During the past couple of weeks, several different clients and workshoppers have talked to me about their discomfort with causing pain to their beloved. “I want to ‘open’ our marriage.  How can I do it without hurting my husband?”  “How can I tell my wife about my dissatisfaction with our sexlife without hurting her?”  “Everytime we talk about our financial situation he gets defensive.  How can we talk about this without hurting his feelings?”

The bad news is, we can not take responsibility for our beloveds’ feelings.  We can be empathetic, accepting and compassionate about those feelings.  It is useful and loving to allow those feelings “a voice”, an influence, in our decision-making, but not a vote.  I think this is the distinction between love and co-dependency.  A co-dependent lacks an “internal compass” to guide behavior, so your feelings become the compass.  My duty is make you happy.  If you are sad, hurt, angry, then I have failed at my duty.  It becomes my fault.  In such a relationship, it is not safe for either party to feel anything but happy and content.

In a healthy relationship each person’s behavior is guided from within, taking into account the thoughts and feelings of the beloved but not ruled by those feelings and thoughts.  When my partner is sad, unhappy, or upset,  I am genuinely moved by her feelings.  I want to be supportive and understanding, and accept her feelings as valid and real for her, but not my “fault”.  Her “problem” is not me or what I said or did.  Something I said or did may very well have triggered emotions in her, and I want to be sensitive to my role in that triggering.  But in the end, we each must take responsibility for our own feelings.  As I like to say in parenting classes “the person who has the problem is the only person who can solve that problem.”

All this leads me to the importance of telling the truth, the whole truth, in a healthy relationship.  Yes, sometimes my words or behavior are going to elicit my partners’ pain.  The sad truth is that sometimes life is painful.  That is one of the realities of being human.

Talking to Jason Weston, (HAI Facilitator, philosopher of love) on my podcast, he said “In my relationship, we have an agreement to tell all the truth, all the time…What I’ve learned is, even though all the truth all the time has a certain kind of risk to it, it also has an incredible possibility built into it.”

Sexting (Sex + Texting) is the new rage.  Sexting is the name people are using to describe sending nude pictures via text message, and, according to “the media,” it’s all the rage among teens.  In a nationwide poll conducted by the National Campaign to Support Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, about 20% of teens admitted to participating in some form of sexting.  Sadly, because these kids are underage, law enforcement people consider this to be a form of felony “kiddie porn”, and arrests of some of these teenagers are happening.

Everything about this story upsets me.  It upsets me that typically horny teens, acting in the fog of typically horny teen stupidity, are being treated as pedophiles.  What could be more “normal” than teens wanting to look at naked teens?  How can this be compared to an adult who is sexually attracted to children or who sexually abuses a child or who purchases or collects material that exploits children?

Teens need information.  Teens need sex education, at home and in school.  Teens need to have their nascent sexuality welcomed and their self-esteem supported.  When they behave in foolish ways (and what human being has never behaved foolishly?), they need open, non-shaming conversation, not felony arrests.
It upsets me that these teens don’t realize that photos of this sort have a way of hanging around forever (digital images don’t wear out or fade out) and are likely to wind up in the hands of people who have no business looking at them, like middle-aged adults who purchase and collect material that exploits children.

It upsets me that western culture seems to promote the idea that nudity equals pornography.  We rate movies and games that include scenes of murder and mayhem as suitable for teens, while movies that show a penis or vagina, or even pubic hair, are typically rated NC-17 or X.  In other words, we behave as if a penis or a vagina is more dangerous than a machine gun or a car bomb!

Make no mistake, I abhor “child pornography”.  I totally support law enforcement officials doing everything in their power to keep children from being exploited by adults.  Sadly, in this case, in the name of protecting children, we seem to be criminalizing sexual behavior, something with which our country has a long history.  Want to learn more about America’s “war on sex” have a listen to an interview I had with Dr. Marty Klein, author of “America’s War On Sex.”

