Researcher Helen Singer Kaplan writes that lack of orgasm during intercourse “may represent a normal variant of female sexuality. ” If focus is exclusively on orgasm rather than psychasm, one would be hard pressed to understand why intercourse is so popular I with women other than for closeness and intimacy. Of the 1,000 women, 823 reported psychasms in intercourse at five-year follow-up. “Once I learned the difference and stopped working for just something in my genitals, I started to really have orgasms, I mean psychasms.” This wife’s report was typical of those women who learned, as did their husbands, that orgasm and psychasm are dif- I ferent. Brain-wave patterns change during psychasm, and even I Masters and Johnson, the third-perspective researchers, state that “the mind turns inward to enjoy the personal experience.”

The early perspectives of sex research mistook physiology for psychology. Masters and Johnson write, “The subjective experience of orgasm in men starts quite consistently with the sensation of deep warmth or pressure that corresponds to ejaculatory inevitability.” In women, Masters and Johnson report the subjective aspects of “orgasm” as a “pleasurable feeling that usually begins in the clitoris and rapidly spreads throughout the pelvis.” The women in the thousand marriages reported such sensations as “an altered state of consciousness,” “being free from everything,” “sort of merging, actually being my husband,” and being “lost, tripped out, gone but more here than ever.”

Contractions in the pelvic area accompany orgasm in both genders. Both male and female experience the anal sphincter contractions. There is a physiological phase of being “on the brink,” of being about to experience pelvic contractions. Masters and Johnson saw women as not experiencing a sexual “brink.” They write, “Women do not have a consistendy identifiable point of orgasmic inevitability.” The women in my couples group did in fact report the sensation of a “brink,” and inevitability of physical orgasm. Four hundred twenty-two of them reported this phenomenon “always,” and a total of 644 wives reported this brink sometimes.

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If it’s candles and music instead of tuna fish and potato chips on paper plates, it probably means there will be some sex that night. We like to keep up the national average, you know. Do our share for the sex revolution and the age of enlightenment. Two and one half times per week, rain or shine. Well, a little more often when it rains, because we can’t work outside.

HUSBAND

Super Marital Sex Rule: Super marital sex depends on sexualizing the entire marriage, not separating sex into a category of obligatory marital duty, afterthought, or a different “part” of the marriage. The “super” in super marital sex refers to “whole,” to making intimacy a way of living and being together, not something you do sometimes. There are more spouses having affairs within their marriage than outside of them, separating marital sex from marital love, resulting in a form of “extramarital” sex rather than an “intra-marital intimacy.”

Extramarital sex has traditionally been viewed as adultery, marriage partners having sex with a person other than their spouse. It has received good press and is statistically quite popular. More than 70 percent of husbands and 40 percent of women report sex outside their marriage. In my sample of 1,000, the number was 76 percent of the men and 47 percent of the women. Extramarital sex is variously described as forbidden, sinful, destructive, .dishonest, and dangerous by some persons and by others as constructive, evolu-tionarily natural, energizing, fun, and somehow, if done “right,” preventive of divorce and marital problems by providing “outside” stimulation.

In the thousand couples, the 760 men and 470 women who reported sex outside of their marriage were always in a marital relationship in which at least one of the partners was less than satisfied with the intimacy of the marriage. There was no evidence in my sample, and there is no evidence in anyone else’s data, that extramarital sex enhances marital sex. My work with couples indicates that at the very least, extramarital sex is distracting from the effort and time necessary to develop and enjoy super marital sex.

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