Monday night 1000 of us gathered in San Francisco to celebrate the remarkable life of Stan Dale.  Watching video clips of Stan talking about his life and work, listening to his sons, hearing reminiscences from his co-facilitators, we all laughed, cried and celebrated the passing of an extraordinary teacher, leader, man.

Today I found another beautiful blog in tribute to Stan, which I hope you’ll take a moment to visit, and perhaps leave a comment.

Surfing the net I stumbled on this terrific post for teens - Top 10 Ways to Make Love Without Sex. Hugging, love notes, hand-holding and seven more ideas, all supporting my belief that “sex” is so much more than genitals rubbing and being rubbed. I think SEX is an acronym for Sensual Energy eXchange, or Spiritual Energy eXchange.

Looking at this advice to teens it occurs to me that that there are at least 10 Ways for Adult Couples to Make Love (without the focusing on our genitalia).

1. Start and end every day by looking into each others’ eyes and saying a heartfelt “I love you.” No matter how difficult it may feel to say the words out loud. No matter how certain you are that your partner already knows. As any songwriter or poet will tell you, there is magic in those three words.

2. At least once every day tell your partner one thing you really appreciate or love about them. There’s an old adage “Familiarity breeds contempt.” Appreciations are the the antidote, the cure for much of the ills caused by familiarity.
3. Go out on a date. Remember dating? Agree to a day and time, hire a sitter, make reservations, get tickets, buy flowers. Take your partner out for a real date.
4. After the date (or as part of the date) find a secluded street (lovers lane), or perhaps your own driveway, and share an hour or two necking - kissing, smooching, petting, caressing.
5. Find a love poem that you think really would touch your sweetie’s heart. Find a quiet time to sit together (turn off the phones) and read it aloud to your partner.
6. Take a bath, hot tub and/or shower together. Perhaps find a local hot tub/massage day spa and share a few hours soaking and being pampered together.

7. Drive to the ocean (lake? river? mountain?). Take a long walk on the shore, holding hands. As you walk let the only conversation be telling each other everything you appreciate about your partner.

8. Find a private, cozy place where you won’t be interrupted or overheard. Sit facing each other. Light a candle and place it between you. While both of you look at the candle, one of you take 10 minutes to speak whatever is in your heart. At the end of the 10 minutes, the other of you take 10 minutes (use a kitchen timer, to be fair) to speak whatever is in your heart.

9. Find a private, cozy place where you won’t be interrupted or overheard. Put some soft music on in the background. Sit facing each other. With your partner’s permission, one of you, with all the tenderness in your heart, gently reach both your hands forward and lovingly caress your partner’s face (for about 2 or three minutes). Then switch.

10.Write a love letter to each other and mail it. Call each others’ voice mail and leave a love message.

Found a fun blog called Sexy Hot Beauty: The Sex Trap. The trap comes from the idea that women use sex to get love and men use love to get sex. And if the sex is “good” then we’re instantly a committed couple.

A big part of the problem is that sex does not equal intimacy. Intimacy - in to me you see - involves inviting another person into your heart, your mind, your soul. Intimacy requires honesty, openness and time. What makes a lot of sex “great” is the endorphins produced by orgasming. But, sadly, familiarity will lessen some of those feelings over time. Great relationships happen when we replace the excitement of newness with the bliss of conscious loving.

Telling the truth, sharing loving touch and quiet communication, creating a kind of Lovership. Making sex into Spiritual Energy eXchange, that’s the path to bliss.

Thanks so much, Dr. Marty Klein, for your eloquent and heartfelt words honoring my friend and mentor, Stan Dale. Like you, I also did not start out loving, or even trusting Stan. One of the many things that won me over was his total acceptance of me, including my skepticism. In the nearly 20 years I had the great good fortune to be loved by Stan I learned how to be a man, how to be a father, how to be a lover. I am forever grateful for the love we shared.

It is also through Stan that I met you, for which I am also very grateful.

My friend Stan Dale used to say “There’s either love or violence.” Can it really be that simple? The world seems a pretty violent place. Always has been, always will be. Is the antidote really as simple as “love”?

Let me make a little confession here. I think there are 2 kinds of people in the world: people who think there are 2 kinds of people and people who don’t. I’m definitely in the second category. All my training and life experience tells me that life happens in the gray areas, that life is not “this” or “that”, that polarities may be real but they are not true.

And yet, I can’t help but notice how the application of love, of loving words, loving attention, loving thoughts, and loving attitudes profoundly transform every situation. Time and time again in my personal growth coaching practice the work revolves around learning to see the love in every situation. I help people change the thoughts in their heads from non-stop self-criticism to non-stop self-love, almost like changing the channel on a radio.

And as I interview relationship experts on my podcast I hear each, in their own way, speak about the healing power of speaking loving thoughts. One of the first things I ask couples to do is to give their partner a minimum of one unconditionally loving appreciation every day. I ask each person to agree to this unilaterally - whether or not your partner does it, you do it. I encourage partners to appreciate the little things and the big, the mundane and the profound. Over time what you look for is what you find, what you focus on is what grows. Life fills with love.
This lesson is equally useful with your children, your co-workers, everyone you meet. As we look for love in everyone, in all situations, at all times, our lives become filled with love. The world you see will be a a world of love. As A Course In Miracles teaches “I can escape from the world I see by giving up my attack thoughts.”