Do some relationships have a “use-by” date? Is some love ever-lasting?  Is a divorce or a break up an example of a “failed relationship.”  If I have one date with someone and then realize that person is never willing to have a second date - they don’t call, they are evasive, they give me a fake phone number at the end of the date - have I failed?

I was talking to Wendy Strgar, CEO of Good Clean Love, a line of earth-friendly, all natural, love and intimacy products.  Wendy’s interest extends well beyond making earth-sustainable products to making love sustainable. Wendy has a lot of great ideas to revitalize relationships, to spice-up relationships, to help people make their relationship sweet and sexy and successful.

At the other end of the relationship spectrum, I interviewed Ian Coburn about his failures to find relationship. Ian has some great insights into the attitudes and behaviors that increase the likelihood of getting a date and of getting a second date.  He’s a funny guy and his advice all comes from his personal failures, which makes the advice feel more “real” than some other dating experts I’ve encountered.
And on next week’s show I talk to Julia Allison and Mary Rambin, hosts of TMI Weekly, a lifestyle video-cast, about dating and sex in the world of upwardly mobile, successful twenty-somethings.  They’re two beautiful, successful women, both looking for love, but finding dates, and often not even finding dates.

I’m wondering, is all love some version of the same basic thing, like all light is fundamentally the same.  And like light, sometimes when we love it’s a candle - beautiful, romantic, but temporary.  And sometimes when we love, it’s a star - also beautiful and romantic - maybe not everlasting, but certainly lasting beyond our human experience of time.

Last year I interviewed Brian Swimme, cosmologist and author.  He talked about the attraction found throughout the known universe - gravity, electricity, atomic strong and weak bonds.  Swimme talked about love as that fundamental universal attraction made conscious.  If I understood him correctly, he speculated that perhaps that was our human “purpose”, to turn this fundamental attractive force into love.

I was interviewing Ian Coburn, author of “God is a Woman: Dating Disasters“, and he suggested that perhaps men and women often have so much trouble understanding each other is because men are, in general, more literal, and women, in general, more behavioral.

Ian is a “recovering” stand-up comic who has written a pretty good handbook about dating.  Instead of talking about his “successes”, Ian writes about his “failures” with women, and what lessons he learned.  Ian’s observations come from his experiences in the dating world. He’s a funny guy, so it’s a funny book, and it gave me a lot to think about.

Ian suggested that men need to pay attention to a woman’s behavior more than her words.  He’s not suggesting that men ignore women’s boundaries.  He understands that “no” must mean “no”.  He just notices how often, while on a date, a woman will say something like “I’m taking a break from dating.”  In the past, he would believe her words and not pursue more dates.  Weeks later he’d see the same woman now happily dating some other guy.  His “aha”?  He would have been better served to pay attention to the woman’s behavior, the fact that she was actually on a date while saying she wasn’t interested in dating.

On the other hand, Ian finds himself consoling female friends when, while on a nice date, the guy says something like “I’m taking a break from dating,” and then drops out of sight after the date.  His advice to women?  Believe the guy’s words, not his actions.

What do you think, is it a gender thing?  Do you believe the words or the behavior?

I interviewed a courtesan for my podcast, Rebecca Deos, and it got me thinking about why people hire courtesans, escorts, and the like.  What could be worth so much money (hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars)?  I know some of it is about sex without fear of rejection, yet every escort I know, and I happen to know more than a few, tell me stories about customers who were hiring something much more than uncomplicated coupling.

My friend and mentor, the late Stan Dale lived in a geisha house for the better part of a year about 50 years ago.  He told me: “Living in the geisha house was the single most important event in my [then] twenty-seven years.  [Before I lived there ] I thought I knew everything about sex. [But at the Geisha house] there was no ’sex,’ intercourse…What I learned was sense and reverence…when I got back from Japan, I had learned to look at life in a whole new way, and had learned about reverence, which is how a high geisha treats her clients.”

