All relationships live in the shadow of the third, for it is the other that solders our dyad. In his book Monogamy, Adam Phillips writes, The couple is a resistance to the intrusion of the third, but...
If someone is counting on children to bring them peace of mind, self-confidence, or a steady sense of happiness, they are in for a bad shock. What children do is complicate, implicate, give plot li...
What I can tell you, she says, is that his kindness makes me feel safe, but when I think about who I want to sleep with, safe is not what I look for.
We're walking contradictions, seeking safety and predictability on one hand and thriving on diversity on the other.
We no longer plow the land together; today we talk. We have come to glorify verbal communication. I speak; therefore I am. We naively believe that the essence of who we are is most accurately conveyed...
Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity. At the same time, we expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well a...
To the American way of thinking, respect is bound up with honesty, and honesty is essential to personal responsibility. Hiding, dissimulation, and other forms of deception amount to disrespect. You li...
Proust, The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. Adele recalls a moment when she experienced
Once we strayed because marriage was not supposed to deliver love and passion. Today we stray because marriage fails to deliver the love, passion, and undivided attention it promised.
Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it.
It is ironic that some people, like Guy, will minimize the emotional involvement to lessen the offense (It meant nothing!), while others, like Charmaine, will highlight the emotional nature of the bon...
I do believe that the emphasis on egalitarian and respectful sex—purged of any expressions of power, aggression, and transgression—is antithetical to erotic desire for men and women alike.
Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other.
Big data analyst Seth Stephens-Davidowitz reports in the New York Times that Google searches for sexless marriage outnumber searches related to any other marital issue.3
Any person or system exposed to ceaseless novelty and change risks falling into chaos; but one that is too rigid or static ceases to grow and eventually dies. This never-ending dance between change an...
When we channel all our intimate needs into one person, we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable.
The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lightho...
The more we trust, the farther we are able to venture.
So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us. —Gaston Bachelard
She’s beautiful, too, did I mention that? She lives the life I didn’t live. I feel middle-age and middle-class around her. Nothing wrong with that, you’ll say, but her adrenaline is contagious. She re...