How do I subtly tell hubbie I want foreplay?

My husband has never been one for foreplay. Is it too late to change him without upsetting him, or making him think sex has been rubbish up until now?

Foreplay is difficult to define. It’s an umbrella term which encompasses everything that happens before intercourse. That said, there’s no fail-safe formula to make it fantastic. Sometimes, great sex can be condensed into five amazing minutes, with no foreplay, yet, at other times, the absence of foreplay is an unforgivable sexual error. The difference, of course, is the level of sexual chemistry between the two partners.

However, our experiences of sex can also be heavily influenced by mood. If, for example, a person is feeling vulnerable, the simplest, skin-to-skin interaction can feel profoundly intimate. At other times, foreplay might involve full-body exploration and drawn-out kisses all over the body.

The best ‘foreplay’ is the beginning of a new relationship, when it can stretch out over weeks and months. In those heady, early days, foreplay is the flirty text you send before leaving work, or the cold glass of chablis that he pours for you when you walk in the door. It is the way he wraps his hand around your waist when he pulls you close and it is your cold fingers sliding under the buttons of his shirt.

Extended foreplay is a blurry amalgamation of anticipation and interaction. It doesn’t relate to specific sexual activities, yet its repeated omission suggests stagnation. When you have been with the same sexual partner for several years, it’s all too easy to get stuck in a sexual routine. You know what works, so you stick with it and, over time, foreplay becomes a swift circuit of stimulation, penetration, and ejaculation, finished with a perfunctory, post-coital kiss.

Complacency is a common problem in couples who have difficulty discussing their sexual relationship. While you love your husband, the fact that you haven’t broached this issue suggests that you cannot easily discuss sex with him. Don’t feel awkward about suggesting change.

Although it’s not written into the marriage contract (it should be), all long-term relationships benefit from an occasional sexual makeover, and if you present your desire for foreplay in terms of ‘experimentation’, he is unlikely to interpret it as a criticism of his performance. Be sensitive that your idea of novelty might be his idea of intimidation. Trying to gauge where your husband sits with regards to experimentation is important, because although you want to shake things up a little, you don’t want to bombard him and make him feel uncomfortable.

It may sound counterintuitive, but the easiest way to hit the sexual reset button is to temporarily exclude intercourse. Eliminating the ‘goal’ shifts your focus back to the game as a whole and it allows you to revel in the build-up of arousal, without any pressure to dash to the finish.

It is the basic premise of sensate focus, a form of sex therapy which helps couples to pay increased attention to the sensation of touch and is used to resolve sexual difficulties, such as performance anxiety, premature ejaculation, inorgasmia or psychogenic erectile dysfunction.

Sensate-focus exercises restrict couples to a gradually expansive sequence of touching exercises, but you could create your own, less stringent variation, by limiting yourselves to kissing and being kissed.

Kissing is an intensely sensual experience, which is all too often overlooked by couples who have been together for a long time. Take turns to give each other long, languid kisses from the mouth, down the neck, chest, breasts, nipples, belly button, the tops of the thighs, the buttocks, the toes, etc.

The sensation of kissing and being kissed stimulates all the nerve endings in the skin and triggers the release of a flood of feel-good neuro-chemicals in the brain.

It is a deeply connecting and intoxicating experience. It is also hopelessly, powerfully, irresistibly sexually arousing, which would, I suppose, define it as fantastic foreplay.

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