Keeping your man in tune with your wants, desires and interests is an exhilarating and fun challenge whether you’ve known him five minutes or fifty years. Your guy, like all of us, wants a balance of the familiar with the unknown. He wants you, but he wants to be surprised by you. In appearance this means yes, you can change your hairstyle, your makeup, your jewelry, piercings, shoes, colors, tan lines and expression, you can even put on a mask and invite him to a fancy dress ball. Just don’t do it all at the same time, or he’ll wonder if it’s you he’s with, or some total stranger.
In conversation, likewise balance the familiar with yourself, who you might like to be, who you used to be, or even the you you have never been and have no intention of ever becoming. Talk about your past, but keep him guessing about the end result of all your stories. Fantasize about your future together, and talk about where the two of you might be in twenty or forty years, but keep him wondering if you really mean it. And if you have any secrets, by all means kiss and tell, but leave out a different detail ever time you mention the story, and he’ll want to hear it again.
Telling a story will definitely get you onto the right track of keeping your partner interested. Remember the wonderful tale of 1001 Nights and a Night? The night before Scheherazade was sentenced by the sultan to die, she began telling him a story. The story quickly became a story within a story, each one more fascinating than the next, and no story ending before the next had begun. Not only did the sultan spare Scheherazade’s life from one day to the next, so that he could hear another installment of her storytelling, but he eventually halted her execution and married her.
After which, no doubt, the stories continued. Because the tale of how to keep a guy interested continues after marriage, after the birth of children, after the children leave, and after the children come back and try to drag you off to a retirement village. A spouse makes the ultimate sacrifice: to stick with you through everything, long after it stops being pretty. The least you can do is keep him entertained.
In addition to balancing the familiar and the unknown in the areas of appearance and conversation, there is of course, the area of the bedroom. Here again, strike a medium between comfortable and familiar and shockingly erotic. If you’ve been having a wonderful time in bed just tearing off your clothes every Sunday afternoon, don’t suddenly make a trip to the S and M store for full regalia: you might scare him off permanently. Perhaps just try adding one surprising item to your routine, and gauge his reaction. In this, as in all things, let his reaction be your guide to keeping him in tune with your wants, desires and interests.