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.
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...
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...
Eventually, if desire withers, monogamy too easily slides downward into celibacy. When this happens, fidelity becomes a weakness rather than a virtue.
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...
If you’re too busy for sex, you’re too busy.
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...
For these couples, fidelity is defined not by sexual exclusivity but by the strength of their commitment.
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...