It is always tennis. Morning, noon, and night, it’s tennis. He has tennis cuff links and he doesn’t even have French cuffs on his shirts. I hate tennis and I couldn’t play it anyway because of my knee. I mean it. To him, love is just a tennis score.
WIFE
Balancing our needs for recreation and the needs of our marital relationship is a relatively new concern in our society. The day-today pressures of surviving used to take up all the time there was. Now we are told to exercise, to play, to have fun because it is healthy. We do want to play, but how do two people play together if interests and capabilities are different?
It was the rare couple in which both partners were equally involved in a recreational or avocational interest. “He golfs, I drive the cart. I enjoy the scenery, but he never sees it,” reported one wife. “To him the landscape is just a place to lose his golf ball.” As this example illustrates, sometimes a spouse will try to “go along” and enjoy the spouse’s enjoyment, but rarely does this completely fulfill one’s own needs for recreation and fun.
Our public schools seldom emphasize couples play. The boys and girls are separated into different gym classes. The activities are typically individual or team sports, seldom a boy and girl playing together. Even in team sports, the individual seems to be the focus in a society that values stars more than constellations, independence and the ability to stand out rather than the important skill of fitting in to enjoy a common purpose.
So how does super marital sex survive the distance that may result by different recreational involvement? One husband reported, “About the only thing we do together is sex. And then, we really have been doing it to each other.” Sex therapists typically ask about individual reports of fulfillment, the most popular question being “Are you orgasmic?” Couples are less often asked about their mutual interaction, the results of togetherness. The only hope is to change, or at least broaden, our view of play to include dyads, two persons playing together.
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