If your marriage leaves lots to be desired, your sex life is almost non-existent or does exist, then sexpert Dr. Pepper Schwartz promises to add some spice to your life.

Dr. Schwartz will be holding the "Come to Your Senses and Re-ignite the Spark" workshops at Cambridge Beaches, where February is the month of love.

Today is St. Valentine's Day and roses, chocolates and jewellery will arrive for many a lucky woman, but what about the rest of the year, how do we keep the love alive, and how can we remind ourselves that passion, lustful desires, Tantric sex and the Kama Sutra could and should have a place in our lives.

Dr. Schwartz says she can bring back the love.

She has created the Personality Profiler, that is similar to the Myers Briggs Type Indicator®, exclusively for the committed adults seeking long-term relationships on www.PerfectMatch.com.

The Personality Profiler significantly helps PerfectMatch's members to identify their significant other's "Similarity Factors" and "Complimentary Factors'', which will hopefully ultimately lead them to finding their perfect match.

Dr. Schwartz is also a professor of Sociology at the University of Washington, in Seattle. She has both a BA and an MA from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and an MA and PhD in Sociology from Yale University.

Over the years she has received many awards, including the 2005 American Sociological Award for the Public Dissemination of Information, the Matrix Award for Achievement in Education and the International Women's Forum Award in Career Achievement in Washington State.

She is the author of 14 books, which include: 'The Great Sex Weekend'; 'The Lifetime Love and Sex Quiz Book'; 'Everything You Know About Love and Sex is Wrong'; 'Ten Talks Parents Must Have With Their Children About Sex'; and 'Character', with Dominic Cappello; '201 Question to Ask Your Kids /201 Questions to Ask Your Parents'.

In addition Dr. Schwartz wrote the monthly column "Sex and Health" for Glamour Magazine, with co-author Dr. Janet Lever, for more than seven years, and "Talking About Sex" for eight years for American Baby Magazine. She also wrote a weekly column called "Sex. Net with Dr. Pepper" for Microsoft Corporation's One Click Away.

Dr. Schwartz has contributed to many magazines, journals and newspapers including the New York Times "Parent and Child" column, Sexual Health, Psychology Today and Contexts.

She was also a regular member of the KIRO-TV (Seattle) news staff for 12 years and appears regularly on national TV news, documentaries and other programmes.

When asked how she came to be a relationship and sexpert, she replied: "When I was at graduate school, it was the women's revolution, it was the sexual revolution.

"I kind of felt that there were a whole lot of different ways to look at relationships and how to have a successful relationship, then the ones that I had been reading about.

"I had come to Yale to study law, but I felt that the basis of everything was relationships and that was the more practical place to go in and make things better, then cleaning up after disasters.

"My professors thought that it wasn't a high-status area, but I didn't care, it was something that fascinated me and continues to fascinate me."

She then began teaching classes on sexuality, as a student.

"I was a teaching assistant when they began teaching sex courses again on campus, and I read the books for the course," she said.

"I got very upset, because I felt that there were a lot of books coming out with opinion, rather than research and some of it didn't suit my sense of reality. But I didn't have any information, other than 'I don't think that is right'.

"But if I wanted to do something about it, I had to do some research and get some answers that come from studies."

Regarding whether the seminars/workshops would mainly focus around sex or both relationships and sex, she said: "The thing about the seminars is that they are in everybody's comfort zone.

"This isn't therapy, it is enrichment, so I want people to have a good time. Many people only go to a group when they are in pain or are in therapy when they are in crisis.

"I think we concentrate on the relationship in a cafeteria-styled approach, without making it feel like medicine or surgery.

"I definitely want to underline that what we do is fun, and at some point it is also very valuable and helps people. If they need something more in depth, they can feel free to talk to me privately, but this I think this is something that in the end couples will feel closer, a little bit refreshed, rejuvenated and a little more intimate than when they started out.

"If you are taking it on as a lifetime project, then you have to work at it and think of ways to make it interesting, otherwise it becomes perfunctory and anything you take for granted is not what it should be."

With all the divorces and general complacency among some married couples, one has to ask, what is the secret of rejuvenation and excitement.

"I think people become very efficient, but efficiency may be a good thing for a business, but not a good thing for relationships," explained Dr. Schwartz.

