My husband deals with pain; I deal with pleasure. They are intimately acquainted.
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...
Everyone should cultivate a secret garden.
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 you’re too busy for sex, you’re too busy.
Despite its widespread denunciation, infidelity has a tenacity that marriage can only envy.
Where there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.
The symptom theory goes as follows: An affair simply alerts us to a preexisting condition, either a troubled relationship or a troubled person.
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...
I’ve been a sexual underachiever my whole life, and I resent Warren for feeling entitled to something that I won’t allow for myself!
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.
If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected. Love is about having; desire is about wanting. An...
Given the transient nature of life, given its ceaseless flux, there is more than a hint of arrogance in the assumption that we can make our relationships permanent, and that security can actually be f...
But when we reduce the conversation to simply passing judgment, we are left with no conversation at all.
Because I believe that some good can come out of the crisis of infidelity, I have often been asked, So, would you recommend an affair to a struggling couple? My response? A lot of people have positive...
As long as men completely dominate business and political life, as long as women are economically dependent on men, as long as the burden of child care falls wholly on women’s shoulders (toppling even...
When marriage was an economic arrangement, infidelity threatened our economic security; today marriage is a romantic arrangement and infidelity threatens our emotional security.
When I ask her if her open marriage isn’t painful, she answers, Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s not. But monogamy—which we never negotiated, by the way—was painful, too.