We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.
This litany of disenchantment notwithstanding, I believe there’s an additional layer to our libidinal demise that has to do with our culture’s deep ambivalence around sexuality. While we recognize the...
The extended family, the community, and religion may indeed have limited our freedom, sexual and otherwise, but in return they offered us a much-needed sense of belonging. For generations, these tradi...
Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy.
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. —Anaïs Nin
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.
When we select a partner, we commit to a story. Yet we remain forever curious: what other stories could we have been part of? Affairs offer us a window into those other lives, a peek at the stranger w...
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 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...
We don't like to be intimate alone. Some couples take this one step further, confusing intimacy with control. What passes for care is actually convert surveillance. ..When the impulse to share becomes...
Until now monogamy has been the default setting, and it sits on the premise (however unrealistic) that if you truly love, you should no longer be attracted to others.
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...
Ours is a culture that reveres the ethos of absolute frankness and elevates truth-telling to moral perfection. Other cultures believe that when everything is out in the open and ambiguity is done away...
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.
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...
By turning our backs on other loves, we confirm the uniqueness of our significant other. I have found The One. I can stop looking. Miraculously, our desire for others is supposed to evaporate, vanquis...
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...
Despite its widespread denunciation, infidelity has a tenacity that marriage can only envy.
When we channel all our intimate needs into one person, we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable.
We're walking contradictions, seeking safety and predictability on one hand and thriving on diversity on the other.