Committing to move towards a more comfortable relationship with your erotic self is a resolution that anyone can make and one which will heal so many aspects of life, so it is worth a try.  Closing off from our erotic tendencies shuts down all kinds of receiving and giving capacity.

I witness the generation gap widening at home everyday, regardless of my relentless efforts to get my teenagers to communicate. They still mostly pick up the phone when I call (because that was the agreement we made years ago when I said I would pay the bill) but they are short now - often missing the call altogether, only to shoot me a short text of their whereabouts and time of arrival. 

We have known for decades that babies will not thrive without physical holding and affection. There is little that will comfort and settle small children as much as the warm embrace of their family. Yet it is still not uncommon for parents to stop hugging their kids as they reach puberty. And for many adults, the amount of physical nurturing we receive declines as we age, even as medical studies confirm that the health benefits of physical touch extend throughout our lives.   

I am not sure if it is a primarily Western mentality that presumes that life will be easy, and as an extension it will require little effort. In fact, we belittle work as an encumbrance, instead of recognizing it for the value it brings to who we become as people. This phenomenon is true in many places in life, but none so much as in the world of relating.

I remain convinced that at the end of the day, at the end of our lives, the only thing we are going to count is the people we loved and those who loved us back. I have heard that the final moments of consciousness are a rush of memories, images that have been indelibly etched in our hearts where we connected, where we had let go and opened up to love, where we had been received and loved just as we are.

Sexual dissatisfaction is one of the top reasons cited when we leave our relationships. It is also one of life’s most worthy challenges to take on, not only for the meaning and pleasure it can bring to our relationships, but also for the very real health benefits that a satisfying sex life bestows on our well-being.

The most unique and universal expressions of our humanity occur in the moments when we are most keyed in to our animal nature. Whether curled up in our sleep beside our lover or child, or ravaging a perfectly prepared meal, our most basic human needs show us as the animals we are.

The percentage of people impacted by infidelity is somewhere between 30 and 60% of all married couples, depending on the study cited. More interesting than the differences between men and women are the different patterns of infidelity for each gender. Cheating men are more likely than cheating women to have an affair with someone younger than their spouse. On the other hand, cheating women are more likely than cheating men to have an affair with someone better educated than their current spouse.

Our sense of smell is ancient and the source of our most powerful emotional memories. It is also the primal sensory pathway to sexual attraction. And yet, we often give little attention to all that our sense of smell can evoke, in part because we have so little vocabulary for scent. Often we're limited to “it smells like…” and delineated only between pleasant and unpleasant. 

Most people are unaware that Valentine’s Day is one of the biggest break-up holidays of the year. It seems like an oxymoron that the holiday of love would be the one that often breaks the camel’s back, but that’s what happens when we expect a single day to make up for the benign neglect that our relationships are too often steeping in. 

Falling in love is easy… Staying in love takes work, compassion and forgiveness.In the beginning of most relationships there’s this honeymoon phase if you will. Where you’re learning about each other, asking lots of questions, everything is new and exciting and the butterflies are flying…. This is what researchers would call the dopamine phase.