"Hold me down harder, so you're overpowering me and I can't move. Like this," I showed Aaron, trying to pin my hands under his arms as he lay awkwardly on top of me.

"It's uncomfortable," he complained.

"Oh, come on. Now rip off my shirt!" I ordered him. "Can you be more aggressive?"

"Can you be more castrating?" he asked, slipping off my sweater so gently you'd think I was a china doll about to break.

"Now grab my breasts and say something mean," I instructed.

"You're a controlling shrew," he said calmly, obeying me so half-heartedly I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Maybe friends who'd called me a control freak were right. It appeared that I was now 100 percent in control of my own sexual domination.

My husband refused to act like he was raping me. Nor would he want to tie me up, restrain me, spank me, or force me into any form of submission, except to pick up his dry cleaning, which I was always forgetting.

Aaron was tall, handsome, brilliant, funny—everything I wanted in a lover except reckless. Indeed, the kinkiest thing about him was his luxuriant Jewish boy's 'fro; I loved to run my fingers through his curls. He was raised to be a suburban gentleman in the conservative 1950's and went to college in the liberated 70's—which may explain why he wasn't bitch-slapping me while pretending he was a pimp and I was his hooker, or playing the principal punishing the naughty schoolgirl sent to his office, or acting like a kidnapper tying up his naked, quivering victim. Instead, he put his ardor into his work while making sweet, calm, comfortable love to his wife once every week or two. Or three. Okay, a few years into our marriage, we sometimes went an entire month without even a quickie.

This was a far cry from our lewd long-distance courtship, where I'd fly to L.A. in tight jeans, braless under my T-shirt, and he'd throw me to the carpet as soon as I walked into his apartment, or take me in the hot tub on his roof (where we once got caught by the building's manager). The West Coast earthquakes we lived through were an apt metaphor for how I'd initially felt fooling around with him, as in "Oh, baby, the earth moved." The first year he was aggressive, and I was happy to be tamed.

Of course, we couldn't maintain the thrill of our bi-coastal relationship forever. Eventually, we got engaged, married, and moved in together. At 35, I was pleasantly shocked that a strong, intense, career-driven woman like me could actually get a great husband. Soon paying off an expensive mortgage, dealing with infertility, and mourning the death of a few close relatives intruded on our fun escapades. So when the sexual status quo became less-than-hot-and-salacious, I cut us some slack.