I dream of a world where every human being was trained in the arts of the Geisha, the courtesan, the high-priced escort. A world where we would learn to look at each other with eyes that see each others’ wisdom, beauty, sexiness, creativity.  A world where we could learn about our bodies and our sexuality, learn to celebrate our senses, free ourselves from shame and fear, and learn to integrate love and intimacy into our sexuality.

As Stan once said “When people get a chance to touch heart, body, and soul, it’s an opening to feel the magic of their humanity.”

“Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness”.  It’s one of my favorite “lessons” in “A Course in Miracles” (ACIM), a teaching consisting of a “Text”, “Workbook for Students”, and a “Manual for Teachers”.

(I love the 365 daily lessons -the “Workbook”- of ACIM.  I find the “Text” completely unreadable.  Others are deeply moved by the Text, but left cold by the lessons. In the lessons there is a great deal of language referring to “Jesus”, “God”, “Almighty”, “Savior”, etc. that didn’t really work for me.  When I first did the lessons, every time I bumped into a God-reference, I read it as if it referred to “my Higher Power.”  Now I think of those references as my “Buddha-nature.”  Doing the ACIM lessons dramatically improved the quality of my life and opened my heart.  I heartily recommend ACIM.)

I was thinking about this particular lesson because I recently interviewed Eileen Barker on the subject of forgiveness.  Eileen is a mediator and conflict resolution specialist.  Over the 25 years or so that she has helped resolve dispute, both personal and professional, Eileen has come to a profound respect for the healing power of forgiveness.

Eileen teaches that forgiveness is a skill, it can be learned, and it is best learned as a daily practice.  As the adage says:  Holding onto resentment is like drinking poison hoping the other person will die!  As we enter a daily practice of forgiving, we find ourselves letting go of past hurts, slights and indignities, freeing ourselves of stress, ridding us of “toxic” thoughts, and creating more “room” in our hearts for love and joy.  And, as Oscar Wilde so famously declared: “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”

Take a moment to remember what you thought it was going to be like when you found your perfect partner.  Remember how beautiful you hoped it was all going to be, the love flowing, the easy intimacy, sex whenever you wanted it.  And, if it has been some time since you wanted it, remember when you wanted it.
In life, what we practice is what we perfect.  In relationship we often practice behaviors that have us feel increasingly walled-off from our partner.  We practice not communicating, not sharing our deepest truths.  We tell ourselves that we’re trying not to be a burden, or that we know our partner can’t make it better, so why talk about it.  With no real training for how to have a relationship that includes lifelong healthy sexuality we assume that it’s normal for the love to “cool”.  We assume that we should just “settle” for companionship.  Television and the movies consistently show us people under thirty who have sexuality in their lives and people over forty who don’t.

I was talking to Celeste Hirschman on my podcast and she mentioned being erotically embodied as the path to a lifetime of great sex.  “If you’re walking around in your body instead of your head all the time, if you can feel your chest, if you can feel your stomach, if you can feel your cock and pussy, then those different parts of your body will tell you is another person there with you? Is their heart open to you? Are they there with you in their own power? Is their sexual energy there? If you’re not in your body, you won’t feel anything in theirs. You won’t know what’s going on.

“I think being an extraordinary lover is more than just about technique… It’s really about the whole emotional picture and how [one] can feel powerful and confident and really self-assured in the midst of the fact that [there is] this emotional person across from you and they want to have sex with you and you with them, and you both want to please each other and really feel your own pleasure.”

Recently I’ve been thinking about “men” and “men’s work”.  I had a great interview with Ken Solin about his book – The Key to the Men’s Room:  What Men Talk About When Women Aren’t Around.  Ken and I talked about men’s pride and pain, hopes and fears, failures and triumphs, in the service of learning how to be better men.

As I thought about Ken’s ideas on how men can support each other, I noticed how different my closeness to men is compared to my relationships with women.  When I have the rare crisis in my life the three top-of-my-list people I’m most likely to call are all women.  I have a half-a-dozen or more men that I consider close friends, but the conversations with them happen after I’ve talked it out with my “best” friends.

