You rush to greet your partner as he arrives home from work. You’re coiffed, perfumed and in the mood for love. The table is set, the candles lit, the lights dim and soft music is playing.

But he blows past you and heads for the kitchen. He turns the lights on, grabs a cold soda and bellows, “Hey, honey, how soon is dinner? Do I have time to change my oil?”

Or, on the flip side, he’s feeling amorous just when you’re stressing out about the report due at work the next day. You derail his advances by feigning sleep. Annoyed, he gives up.

The way you each handle these short-circuited intimacies may not only determine whether you will salvage the evening, but also may reveal whether you have a chance of improving your relationship through honest communication, marriage experts say.

Some women, when rebuffed by a spouse who’s more interested in dinner than in seduction, may burst into tears, flee to the bedroom and change from a silk negligee to a sweat suit. The atmosphere in the bedroom that night will likely be chillier than the champagne that sits unopened on the dinner table.

Some men, when rejected, may be able to communicate their anger and disappointment. Others may suppress their feelings, continuing a recurring pattern of behavior that sabotages closeness and sexual intimacy.

What It’s About
It’s all about communication, says Dr. David N. Lombard, a clinical psychologist at Parkview Behavioral Health in Fort Wayne, Ind. Lombard works in a primary-care setting. Much of his time is spent counseling sexually dysfunctional couples on the importance of effective communication.

A common problem is that people often see sexual intimacy as a conquest, Lombard says. In viewing orgasm as a “destination,” they forget to enjoy the “journey.”

“A lot of it has to do with honesty,” he said of troubled relationships. “Even some liberal thinkers were raised conservatively, so that sex, like cancer, became a topic they don’t feel comfortable thinking about or discussing with a partner.”

Besides verbal communication, body language is also important, as long as couples don’t misread or “over-read” behavioral cues, Lombard says. If your partner is sitting at the opposite end of the couch instead of next to you, that doesn’t mean he or she doesn’t care about you or wants distance from you, he says. Perhaps the reading light is better at that end.

“Many couples think, ‘A partner should know what I want. He shouldn’t have to read my mind, he knows me so well,’” he said. But Lombard encourages them to talk openly about closeness and compassion, and about what they are thinking and feeling.

How to Communicate
Couples often acknowledge the importance of communication, but they don’t know how to effectively reach out to the other person. Lombard offers these suggestions:

Be romantic without necessarily being sexual — “It could be a minor gesture like grabbing your partner’s hand while you’re walking through the mall or patting him on the shoulder while he’s paying the bills,” he said.

Sex means more than foreplay and intercourse — “It starts in the morning, when the tone for the day is set by how you treat your spouse and how you say goodbye to each other, and it lasts all day,” Lombard said.

“Sex shouldn’t be about all the [physical] pleasures. It should be about marriage and relationships.”

Sex isn’t a competition — Too often, sex becomes a contest, with expectations of multiple orgasms, Lombard says. Some couples schedule sex like an appointment, on birthdays or anniversaries, and ignore its importance the rest of the time.

“A lot of people won’t have sex unless they make it a big night,” he said. “There are times you can have the bonding, the closeness, but it doesn’t have to be a big production.

Lombard counseled one couple that had been married 25 years but hadn’t had sex in more than 20 years. One night, the husband rolled over and touched his wife. She rolled the opposite way. He stopped trying. Neither knew how to communicate about the problem.

Part of the solution is to motivate people to change. Therapy is done within the framework of each couple’s standards for acceptable sexual behavior, which often are influenced by cultural and ethnic differences, Lombard says.

“We don’t impose our beliefs on them. You can’t hand them a recipe,” he said.

But he does urge them to be creative and discard stereotypical beliefs that are often influenced by what television says sex is “supposed” to be.

Finally, couples must be receptive to counseling. That means opening up.

“Most of our adult life is going to be tied around a close relationship that’s going to have sexuality,” he said.

Even then, counseling cannot improve or salvage every relationship.

“Some couples are so far away from each other, so defensive, that it doesn’t work,” Lombard said.

“In sex therapy, it’s not the other person’s behavior we’re trying to alter. It’s our perception of the other person’s behavior,” he said.

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