Leman - Sex Begins in the Kitchen: Creating Intimacy to Make Your Marriage Sizzle

1981, 1992, 1999, 2006 by Kevin Leman

Published by Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.revellbooks.com

Ebook edition created 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansfor example, electronic, photocopy, recordingwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

ISBN 978-1-5855-8123-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Scripture marked TLB is taken from The Living Bible , copyright 1971. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

For the sake of easier reading, the pronouns he, him , and his refer for the most part to both male and female in the generic sense.

To my wife, Bucky
Still my richest blessing

Contents

Introduction

M y wife, Sande, is a five-forker. She loves those restaurants that give you five forks. I myself prefer one fork, and if its plastic, all the better. Sande loves to give her friends gifts with potpourri. I dont. I like the Waffle House. She doesnt.

Sande loves to have her nails and hair done. I prefer to do my nails at a red light with my front teeth in ten seconds or less. As far as my hair goes, I enjoy putting a baseball cap over it. My wife thinks nothing of going potty in groups of two, eight, twelve, or fourteen. If theres one thing I prefer to do by myself behind a door bolted in four places, its going potty. She likes sharing; I like three-word sentences. What Ive learned and what youll learn by reading Sex Begins in the Kitchen is that we can be different; we can do different things together and still work toward becoming one as husband and wife.

My wife speaks a language that took me a good ten years to understand. And weve been happily married for thirty-eight years. You see, women say things to us men in such an interesting way. They dont really want to tell us exactly what their needs are, but they want us to be able to, in essence, read their minds and know their needs. You see why it gets confusing? Women are relational by nature. They have many friends. If youre a woman, your husband probably has one close friendif hes luckywhile you have a number of friends. Women and men really do speak an entirely different language. Researchers tell us that a woman will use three times the number of words that a man will use in a given week. As a matter of fact, some of us men are out of words by late Thursday afternoon.

Youre about to read a book that has helped hundreds of thousands of readers in many different languages. This is a book that will help you get behind the eyes of your spouse and see how differently the two of you view life. Whether youve been married for a few months or a few years, youll find Sex Begins in the Kitchen to be right on target by helping you discover who you are and who this wonderful gift isyour mate.

The average marriage lasts a whopping seven years, and the average couple has 1.9 children. And seven years into that marriage, youll be fighting through your attorneys over who really does own the microwave and the remote control. Lets face itin this day and age, we can use all the help we can get. So youll find Sex Begins in the Kitchen to be a useful tool.

I also promise youll have a few good belly laughs reading these pages. But more importantly, youre going to gain some great insight into what makes your spouse tick and what makes you tick, and how two very different people can come together to become one and form a union that will last a lifetime.

I hope youll enjoy this book. May God bless you, your spouse, and your family.

Why Sex Begins (and Sometimes Ends) in the Kitchen

I ts one of those Friday nights when every member of the family has something to do. The two teenagers and their nine-year-old brother are going to the high school football game. Its Dads night to bowl, and Mom has to go to church to work on decorations for a mother-daughter banquet coming up the following evening. At six-thirty, as soon as dinner is finished, everybody flies out of the house, headed toward their separate destinations.

Its about three hours later when Mom is turning her car into the driveway of her home. Shes completely exhausted. Its been a long day, and the only thing she wants to do now is to collapse into bedbut first maybe shell relax in a tub full of bubbles for a while. And then, as she turns off the ignition and switches off the lights, it hits her: the dishes! She didnt have time to get to the dishes after dinner. In fact, the whole kitchen was a mess.

She thinks for a moment about the possibility of leaving it until morning, but quickly decides thats not possible. Well, so much for her plans for a hot bath and a warm, comfortable bed.

She walks up to the porch, unlocks the front door, tosses her purse on the table in the front hall, and heads straight for the kitchen. Might as well get this out of the way right now.

She stops dead in her tracks as she sees a beautiful, sparkling-clean kitchen. Her first reaction is to think that she got into the neighbors house by mistake. But she goes back outside, checks the number, and finds that... yes, this is her house. She walks back into the house just in time to see her husband hanging up the wet dish towels in the laundry room.

And let me tell you: the guy may have a bald spot on the back of his head, his stomach may hang over his beltjust a littleand he may give the appearance that hes trying hard to grow a second chin. But the old fellow has never looked more desirable to his wife than he does right now.

And thats what I mean when I tell you that sex begins in the kitchen.

Too many peopleespecially those of us who are fortunate enough to be malesseem to believe that sex begins and ends in the bedroom, period. Some men grunt their way through the evening without showing their wives the least bit of attention. When a mans wife asks him if he thought the dinner she fixed was good, he grunts in response. She tells him about something important that happened to her during the day, and she gets another grunt out of him. She tries to talk to him about something cute that one of the kids did or said and hears the third grunt of the evening. After that, she just gives up trying to talk.

But then when bedtime comes, hes grabbing for her and wondering why shes so cold to him. Thats just not how good sex happens. Sexual intimacy between a man and woman should be the culmination and expression of the intimacy they share in all areas of their life together. For sex to be what it is capable of being, it must be an act of loving and sharing, of giving to each other.

It is most definitely not a game of Im Tarzan, you Janegimme.

Now before I get myself into trouble, let me explain what I meant a moment ago, about those of us who were fortunate enough to be born males. That may have sounded like a sexist statement, but thats definitely not the way I meant it. What I did mean was that as far as Im concerned, there couldnt be anything better than to be a man who has a deep and abiding relationship with a good woman.

Let me assure you that there have been many times, over the course of the years, when I have thanked the Lord above that he made me a man. And all of those times have had to do with my relationship with my wonderful wife, Sande.