I think a lot of men are like me in this. What with our “father wound” and our “be-a-man training”, a lot of us guys have a life-long history of superficial associations with each other.   Maybe we played on teams together or were Boy Scouts together, but by the time adulthood arrives, a lot of men have learned to bring their deepest feelings to women.  It’s as if we men think that women can teach us to be better men – which is probably true, and also not really possible.  (I wonder how different it is for gay men?  And I can’t help but notice that even my gay friends often have closer friendships with women.)

Thinking about all this has me reaching out to my men friends a bit more, looking for some joyful male bonding.  And I’m appreciating the women in my life who help me be a better man and I’m appreciating the men in my life who help me be a better man.

Yin and yang. The Chinese principle of dualism. Yin is soft, yang is hard. Yin is tranquil, yang is restless. Yin is slow, yang is rapid. Yin is cold, yang is hot. Yin is gentle, yang is rough. Sometimes, I hear people assert that yin is feminine, yang is masculine.

I was talking Satyen Raja on my podcast and he said “in any type of relationship there’s a masculine energy, one person has more of a masculine energy at their deepest core and there’s another partner who has more of a feminine essence at their deepest core.” He went on to talk about how this feeling of “fitting together” can fool us into believing we’re in love. It’s a great interview. But it got me thinking about this idea of duality.

I once heard a comedian say that there are two kinds of people in the world - those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don’t. I don’t. I see the world in infinite variety. I see masculinity in the way I care for my children and femininity in the ferocity of my sexuality. I see the hard in the soft and the light in the darkness, and all the shades of gray in between.

I believe great relationships are all about the gray areas. We are neither one thing nor the other, we dance and flow back and forth, sometimes leading, sometimes following, sometimes on top, sometimes on bottom, always side-by-side, intertwined.

The funny thing about the Chinese philosophy of yin and yang is that it also includes finding the yin in yang and the yang in yin. And then finding the yin in the yang that’s in the yin…well, you get the idea.

By the way, there are actually three kinds of people - those who understand arithmetic and those who don’t.

Surfing the net I bump into lots of interesting tidbits related to Sex, Love and Intimacy. Here are a few of the most recent.

Did you know that Melbourne University’s (Australia) Andrew Pask and Roger Short have developed an estrogen cream that - when applied to a man’s foreskin - will boost the body’s natural defenses against HIV? It’s being touted as a “Living Condom.” As far as I can tell, it is of no use preventing pregnancy, protecting a female partner, or protecting against the other 25 or so STI’s known to mankind. And there’s no word on help for those of us who no longer have a foreskin. Let’s hope that small steps continue to lead to bigger breakthroughs.

Meanwhile, according to an article in the NY Times - The Weird Sisters - scientists are fascinated by an 85 million year old species, bdelloid rotifers, that defy what we think we know about evolution. They are asexual yet they appear to evolve in ways that can not be explained by occasional genetic mutation. Apparently, living without sex is no big deal, in terms of species. It’s surviving 85 million years that has everyone puzzled. Speaking personally, I really hope this asexuality doesn’t catch on. I’ve tried in two marriages and I can tell you it’s not for me.

There’s a great article by Naomi Wolfe in New York Magazine re-evaluating the relationship between easy access to pornography leading to men objectifying real women in the way they objectified porn stars, and treat them accordingly. The belief was that rape and other kinds of sexual mayhem would surely follow. Not true, according Ms. Wolfe’s research. Turns out, porn seems to deaden men’s libido as regards real, living, flesh-and-blood women.

Finally, a tip-of-the-hat to Dr. Marty Klein, sex therapist, public policy analyst and author of “America’s War on Sex“. Dr. K’s blog - Sexual Intelligence - has a terrific open letter to anti-gay marriage activists, debunking their lies and fear-mongering with solid information and facts. Check it out.