Sometimes it has to do with other longings that are much more existential. Sometimes you go elsewhere not because you are not liking the one you are with; you are not liking the person you have become.
Mystery is not always about travelling to new places, it is about looking with new eyes.
Erotic intelligence stretches far beyond a repertoire of sexual techniques. It is an intelligence that celebrates curiosity and play, the power of the imagination, and our infinite fascination with what is hidden and mysterious.
Love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life: time. Marriage is not the end of romance, it is the beginning.
The mom doesn’t become sexy; the woman does. You have to retrieve the woman from the mother. And she may need to separate to do that: a bath, a walk. She must cordon off an erotic space.
People cheat on each other in a hundred different ways: indifference, emotional neglect, contempt, lack of respect, years of refusal of intimacy. Cheating doesn’t begin to describe the ways that people let each other down.
I want to engage people in an honest, enlightened, and provocative conversation about the nature of erotic desire and the intricacies of intimacy and sexuality. The object of my game is to bring nonjudgmental, multicultural understanding to the challenges and choices of modern relationships.
It’s hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned her sense of autonomy.
When we seek the gaze of another, it isn’t always our partner we’re turning away from, but the person we have ourselves become.
Affairs can be powerful detonators. They can invigorate a marriage that’s flat, jolt people out of years of complacency. Fear of loss rekindles desire, makes people have conversations they haven’t had in years, takes them out of their contrived illusion of safety.
Success, to me, is helping one person or many people counter the isolation and pseudoconnectivity of our lives by boosting their ability to connect to themselves and to others.
It’s our imagination that’s responsible for love, not the other person.
Our partner’s sexuality does not belong to us. It isn’t just for and about us, and we should not assume that it rightfully falls within our jurisdiction.
On some level we trade passion for security, that’s trading one illusion for another. It’s a matter of degree. We can’t live in constant fear, but we can’t live without any. The fear of loss is essential to love.
The secret to desire in a long-term relationship.
Today, our sexuality is an open-ended personal project; it is part of who we are, an identity, and no longer merely something we do.
The attraction of dating is that you don’t take yes for granted – – you’re fully engaged, there’s seductiveness, tension.
Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness.
The very ingredients that nurture love – mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other – are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire.
Most of us will get turned on at night by the very same things that we will demonstrate against during the day – the erotic mind is not very politically correct.