Less seriously, let us return to the thesis, but a true one, that marriage is an extremely sexy institution. There is no reason one should fail to take advantage of it. Humanly, it begs to be exploited. Marriage is filled with diamonds and glories. It is literally fantastic in what it could offer, in terms of what it could be. Before you read further, agree, tentatively, to put from your mind the familiar placidities of what marriage is supposed to be. Remember that it has been, in effect, defined by unmarried males, individuals who, for one reason or another, refused to love women and give them pleasure. Now, tentatively, agree to the possibility of your own redefining of marriage, what it could be. You must live it. It is up to you, not another, to decide what it shall be. You shall choose its nature. There are now, before you, thousands of possibilities, sunlit, numerous, astonishing. You must go slowly, you must think carefully. At this point, it is only necessary to be open, to try to be open.

Incidentally, society may have made a mistake. It has permitted marriage, probably because there was no practical social alternative. It surely recognizes the dangers of its construction. It tries to determine the nature of marriage, inside and out. It can, however, determine only the outside. It is up to you to determine the inside.

When you and your wife close the bedroom door you are alone with your love and your imaginations.

Before we enter into certain possibilities for deepening, intensifying, improving and transforming human sexual experience, a certain number of distinctions are in order, because words are likely to tumble us in one direction or another. The important thing, though difficult, is to try to think in terms of the world and what it is like, and what experiences are like. Concentrate on the nature of the experience; do not simply look for words to label it. What is going on in this book, in its stumbling way, is revolutionary, and the preprinted labels, with their value judgments saturated in the ink, are not helpful to achieving understanding.