Looking back, it seems to me that I had a really long emotional adolescence, stretching from the time I was twelve until I was in my late thirties. My alcoholic father was and wasn’t a role model for the man I wanted to be. He taught me a lot about how not to be, but gave me no model and no path to become the man I hoped to be. So I mostly faked it. I watched lots of Hollywood movies and then pretended to be a suave, urbane, witty, man-of-the-world. I built a great outside to hide my scared-little-kid inside.

I lived my life recreating my relationship with my Dad with every new boss, and recreating my parents’ dysfunctional marriage in my first two marriages. Each job began with me creating a pseudo-father-son relationship with my boss, then finding fault with my boss, then feeling unseen or unacknowledged, then, ultimately quitting the job or getting fired, feeling like a failure and even more of a fake. Ugh! Each marriage was another attempt to prove to myself I was grown up, and to have a wife who would “save” me from my loneliness and fear of being discovered as the fake I knew myself to be. Ugh, ugh!!

I met Stan Dale in 1988 when my second wife and I attended a weekend workshop offered by HAI (the Human Awareness Institute) titled “What is Sex? What is Love? What is Intimacy?” (now known as the Love, Intimacy and Sexuality workshop, level 1). I loved the workshop (so much so that I now lead this, and all the other HAI workshops). I didn’t really like Stan, however. He was too self-assured, too smooth-voiced, too “preachy” for my tastes.

It wasn’t until my third HAI workshop that I really “got” Stan. I was sharing my pain about my Dad and my childhood when Stan asked me “When are you going to let your Dad off the hook?” I got instantly enraged. Off the hook? My Dad beat me, humiliated me, ignored me, tormented me. Off the hook? My pain felt so deep I couldn’t conceive of a me that was free of it. And Stan, who barely knew me, had asked the question I most needed to be asked in that moment.

Somehow, and I really can’t remember exactly how, Stan helped me embrace the thought that my Dad wasn’t very well suited to the job of raising me. He was ill-equipped to meet my needs. So I fired him. I let go of my belief that there was something he could do or say to make me whole. Over time I came to see that I was a better Dad than my Dad was and subtly began to lovingly give my Dad the very things I had wanted him to give me. When my Dad died in 1995 I felt complete with him and knew that I loved him and he loved me. And Stan taught me how to find that love.

For the past 19 years I’ve had the great good fortune to have Stan Dale as a friend, teacher and mentor. For 19 years he has treated me with dignity, respect, kindness, compassion, honesty, and love. Much of who I am today I learned by paying attention to Stan. He taught me how to be the man I was pretending to be, and how to be so much more. There aren’t words enough to express my gratitude.

My friend Stan Dale died Friday June 8, 2007.

In my workshops - the Love, Intimacy and Sexuality Workshops produced by the Human Awareness Institute - I often hear people lament the difficulty of keeping love alive and vibrant and exciting. For too many, it seems, relationships are just long slow declines ending in “bed death” and mutual indifference.

I wonder, dose it really need to be this way. In an interview I did with Dr. Marty Klein, I understood him to say our expectations regarding long-term love and sex are too high. Fueled by media generated unrealistic images and fantasies as well as the rhetoric of the baby-boomer “me” generation, Dr. Klein seemed to say that we put way too much emphasis on sex in our “golden years.”

I can see his point but also find myself disagreeing. I believe we can create very long-term sexual relationships that maintain a fair amount of novelty, excitement and thrill. The enemy, in my opinion, is boredom. How to make love with same partner, week after week, year after year and not get bored, that’s the question.
One solution frequently proposed is “open” the relationship. The idea is that there are so many facets and aspects to our love and sex is only one of them. We’ll just include other lovers, sex will get interesting again, and all will be well.

Often this is expressed in terms of eating at restaurants - just because you have a favorite restaurant does not mean you never want to go to other restaurants for the rest of your life. While this may be true for restaurants - and I’m not sure it is - people in loving, intimate connection are really quite different than people ordering a meal! And, to stay with the metaphor a bit longer, before I stop going to my favorite restaurant why not try ordering some new and different meals? How about building an all appetizer dinner? An all dessert dinner? A try-something-I’ve-never-tried dinner?
I think boredom is not normal in human beings. I notice that healthy babies find interest in everything. Even now, as an adult (well as someone who is in his fifties, anyway), when I’m feeling good about me and my life the world is inherently interesting. Whenever I say, or I hear someone else say, that they are bored I wonder what feeling is being suppressed. I know that when we suppress a feeling we inadvertently suppress most of our feelings. And a life without feeling is dull and boring.

Maybe this relationship fatigue that so many encounter is actually less about the supposed boredom of “eating the same dinner every night” and more about the walls between spouses/partners we allow ourselves to build. Maybe before we start inviting others into some of the areas usually reserved for our most intimate partner we would be better served getting help and support to improve our communication, to learn to be more open and honest, to discover new and different sex techniques - to try a different meal at that restaurant we so love?