Good Clean Reads

“You are what you love, not what loves you. That’s what I decided a long time ago.” I have remembered this concluding line of a conversation between Nicolas Cage and himself (when he played the twin writer brothers in the 2002 movie “Adaptation”) for over five years. I have many times thought back on it over all the stories of unrequited love that I have heard since then. Donald knew something...

There is a great relief to accepting where you are in life. Letting go of all the might haves or should haves and seeing what is left is where one’s real life begins. The idea that hindsight is 20-20 doesn’t really respect the fact that when that moment was fully present, you did the best you could. You made the best decision that was available at the time; you loved as much as you were able to. Giving up this looking back is how to start moving forward into the days that you have. This wisdom of “No Going Back” is useful in learning to embrace our current relationships as well as our relationship history.

That Rolling Stones refrain is playing in my head repeatedly of late and it seems clear that this is as true a love song as I have ever known. Although I would never have thought it in my earlier years, what I know of love that has staying power is that it is actually rarely about what you want. Growing up and cultivating sustainable love is mostly about learning how to accept what you get, turn it into what you want, or at least embrace it as what you need in a relationship. I learned this at work the other day, when a customer called to reorder some products.

The goal of making a relationship sustainable should not just be to stay, but rather, to find and cultivate the places in the relationship that are worth staying for. Re-imagining your commitment into a healthy curiosity about the mystery of the other person and allowing for the ebb and flow of intimacy that is a normal part of loving relationships. Here are a few thoughts to help you explore...

The heart is perhaps the only muscle in our body that is stronger when it is soft. Firmness, strength and the ability to harden are key to core vitality throughout most of the body including our sexual organs. Hardening our heart whether it is in response to a political reality or a difficult relationship turns us into our own personal brand of fundamentalist. It is a slippery slope from the tightening in the chest to a self righteous stance about how the world should be. This can affect our emotional wellness and happens even before we see it happening.

In a recent radio appearance,I was asked a question that caught me off guard. I am accustomed to and barely miss a beat for the normal inquiries about achieving orgasm or frustrations with inconsistent libido but no one has ever asked me before which way to vote for sexual health. The caller wondered which political party or candidate was more sexually healthy and promoted values consistent...

‘Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear most.’

Let’s just admit it, sex is kind of scary. Even those of us who love it, sometimes cower at its power and consequences. Sex has the power to catapult and end a relationship almost...

If you have ever wondered what happened to your active sex life or can’t even remember what it feels like to have a sex life, then the recent books “Just Do” and “365 Nights” will either inspire or depress you. Two couples took up the challenge to refresh their marriages with daily doses of sexual intimacy. Successfully combining an active and satisfying sex life with a married lifestyle is the subject of volumes of books and a frequent focus of my own writing. It is epic to achieve the same with kids in tow and worth noting that neither of these couples have any which makes their achievement noble but not quite heroic.

Kids or not, the author of the Study of American Sexual Behavior rightly states, “There’s a strong relationship between rating your marriage as happy and frequency of intercourse. What is harder to say is what the causal relationship between the two is. We don’t know whether people who are happy in their marriage have sex more, or whether people who have sex more become happy in their marriages, or a combination of the two.”

The truth is that intimacy begets intimacy. Sexual intimacy creates a singular connection that paves the way for better communication and emotional closeness and physical release that is unparalleled in any other activity that we share. This is no truer than the fact that couples who communicate well and show up for each other regularly are more apt to be drawn together physically. The experience of the couples in both the books both bear this out, their experiments did bring them closer together in every way and also gave them the space and frequency to develop a broader and more comfortable language for sex which not surprisingly improved their sex lives, even after their daily marathon ended.

Frequency of sex is not really the point of the story as even all the authors will attest, people’s needs and capacity for sexual intimacy is variable. Sustaining the emotional space that leaves you feeling interested and safe enough to be vulnerable and open to great sex is in and of itself a remarkable kind of intimacy to live in. This article was particularly interesting to me as I have been living in a pretty dry spell of physical intimacy of late, what with broken bones and poison oak frequenting my home life. The tension and stress between us wears more deeply and the lack of physical closeness turns the edges of all our encounters brittle. The longer it goes, the more challenging it is to open up in the ways that bring our physical intimacy into daily view.

So why not do your own experiment, this weekend. It is summer after all and we are celebrating love oil; see what happens with three days in a row. I know that I plan on falling deeply under the the spell of some serious love oil therapy this weekend, poison oak or not. Check out our love oil giveaway contest and share a story to inspire.

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Recently, after I reviewed another book on greening the fashion world, the publisher sent me a note saying that she had seen my site and was going send me another new book she thought I would be interested in: Sex Secrets of Porn Stars.

I wondered if she had actually read anything on my site.

After years of attending the big Vegas “Sex Shows,” it had become increasingly clear that my corporate...