---

Loving couples: In a world where 40 percent of marriages end in divorce, you can't help but notice them. There they are, finishing each other's sentences or laughing in some dusky corner of a Chinese restaurant. They seem so wonderfully in sync, and they make the work of being a couple seem effortless. Of course, no intimate relationship ever is, especially once you factor in life's built-in pressures, like work deadlines, laundry and your daughter's orthodontist appointments.

But, says Jane Greer, Ph.D., Redbook Online's resident sex-and-relationships expert, there are certain core values that make some marriages more intimate and resilient than others. You could probably predict the list: trust, mutual respect, commitment and a strong sense of "we" in the relationship. What is surprising, experts point out, is that when you ask loving husbands and wives about the key to their devotion, over and over you'll hear the same things, specific habits that mirror these values. Le...

---

1) The only difference between a friendship and a relationship is intimacy. If you have a sexless marriage or a sexless relationship, what are you? companions? best friends? If a couple doesn’t have much sex, then this generally means they lack passion, and that they could be more in love. There’s no such thing as losing the feeling of being in love. You just lose the ‘state’ of being in love, and you lose polarity/passion with your spouse.  You can be in love and have passionate sex way in to your old age.

Yes, sex is not the only way to achieve intimacy, but it is one of the main and most important ways to achieve intimacy between a man and a woman. Not making sex a priority can cause your relationship to deteriorate. The passion dies out.

2) Women can go to their girlfriends, a counselor, a guy friend, a mother, father, relative, aunt, to connect and talk to people. Men don’t generally do this.

I’m not saying there aren’t men who DO cal...

---

This article is not meant to be rude or offensive in any way. My aim is to help women become better women, and part of this is helping women understand more about men, what men want and why they want it.

Despite this being a sensitive topic, I hope we can all approach it with a little light-heartedness and let us remember that oral sex has been around for many, many years. I am also not condoning promiscuity, nor telling women they have to give their man oral sex. Ultimately, this is the woman’s personal choice.

My message is not for promiscuity or casual sex; I do not condone this. I condone healthy, strong committed and passionate relationships where each party does not reject the sexual essence of the other, and they each understand how the masculine and feminine energies operate.

Just as men sometimes have difficulty understanding why women are such emotional creatures, and don’t know how to deal with our ‘ocean of emotion’, a lot of women have trou...