"So they say, I am taking care of the kids, you are taking care of the lawn, you are setting up something social for the weekend and everyone has got an assignment and working away, but they don't stop the clock at all.

"They just get into an efficient and well-known territory that seems to work, and they don't realise how bored they are getting until they are really disconnected.

"So I think what you have to do is to take time out from as life as usual, not take each other for granted, not let things be the same all the time, figure out new things to do as a couple and different ways to be together and different things to talk about.

"It is almost like people think that you can stay interesting without new material, but what is interesting is change. You need to find a way of doing that, whether it is being more adventurous sexually, or taking an adventurous trip, doing volunteer work together, it doesn't take huge things to change direction ¿ but little changes can be very effective for couples to see each other in a new way or an old good way."

When it was suggested that perhaps couples could take time out from the hustle and bustle of family life, she said: "Absolutely, having a date once a week, having dinner alone, leave the kids with the nanny or family member, or taking a walk on a Saturday afternoon.

"Or put the little ones to bed early and have some time alone.

"I say if you are so concerned about your family, then it is best that you spend sometime without them, because you have to remember why you are with this person, you didn't marry them just to be breeders, you married each other because it was something emotional."

As women reach 40 they hit their sexual peaks, while men on the other hand are beginning to slow down sexually. When asked how could couples rebalance the scales, she said: "That is why I give a lot of time in my workshops about refreshing your senses, because the best way to kill your sexual appetite is to do the same thing all the time.

"If you are on a diet and you can only eat one thing for breakfast, lunch and dinner, you wouldn't even want to eat steak, because you have been dulled by it.

"So why would you think that it would be any different if you do it exactly the same way, in the same environment. So one of the things that I do is take a look at all of our senses and see how we have neglected them and do a refresher course about making things different by using our senses more indifferently.

"Some simple ideas are: how often do you dine by candlelight now; or how often do you light a candle before you go to bed; or how often do you light candles around the bath when we take baths together? These are simple things, but they really make a difference."

Dr. Schwartz said it is about finding new and interesting ways to delight each other.

"Build a little bit of anticipation about it, the kids are going to bed early tonight, we are going to have dinner and in the end I am going to give you a massage," she said.

"It's not expensive, but it makes a difference. It is what I would call conscious purpose, things don't happen unless you say, this is important to me and we are going to talk about it and give each other more conscious attention to our in intimacy and our romance and or sexuality.

"You don't diet unless you really consciously try and you aren't romantic unless you have a conscious purpose."

On the relationship front, many couples find that they have years of irritation and aggravation, on regarding an easy solution to resolve these issues, she said: "Well I think sometimes it takes a third party to give them some communication skills that are positive, and to know how to avoid escalating to anger.

"In a sense it is harder to repair and it is easier and better if there is a different way of communicating, and that there are basic skills to help mute the problem.

"The very simple ones are where people learn not to interrupt each other and learn to avoid saying something that sounds contemptuous, because even a slight crack it has much more damage than they think it does. To try and do things to reduce and maximise fun, to enforce the part that says that we are really good friends and we have fun together and to minimise the part that feels vulnerable.

"It is a two-headed battle, one is to keep the positive up and to minimise and avoid the negative, while the other is to putting differences on the ground. One has to communicate and even be angry about things that upset one, but there has to be rules.

"It is like being in a prize fight ¿ you are going at each other, but there are certain things that are figuratively below the belt. We make this a contest where we want to respect each other when we are done."

Asked whether the format would be more of a lecture or workshop, she said: "It will be some lecture, some workshop and some time out and it should be like a kind of relationship vacation where you are having fun, but also learning things.

"There will also be some relationships to work on, so it depends on how long they come for. But there is time to take for each other, and if they just want to take the workshops I think there is some way that they can do that too.

"I give them exercises on how to prioritise time together, what part of their senses do they feel more comfortable experimenting with, I give them exercises on different levels of sexuality that the couple might want to try, from the very minimal to exotic and I give them the communication skills to practise them.

"The key is to use something new in every area, not just sex, and if they realised how important that was not just to their physical, but also their psychological health they might be tempted to take things up a bit. Life is a series of pieces and each piece matters."

For more information on the workshops, contact Cambridge Beaches on 234-0331 or visit www.cambridgebeaches.com.