The V-Word

Maybe you think you need a vacation. Maybe you think you need certain kinds of food, or a certain amount of sleep, or certain clothes, or certain makeup, or certain books or friends or likes. Maybe you think you need a better cell phone or job or spouse in order to be happy.

Actually, there are just two things, beyond the necessities, that you need in order to be happy: you need patience, and you...

"Sex is a part of nature. I go along with nature. "-Marilyn MonroeOral sex is, at once, one of the most desirable sexual experiences and the one that still carries enough discomfort to still call it taboo in some circles. There was a time when you could get arrested for it. Still, in the vast sea of sexuality, developing a healthy connection and building skill to oral ways of loving have a power and passion unique in the world.

“A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.”- Ingrid Bergman

Kissing is the cornerstone of the intimate dance. Fail at the kiss and whatever potential spark of romance may have existed evaporates in an instant. And while the passion and intention that we bring to the kiss is our most immediate communication device, which as Bergman notes makes our...

Love is scary.

There, I said what we’ve all been thinking. Sometimes, love is so scary that it’s easier to choose not to have it. Padded behind layers and layers of emotional armor, we defend our choice of not investing in love with myriad excuses — I’m too busy for a partner, I like being single, I’ve looked, I swear, but I can’t find anyone I’d want to be with…

Recently, I was at a documentary...

So, I spent the last month writing an erotic novel (under a pen name, and it isn’t technically novel length; at 30,000 words, it’s more a long story or novella). I wanted to see what it would be like — I work as a writer, but I’d never before written explicitly about sex, or tried to build a story driven by sexual tension. Also, I’d read Emily Nagoski’s post about her own (successful) experiment...

It was a normal weekend for us here at Good Clean Love when we posted a link to some light weekend reading for our Facebook fans — "The Friend Zone Has Deep-Seated Roots in Rape Culture," courtesy of The Plaid Zebra. Our post reached more than 1500 people, and we definitely heard about it: many people were angered by the content of the article and asked that we take our link to it down. In response, I figured we should probably have of a conversation about the whole thing.

At first it may not be obvious how sex and chronic illness are related: what context could they possibly share? Yet spend any time at all not feeling well, or worse, and you’ll know intimately how sex and illness both depend completely on the body. And how, paradoxically, when the body is ailing, a desire for pleasure, any desire at all, can feel impossible.

As Wendy has written, “Our body...

“There is no perfection,  only life.”  Milan Kundera

A dear friend of mine who will be signing divorce papers next week was lamenting to me about how he wishes he had paid better attention to the moments earlier in his relationship where things began to come apart. “I don’t know why I didn’t understand how serious the problems were then…” Most of us don’t see the gravity of the moment when things...

I'll admit that I'm a marriage newbie. After all, my husband and I got married just last fall after being together for a couple of years. Thus far, I've been hesitant to dole out marriage advice for fear that 1) I'll look like a fraud and 2) that it'll somehow backfire on my marriage, which, so far, is going pretty well. But, it's time to pull the sheets back, so to speak. Almost immediately after our wedding, people began asking me if it felt different to be be married.