The V-Word

Two in five women have Bacterial Vaginosis (BV), but 84% of those don’t know they have it.

In fact, it is the most common form of vaginal infection, yet not many people know about it.

BV occurs when the normal balance of good bacteria is overtaken by certain types of harmful bacteria. It is often misdiagnosed as thrush or as a yeast infection. Common symptoms include a fishy odor around the...

“Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.”
― Rumi

The old saying that “time waits for no one” is why learning the art of letting go and holding on matter so much. Increasingly, I have the sensation that life is passing me by, days feel like they pass by in ten minutes and my Mondays become Fridays in...

“One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.” -Sigmund Freud

Last week I shared the revelations about how what I have been forcing myself to forget has caught up to me. I decided that I had to start remembering differently; so now, one week in to this new agreement with myself in my marriage, a few things have come clear. The thing is that the remedy is not...

“The most precious gift that marriage gave me was the constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant – in a word, real.”  -C.S. Lewis

Another powerful way to ground the idea of holding on and letting go in our intimate relationships is to reflect on our memory. The things that we choose to remember about the people we love, as well as what we...

“All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.” -Havelock Ellis

Back in the early days of mothering my days were full of the small details of children. What they ate, when they slept, who they played with, what they watched… The mundane was everything and my sense of mastery and control often clashed with a claustrophobia from how small my life had become. Looking...

In true late adopter fashion, I’ve finally jumped into watching “Game of Thrones” after, well, years of seeing headline after headline about the epic novel-turned-TV series. I got completely sucked in from the first episode. However, a curious thing happened while I watched some of the sex scenes — I noticed that I had completely turned off my ability to feel, because it was honestly too painful...

The title of this post is from an essay by Sparrow, a poet. I love this essay because I think it captures so well how important small, private moments of joy are to our ability to be human. In my experience, searching for big happiness brings more disappointment than pleasure — those searches blind me to the small, beautiful things around me, like the flowers of muscari that are almost the same.

"…the nearly $2 billion spent on abstinence only education over the past quarter-century may as well have been set on fire…”  Peggy Orenstein

Sexual health is a conversation that has been subverted for far too long. The conversations that we avoid and push underground become tainted with our own darkness and the longer that they remain out of reach, the more distorted they become. Sexual hygiene...

I visited a friend for a night recently, and as usual we talked about sex. She told me that she and her boyfriend, with whom she has been with monogamously for about a year, started having anal sex after she brought up trying it — she had accidentally seen a butt plug in her roommate’s bedroom, and she had become fascinated by it. My friend wondered whether the butt plug was her roommate’s or her...