Daniel Bergner, is a contributor for the New York Times Magazine and author of several books including, The Other Side of Desire, which I loved. He just wrote a new book which was released last week, What do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire. An excerpt from the book just appeared in …
Continue ReadingEmotional affairs.
I recently had a friend ask me if I thought an emotional affair was dangerous. She asked me this question because she has been having some difficulty in her marriage and she found herself being drawn to a close family friend. They had a lot of shared history and she felt comfortable talking to him. …
Continue ReadingMonogamy and desire.
Author Esther Perel wrote the book, Mating in Captivity, in 2006. This is a great book for looking at the complicated relationship between long term monogamy and ongoing desire. Perel articulately explores how often our longing for stability and comfort can annihilate passion and desire. Perel furthered her research by traveling the world and asking …
Continue ReadingThe Coolidge Effect.
“The Coolidge Effect” is a term coined by Ethologist Frank A. Beach, a researcher, known for his studies in psychobiological brain functions and sexual behavior in mammals. In 1955, Beach was at a psychology conference where he was presenting his recent findings on a study on the reproductive behaviors of rats. One of his students …
Continue ReadingDodson debate.
An interesting thing happened at Yale a few weeks ago. Betty Dodson, a feminist, bisexual, 84 year old, champion of free love and sexual diversity, debated an Orthodox traditional Jewish 21 year old at the Yale political Union. The Yale Political Union is the nation’s largest student debating society where students engage each other as …
Continue ReadingOn learning to kiss and other fables.
A woman I know told me the following story which I thought was wonderful. She has been dating a guy for the past few months who (by all accounts) seems like a keeper. They have a lovely relationship. One day a week or two ago they were on the phone and he said, “You know, …
Continue ReadingOnline dating — Part 2: My response to online dating in “The New Yorker”: (A little different than Paumgarten.)
Online dating is one of the best things to come out of the explosion of communication and social media ventures. As the number of people you know becomes smaller over time, the number of single friends you have may also become more limited. So with online dating that pool of available single people always remains …
Continue ReadingMonogamy.
So we’re back to monogamy again…someone said to me recently that they are afraid of committing to one person for the rest of their life and I got to thinking about all the studies that say that people with one steady partner overall rate their sexual satisfaction higher than those who don’t have one. So …
Continue ReadingFlying might not be all it’s cracked up to be.
You may want to check out this week’s NY Time’s Week In Review. Basically, the article points out that among all the jokes and innuendos the people on the street are making about wayward love lives of our politicians, there lies a small fear that perhaps we, with our much more prosaic sex lives, are …
Continue ReadingMonogamy or why do we need to look in other people’s bedrooms?
Hey did you see yesterday’s Times article — “In Most Species, Faithfulness Is a Fantasy“? Basically, in order to find a species that was always faithful, Natalie Angier had to resort to citing the “flatworm that lives in the gills of freshwater fish.” So who are we kidding and why are we all so prurient …
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