Happy Christmas!

There will be a short break until the New Year!

Suggested New Year’s resolution for all you single love-lorn men out there, looking for your soul-mate and yearning for the love and passion that could be yours: treat yourself to my book, Dating – the missing manual, and start applying the advice little by little to your life.

It comes from personal experience. It works.

Can you last longer than a boiled egg?

There is a joke that goes like this.

The wife is in the kitchen early in the morning and her husband comes in. ‘Quick,’ she says, ‘take me right now.’ The husband is a bit surprised, but not wishing to let such an opportunity go by he obliges her on the kitchen table. He gives her a good seeing-to and when he’s finished he asks her, ‘Why the sudden urgency?’ She says, ‘Well I’m doing boiled eggs and the egg-timer is broken.’

The subtext of course is that he has come but she hasn’t. He’s too quick.

The joke is remarkably accurate, because studies show that the average male lasts about 5 minutes. There is a way for men to last much longer, if we want to.

I started this blog because of a surprising discovery.

Well, to be honest the surprising discovery was why I wrote my first book, Last as long as you want in bed, subtitled It’s not about you. And the purpose of the blog is to encourage you to buy the (remarkably inexpensive) book. But of that, enough for now.

The surprising discovery is so simple that when I state it you might well think, well I knew that already. It’s obvious. But if that is so, why do so many of us have problems with sex and in particular why do so many men come before they have satisfied their woman? Studies show that a third of all men have suffered some sexual dysfunction, with premature ejaculation being common (scientific references are in the book).

So what was the surprising and obvious discovery? It’s that real sex, the best sex, is about being there for the other person, and for a man, that means responding to what she wants and what turns her on. It requires an act of will, because you have to resist your desire to get right on with what your body is urging you to do. Most of all you have to be present – to her and to your own body – but at the same time not be a slave to your own body.

It’s not about you, it’s about her.

Strange, that being present is where we are usually not, and this leads to all kinds of disasters, not least in the bedroom (or the kitchen table, for that matter).

Yet by being present we can truly enjoy, in a much deeper way, what is actually happening, right now.

Ovid – The Art of Love

Amor stringing his bow, Roman copy after Greek original by Lysippos. Musei Capitolini, Rome. Photo: Ricardo André Frantz

Love is a boy.

Ovid begins his treatise, The Art of Love with Cupid, a wild boy.

By this we know that we are dealing with Eros, desire, Cupid’s Greek equivalent, from whom we get the words erotic and erogenous zones. There are of course other loves.

C. S. Lewis in The Four Loves gives us not only Eros but also Storge (affection, as a parent for a child or a child for a pet), Philia (friendship) and Agape (in the sense used in 1 Corinthians 13 – divine love).

The happiest marriages and sexual partnerships include all four loves. The case for friendship is easy to make, and of the others I shall perhaps treat another time.

Back to our ancient Roman guide through the difficulties of love. Ovid says that he is well-qualified to write on this subject because he is old enough to have learned Cupid’s ways. Cupid is notoriously mischievous. If you are anything like me, you will have fallen in love many times and had no idea how even to get a kiss. But Ovid says his poem springs from experience.

Just as the fierce warrior Achilles was taught and tamed as a boy by his teacher, the old Centaur Chiron, so Ovid says he will tame the wild boy Cupid, ‘though his arrows riddle me.’

Over the coming weeks it is my intention to look at what Ovid says and see how much of it still applies today.

Penis size

Some comments from women about penis size. Read the comments on the comments too:

onceamonth4ladies.com/2012/12/13/lady-confessions-the-size-of-the-boat/

The reason penis size is not critical and hints on the right way to use it with a woman’s sensitive areas are all explained in my book.

Your woman and now

Please overlook the misplaced apostrophes and understand. Today I can do no better than refer you to this blog post on another blog:

www.2baware.net/blog/uncategorized/things-to-know-about-a-woman

(My tour through Ovid’s Art of love will begin soon.)

Love and sex – 2

True love versus the quick fling:

The waking share one world in common, but each sleeper turns away to a world of his own. – Heraclitus (6th century BC)

Do we separate mind, heart and body when we have sex?

The best sex is when mind, heart and body are all involved together. Without the involvement of the heart, sex is merely mechanical pleasure.

A ‘sleeper’ in Heraclitus’s meaning is not necessarily one who is physically asleep, but one who is asleep to the reality of now, not here in body and mind, away with the fairies, in imagination of things not present.

Being truly present to your beloved is to enjoy a union far more pleasurable than the mere friction of body parts. At the same time, being present is the only way fully to enjoy the physical pleasures of sex.

If you want to be loved, be lovable

If you want to be loved, be lovable

– Ovid, Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) II:ii

As I wrote in last week’s post Patience and attraction, “if you become a better, stronger, kinder human being then the right kind of woman will be attracted to you.”

Afterwards I found the quotation at the top of this post in Ovid’s Art of Love.

Ovid was a Roman writer (43BC – 17AD) who was friendly with Horace and may have met Virgil (the Virgil who wrote that extraordinary prediction of the coming of Jesus in Eclogues IV – some may dispute that this refers to Jesus but the coincidence is to be wondered at). Anyway, the poem Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) is Ovid’s guide to dating and sex.

This work got him banished to a cold, wet place by the Black Sea in what is now Constanta in Romania, ostensibly because the Ars Amatoria was far too naughty.

Over the coming weeks I shall be going through Ovid’s poem at a gentle pace, seeing what is still good advice today and what perhaps should be avoided by the wise.