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...
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...
Proust, The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. Adele recalls a moment when she experienced
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.
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. If intimacy grows through repetition...
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 marriage was an economic arrangement, infidelity threatened our economic security; today marriage is a romantic arrangement and infidelity threatens our emotional security.
The symptom theory goes as follows: An affair simply alerts us to a preexisting condition, either a troubled relationship or a troubled person.
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...
So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us. —Gaston Bachelard
Sex without sin is like an egg without salt. —Luis Buñuel
My husband deals with pain; I deal with pleasure. They are intimately acquainted.
It’s hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned her sense of autonomy.
It takes two people to create a pattern, but only one to change it.
And what is true for human beings is true for every living thing: all organisms require alternating periods of growth and equilibrium. Any person or system exposed to ceaseless novelty and change risk...
Affairs have their own brand of passion. Secrecy, torment, guilt, transgression, danger, risk, and jealousy are highly combustible, a Molotov cocktail, an erotic explosion far too threatening in a hom...
The Archaeology of Desire The psychology of our desire often lies buried in the details of our childhood, and digging through the early history of our lives uncovers its archaeology. We can trace back...
Proust, The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Often, when one partner insists that they don’t yet feel acknowledged, even as the one who hurt them insists they feel terrible, it is because the response is still more shame than guilt, and therefor...