Good Clean Reads

“Most people give up just when they’re about to achieve success. They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game, one foot from a winning touchdown.” –Ross Perot

This week’s announcement about the end of the 40-year marriage of Al and Tipper Gore caught me off guard. I am sure I wasn’t the only one surprised by them calling it quits. They were one political couple whose...

“I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.” -Woody Allen

On the drive up to the State Tennis tournament and with graduation just weeks away, we were listing the names of the kids we knew in common to find out where they will head off next year. As we were talking, I learned about a boy who I had known since my...

“The spirit, the will to win, and the will to excel are the things that endure. These qualities are so much more important than the events that occur.”-Vince Lombardi

Winning feels a bit like a hallucination. I am so accustomed to the doing and the trying that for so long has characterized the incremental progress of Good Clean Love that being recognized as a winner feels a bit foreign. I won the...

"Love isn't an emotion or an instinct-it's an art. " -Mae WestDone with conviction and commitment, the way great artists approach their masterpieces, our loving relationships sculpt us into the highest and best form of ourselves. This is their only job and their highest purpose. Through love we entrust our loved ones to mirror and elicit from us the aspirations and values that we have expressed so that the commitment to the relationship transmutes into a commitment to ourselves.

“Love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image… otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” ~Author Unknown

There is probably not a culture on earth that values the ideal of long-term love and marriage as much as Americans. While more than 90% of young adults aspire to marriage, fewer and fewer are choosing it because as a...

“But true love is a durable fire, in the mind ever burning, Never sick, never old, never dead, from itself never turning.” -Unknown

Throughout human history, the hearth of a home has been the place of gathering. So central to the meaning of home, the hearth has become a synonym for the warmth and comfort that home offers. Whether in the preparation of daily nourishment, the capacity of welcome to...

The question of whether intimacy and love-making should be spontaneous or planned is one that gets between many couples. There are two issues in question here and it is important to tease them apart if you are going to make sense of either.

“Passion is the quickest to develop and the quickest to fade. Intimacy develops more slowly, and commitment more gradually still.” — Robert Sternberg

The...

What more can you say about a life well lived than it was delicious? Pavarotti was quoted in his biography saying: “One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.”

Many people have trouble talking about sexual topics, including me. Thinking about how to recognize and overcome some of the following obstacles might help you develop an ease and vocabulary for having meaningful sexual conversations in your relationship or with your kids.

“Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer sex raises some pretty good questions” -Woody Allen

Many...