaking will improve as you both learn to receive pleasure from the other.

Learning to receive pleasure may involve things like:

• Overcoming your frustrations about what he/she does or doesn’t do outside the bedroom.
• Wishing he/she appeared more interested in actually participating in this sexual experience.
• Leaving behind guilt from past failures.
• Enjoying pleasure in faith rather than in pessimism.
• Believing that your spouse really does want to bless you right now.
• Living as a person created by God to be sexual and to experience sexual pleasure.
• Entrusting your body to your spouse and letting him/her bring pleasure to it.
• Discovering how your body works.
• Asking him/her to go faster/slower, firmer/gentler, here/there, sooner/later.
• Suggesting (graciously) that there be more romance, bigger build up, and more expressions of love outside the bedroom.
• Learning to stop saying “no” or “maybe” or “once we” or “if only,” and start saying “yes.”