This is a highly personalised and enjoyable behaviour that takes place between a man and a woman often before penetration occurs. It is an extension of the love-making that ideally goes on throughout their everyday lives, as discussed later.
A lot of nonsense has been written about foreplay. The received wisdom perpetuated from sex manual to sex manual is that the secret of good sex is preparation. Unless, it is claimed, a man spends hours preparing his woman’s genitals (and the rest of her) she will have no orgasm, poor orgasms, or will not even want sex at all.
Many women sometimes like to enjoy extended love-play before having intercourse and at other times enjoy a ‘quickie’ in which the man simply thrusts his penis into her straight away. This sort of ‘kitchen-table’, unpremeditated sex can be thoroughly enjoyable for both partners, yet it involves little or no foreplay.
Most couples though do not practice this kind of ‘quickie’ sex every time and usually enjoy some form of foreplay before they have sex.
Foreplay has many functions. It makes the couple relax; it gives them an opportunity to talk ‘sweet nothings’ to each other; it makes them aroused; it prolongs the pleasure of intercourse (which would otherwise be over quickly); and it makes the pleasure of intercourse more intense. It is a time when a couple can lose themselves totally in each other, forgetting the rest of the world entirely. Foreplay also postpones the onset of intercourse, which is a good idea on the basis that something lovely is always better if you have waited for it.
The term foreplay is rather unfortunate in many ways because it gives the impression that it is always a forerunner to penetration. This is not so and gives the erroneous impression that such pleasuring must end in penetration. For many couples this is a nonsense. They kiss, cuddle and pleasure one another as an end in itself or as a prologue to masturbation or some other sexual delight. The pressure on many people to have intercourse just because they start to pleasure one another is at the heart of much goal-centred sex and does some couples a lot of harm.
There are, however, some exceptions. Due, probably, to severe punishment for touching in childhood, some women dislike foreplay, especially genital stimulation. A woman who does not really want sex with her partner, or who is always unsatisfied, may also reject foreplay because she does not want to become aroused only to be let down.
Men who have difficulty erecting often want to proceed to penetration when it occurs for fear that it may be lost. Also, men who have a tendency to premature ejaculation may also try to keep foreplay to a minimum so as not to become sexually over-aroused.
Any couple who have followed the advice in the chapter on courtship should have no difficulty in gauging their partner’s mood and adjusting foreplay accordingly.
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