“Intellectual Foreplay” is a book of questions for lovers and lovers-to-be. This book of questions is published by Hunter House. This book is a softcover book that includes black and white pages on the inside. The book has 273 pages which are divided into seven parts. These parts basically organize the questions and make it easy to pick the questions that are most relavant to you. The book has two authors: Eve Eschner Hogan and Steven Hogan.
The book is titled Intellectual Foreplay because it’s supposed to give you FOURplay ways of connecting: 1) intellectually, 2) emotionally 3) spiritually 4) physically. This book tries to give you the tools that you need to connect those four ways before you commit to marriage or other serious involvement. How does it do it? This book is basically a book of questions! The author went around and asked people “what would you want to have asked your partner before you got involved”, and she refined those answers and placed them into this huge book to discuss with your partner. As someone who loves to get to know others by asking them questions, this book is just downright amazing for me.
I am really, really impressed with how the authors explained the best way to look into this book and how to utilize it. They didn’t just “let you loose” on a bunch of questions. Instead, there’s an introductory chapter that was really impressive. It explained the importance of knowing this type of knowledge about your partner, and it also talked about the best ways to bring up the questions and talk to each other about it. It mentions that others may feel offended unelss you explore it as an adventure. It also talks about the best ways to utilize the book, and the book gives a lot of real-world examples that really impressed me. There are definitely a lot of ways to use this book that I hadn’t though of including learning what you want in a partner, talking to your partner before you become exclusive, exploring the options before you get married, and lots of other things.
So what types of things do the questions cover? It’ll cover romance and sex, sports and hobbies, values and beliefs, past and futures, and money, home, and children. The questions fall into some pretty basic sections such as defining who you are, talking about your past, definining where you want to go, defining if you can live together, talking about where you want to go as a couple, and talking about if the two of you can begin to evolve with one another in your relationship. The book really does cover quite a bit of ground!
Each section is divided into subchapters, and each subchapter includes about 30 or 40 questions – it really varies upon the chapter. Some of them are going to see a bit basic (which way do you like the toilet paper roll to face?), but some of those basic ones (is the bathroom a private place or can your partner come and go?) let the boyfriend and I to get into interesting discussions about how we saw the bathroom and if it was a place to relax.
If you’ve been together for a long time or already have lived together for a long time, this book may not be nearly as useful, but it still does have a lot of use. For example, I can answer most of the questions about the Bathroom off the top of my head from my boyfriend’s point-of-view, but I can’t answer his questions nearly as well for children/future planning questions, and we’ve been together about four years. So if you’ve had a long marriage, this book probably won’t be the most useful, but if you and your partner are still relatively new, I really, really would recommend this book as it brings up a lot of issues and questions to think about before you get too serious.
Really, I totally love question books – just because they can get some of those never-asked questions out there and let the two of you have a point of discussion. This book has a lot great questions to ask, and with the 34 different subchapters, I’d say that there are at least 400-500 different questions in this book to discuss with your partner. Some of the questions can get really deep into discussion (such as where you see your lives going or how you feel about children), but some are more surface questions. If you want to learn more about your partner, I seriously suggest checking out this book.
