The V-Word

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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Flying out of New Orleans, I am seated next to a gynecologist that I didn’t meet at the ACOG yearly meeting. I share my story about love products and my work about making love sustainable. He shares his story about how limited his time with each patient is and how awkward it is to discuss sexual intimacy. We talk about how little education and language we are given in our childhood and youth to...

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...

“The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.” – W.S. Coffin

Telling the truth in relationships is perhaps the most challenging aspect of relating. Not doing it makes relationships impossible. It is difficult because it takes time to know our own truth and often, even as we get it, truth is as changeable as the days we live in. The wise among us know that...

“The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved – loved for ourselves or rather, loved in spite of ourselves” -Victor Hugo

Serious scientific inquiry has proven this quote to be true. By all measures of health and well being, the single most significant predictor of life time happiness and longevity is being involved in an intimate and loving relationship. It is true across...

Here’s the thing about loving people: They are annoying. I tell people this regularly and they laugh, sometimes a nervous laugh, but more often a knowing laugh. We laugh together out of relief too, it’s not just you, or me, but lets face it, collectively we are all pretty annoying. A recent study of thousands of couples sited the most frequent cause of breakups and divorces were rarely about big...