Basically my thesis is that if you can talk with one another frankly about intimacy issues and keep the sex hot after years of repeated couplings, you can talk about anything. In order to keep satisfying and exciting one another and to avoid sinking into a rut, you're pretty much obliged to be in touch with one another's feelings, appetites and sources of frustration or alienation.

Seriously, how hard is it to have a candid conversation about how you treat each other in a daily basis when you've just had a chat about how to make each other come with greater zeal? It can be awkward. It can be embarrassing. It requires a hard look at what you want, what you expect, and what you give. It requires honesty and careful listening.

In short, the tools you have to bring to the table to iron out wrinkles in the lovemaking are the same tools you're supposed to bring to bear on every aspect of your relationship -- only in the other parts the immediate rewards can be less clear. Wanting to understand your partner's feelings is a prerequisite for success, and finding the motivation is easy when the carrot at the end of the stick is hot, hot porno lovin'.

While it may be possible on the short term to have a satisfying love life with someone you resent or hate or feel distant from, I don't think such grooves can usually last. Sooner or later something in somebody changes, and what they require shifts. If you're too out of touch to track those shifts, the orgasms stop or become masturbatory. Soon it becomes harder to work up the enthusiasm to begin, or harder to look one another in the eye afterward. Eventually you find yourself on altogether different missions, clinging to dark buoys, unhappy, bitter, or even sailing into foreign ports.

I know some guys married to MILFs who complain that they never get any. They have no idea where along the way they dropped the ball. At some point things just started to suck a bit, so they watched TV instead of snuggling. As time went by they become habituated to being physically alienated from one another. It wasn't something they talked about, except for the guy to sporadically mumble that he may feel under-serviced or the girl to mutter about how things just didn't feel right. Then they watched American Idol and fell asleep.

And then they're surprised to find that a decade has passed and they don't like each other's friends.

In the words of one acquaintance of mine, they have become "colleagues in a company" whose product is raising children and balancing the chequebook. Their relationships are amicable and professional, like my relationship with the Tim Horton's girl who sells me tea at the side of the highway.

That's sweet, in a way. I mean, better for the kids that their parents are friends rather than enemies. But I think the love and listening flows better when the heads of a household are also crazy about each other. Parents are, after all, the foundation blueprint upon which children base their model of what romantic relationships look and sound like.

"Mommy, is there romance in the world?"

"Yes dear, just not at our house."

I have gained more insight into what my wife wants and needs in her life by her descriptions of what she wants and needs in bed than from any other source. It is a subject impossible to discuss without candour. Those who would hint are forced to speak openly or be left unsatisfied. Those who would brood are forced to come to terms with what they'd really like to say, or risk sleeping alone. Those who would act only selfishly find themselves playing second fiddle to a battery-powered marital aid. Those who would act only selflessly in order to avoid conflict or awkward confessions find themselves resentful and bored.

Okay, I know lust is a sin.

I never claimed to be a religious man.

But I am a happily married man who not infrequently enjoys the privilege of making his wife squeal like a getaway car. It hasn't always been easy -- particularly for a spell immediately following the birth of our first child -- but we've always managed to get back on track with a dose of frank discussion, patience and a dollop of shameless experimentation.

In conclusion, hot sex is a litmus test that broadcasts the health of the intimacy between you and your partner. Being communicative about sex as a means of keeping it hot is also a way to train one another to be more sensitive to less intimate wants and needs. And hot sex is an excellent motivator for keeping in touch with your partner's feelings, because the reward for your efforts is -- well, hot sex -- and its associated rewards like feeling trusted, feeling desirable, and enjoying the metaphysical connectivity of big time sensuality.

Yes friends, I heartily and without reservation endorse hot sex and the full panoply of its itinerant benefits. And that's one to grow on.