There are more ways to make love than there are couples. Every couple can enumerate their techniques, how they make love, their physical and mental interaction and whether making love is all that its supposed to be.
For starters let's keep it out of the bedroom and put it strictly into the imagination. And to further this approach it only has to involve one person. The imagination can do it all, including giving intense pleasure, feeling the essence of connecting with a partner, and a feeling of fulfillment. The imagination creates pictures, emotions, locales, ambiance, and a sense of adventure. You can imagine the most beautiful or handsome person in the world, create a new person, use toys, animals, sites for gratification. If you're free enough your sense of fulfillment can feel almost complete, but not quite.
For completion you need a real live partner. Perhaps you need to accept that you can never achieve the idealized setting or sense of mutual and even ecstatic pleasure that the imagination can produce. But what you get with the real thing is not just a sense of the lovemaking but the knowledge that it is actually an event, a happening, the genuine article. It not only feels real, it is real and the squeeze and kiss and hug and words come over as authentic.
When you are in bed and touching your partner, feeling flesh against flesh, when kisses titillate and enrapture, you know with your deepest feelings that you're turned on. When you mutually decide to come together there is an awakening that is unlike anything else that you experience. You can feel your body tingle in your imagination but it does not compare to what happens when touched by a lover. You can talk dirty in your imagination and kid around in your thoughts but it does not hold a candle to the real thing.
Being turned on mutually and feel the heightened sense of arousal, and feel the pull toward consummation and rising passion, feeling the intensifying excitation turn to frenzy and when you reach the release and fall upon a real life body that is wrapped in your arms then the Imagination needs to slink way in embarrassment.
So is that it? Nothing new about realizing that the real thing is the real thing. Not so fast. For what gives rise to the best of all lovemaking worlds and arousing sexuality is combining the imagination with reality. When you touch your lover and imagine that your arms are circling him or her and you linger in a deep kiss all the while imaging that you are soaring above the earth, or flying through a waterfall, or deeply immersed in an underwater cave filled with cavorting fish rubbing against your bodies then you're really making love. When you enter each other and feel your rising passion while flying out beyond the stars you have broached another plane of sexuality and lovemaking.
Fantasies in lovemaking are common and often help the partners rise above what is sometimes rather boring sex. Hard to believe that sex can be boring but sometimes it is. I do not cotton to using images of other people when you make love but I can certainly advocate changing locales, changing your individual selves, becoming younger or older, having greater flexibility, becoming more vital or passionate, all in your imagination. Have you ever imagined flying high in the sky or doing it underwater while making love? If you have not, try it letting your imagination contribute wildness, physical feats that may be difficult or even impossible for you to actually do and stimulate heightened passion while you are making love with your actual lover.
You can share the fantasies and together soar into another world, words and whispers and mutual grunts and squeals come together and when you realize that final moment of ecstasy you hold and cling to a real person, a person you love, a person with what you have real dreams. After that moment of fulfillment you hold each other and then peacefully, fully satisfied, fall sleep in each other's arms. Now that is how couples make love.