Monday 12 March, 2007

Sex and relationships

I had an article in The Age on the weekend which was about sex and relationships. But before you click on the link (if you do so) I need to make a correction. In the first paragraph of the piece it (well, thanks to the subs, I) say that I wrote a book called Sex in Long Term Relationships, which I didn't. It was edited by Klay Lamprell and I was the book's publisher back in 1997. A formal correction will be printed in the Age in the next few days. Anyway, here's a brief extract from the article by way of inviting you to read the entire thing:

'Two unconventional partnerships woven together by language were those of the Bloomsbury couples Leonard and Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington. Virginia Stephen wrote in a letter to her husband-to-be, Leonard Woolf, that, "both of us want a marriage that is a tremendous living thing, always alive, always hot, not dead and easy in parts as most marriages are. We ask a great deal of life, don't we? Perhaps we shall get it; then, how splendid!"

After 25 years of marriage to Leonard and despite the relative absence of sexual intimacy between them, she could still find it in her heart to write the following to her sister Vanessa after having decided not to take a holiday in Paris away from her husband: "I was overcome with happiness. Then we walked around the square love making - after 25 years can't bear to be separate . . . you see it is an enormous pleasure, being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete."