And yet….

Isn’t that stress sort of…satisfying? Doesn’t a part of us crave that sense of mystery, that sense of taking a risk for love? Is that, perhaps, part of the allure of an affair — to experience something new and adventurous, to adore (and be adored) the way one is at the beginning of a romance?

Ah, such is the tension of a long-term commitment. As much as we want our veins pumping with the passion of infatuation/lust/love — we also want to “settle down” and settle into a comfortable life with someone. Strong relationships are built upon a foundation of trust and dependability. Yet, that stability can grow rather stale.

The key is to understand that a vibrant long-term relationship requires the ongoing balancing of these two desires. It can be done!

President Obama shared his experience of this balance in a 1996 interview with the French newspaper Le Monde entitled “An Intimate Conversation With Michelle and Barack Obama.”

“Sometimes, when we’re lying together, I look at her and I feel dizzy with the realization that here is another distinct person from me, who has memories, origins, thoughts, feelings that are different from my own. That tension between familiarity and mystery meshes something strong between us. Even if one builds a life together based on trust, attentiveness and mutual support, I think that it’s important that a partner continues to surprise.”

The surprises don’t have to be huge. A small simple gesture, when out of the ordinary, can snap you out of the domestic doldrums.

What can you do in the next 24 hours to surprise your lover?

A Sense of Surprise is a post from: Living Sexuality

I love being lost
in the sound that mud makes
when it is soft and wet and begs
your fingers to stay a little while longer
and please play some more in my earth
smell this beautiful terra firma consuming you
begging you to forsake the skillful architecture of
your hands
to make a more marvelous mess
and I love you saying look baby I have found
this branch of myself that I can use to dig
your sweet red clay to death and I say yes dig me baby
dig me as if planting love like crocuses
beneath the window of my hips.

I Love Being Lost is a post from: Living Sexuality

We’d complain about the heat, but we’d stay outside on that pier until the sun went down and we were scared away by the bats skimming out across the water.

As a teenager, I had my first (and only) experience of topless sun-bathing. I picked an afternoon when no one else was home, I found a spot behind the garage where no one could see me, and I dared to bare it all. The whole adventure lasted probably twenty minutes – but I still remember how freeing it felt to be totally exposed to the sun’s gaze.

I still love that feeling of the sun heating my skin, making me blush. It’s amazing how something so far away touches me and changes me.

Perhaps that’s why I adore The Sun Lover by Julia Kasdorf:

The long afternoon after church
a girl lies on the lawn,
glazed thighs slightly parted,
fingers splayed like petals. At sixteen
she is a virgin. While her parents nap
in the quiet house, she knows
the sun is teaching her about love,
how it comes over your body
making every muscle go soft
in its pitiless gaze,

how it penetrates everything,
changing you into something dark
and radiant. She craves it,
knows it is everywhere like God’s love,
but difficult to find. She waits,
entirely still, trying to see her eyelids–
not lingering traces, but the lids themselves
luminous and red as the cheeks of the kid
who stuck a flashlight in his mouth at camp.
She squints so the tips of her lashes
flash like iridescent fish scales.

Every hour, she turns over but prefers
to face the sun. All her life
she’ll measure loves against this
gentle ravishing. She’ll spend afternoons
alone on crowded beaches, and at home
stand naked before mirrors, amazed
by the pale shape of her suit. She’ll touch
her cheekbones’ tingling pink, and nip
at her lover’s shoulders, as if
it were earth she were after.

The Sun Lover is a post from: Living Sexuality

This makes a lot of sense in sexology. So much of what turns us on and turns us off is not as much about what we are actually seeing — but about the feelings (memories) we associate with those things.

This is empowering — We can change our perception of sex by creating more healthy and happy memories.

David Schnarch, author of Passionate Marriage (one of my favorite books about couples and sex) notes that the reason so many people don’t desire sex is that the sex they’re having isn’t very desirable — on a physical, emotional and/or a spiritual level. They aren’t creating enough meaningful memories to make sex desirable.

And maybe that is why there’s a difference between “looking at” someone and really “seeing them.” We can look at someone or something and become sexually interested, but it’s a different thing to “see” someone and desire them sexually.

Could this be the secret to keeping sex alive in long-term relationships? Perhaps the visual turn-ons aren’t as hot or strong as they used to be, but the history (the accumulation of memories) is what can make sex meaningful, and therefore desirable.

Our culture focuses on how we look to others, but satisfying sex comes from how we are seen by others.

Agree?

Seeing is Remembering is a post from: Living Sexuality

‘Twas a new feeling – something more
Than we had dared to own before,
Which then we hid not;
We saw it in each other’s eye,
And wished, in every half-breathed sigh,
To speak, but did not.

She felt my lips’ impassioned touch -
‘Twas the first time I dared so much,
And yet she chid not;
But whispered o’er my burning brow,
‘Oh, do you doubt I love you now?’
Sweet soul! I did not.

Warmly I felt her bosom thrill,
I pressed it closer, closer still,
Though gently bid not;
Till – oh! the world hath seldom heard
Of lovers, who so nearly erred,
And yet, who did not.

Irish Love Poem: Did Not is a post from: Living Sexuality

• Touch
• Get Some Sleep
• Speak Up
• Laugh More
• Make Eye Contact

Pick up a copy of Natural Awakenings to find out what makes these five things so important to intimacy.

If you live outside the Charlotte NC metro, you can find the article online.

It's Only Natural is a post from: Living Sexuality

Peaches or Plums

by Alan Michael Parker

Oh, how I hate my mind,
all those memories
that have invented their own memories.

Take my first love, for instance,
how after Mass we’d kneel
underneath the back stairs

and kiss and kiss and kiss and.
Were her lips like peaches or plums?
She was Catholic and she wanted

to be bad, and I loved her
more than baseball,
but all the other days

divided us, carry the one,
nothing left over. So strange,
only to kiss on a Sunday,

to hold my own breath again
for a week, another 10,022
minutes of wretched puberty,

until she moved to Iowa
or Ohio or the moon.
Oh, I can still remember

nothing about her,
only kissing, and the impossible
geometry of the descending stairs

that rose to the church kitchen,
her breath like hot nutmeg
and a little like the ocean;

and once, oh my god, she bit me,
a first taste of my body,
blood in her smile.

Were her lips like peaches or plums? is a post from: Living Sexuality

It’s Joan of Arc‘s birthday (c.1412):

“One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.”

Happy Birthday Joan (1412-1431) is a post from: Living Sexuality

I enjoy reading articles and blogs online, but have come to realize that they just can’t cover subjects to the degree that a good book can. I am narrowing down my list of blogs that I will tend to, focusing on ones that either educate or inspire me. More on that in a future post.

For now, these are the TEN BOOKS I COMMIT TO READING THIS YEAR:

Life is a Verb by Patti Digh – which I bought myself for Christmas. I follow the author Patti Digh on twitter and her blog is fantastic! “37 days to wake up, be mindful, and live intentionally.”

Taking Flight by Kelly Rae Roberts – another book I bought myself for Christmas. I adore Kelly Rae‘s creations and one of her lovely prints adorns my foyer. Her book includes a lot of her art as well as others’. “Inspiration and Techniques to Give Your Creative Spirit Wings.”

The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein- this was one of my favorite books as a kid, and my daughter is in a real “giving” stage right now. She made ornaments and handed them out to strangers last month. I got upset when she gave her Christmas presents to people a week early, but she cried and said she couldn’t help it because she just like to make people happy. She’s a sweetie and I think she’ll enjoy this book.

Driftless by David Rhodes – I heard a spot on NPR the other day about this book and knew right away that it was going to make my list. Why? Because it’s set in my home-state of Wisconsin. Read an excerpt.

Eve’s Revenge: Women and a Spirituality of the Body by Lilian Calles Barger - Sounds right up my alley.

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine by Sue Monk Kidd – she probably doesn’t remember this, but Julie Clawson and some other women recommended this book to me when we were at the Emerging Women’s East Coast Gathering in Virginia Beach in late 2006.

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant - gotta have some good fiction to even things out. I heard positive things about this book a few years ago, and I own the book. ‘Bout time I read it!

Now onto books more geared toward my day job:

Sex on the Brain by Daniel Amen, Bonk by Mary Roach, and TA Today: A New Introduction to Transactional Analysis by Ian Stewart.

And if I’m really on top of things, I may even post book reviews!

Ten Books for the New Year is a post from: Living Sexuality

“I had been set free because my greatest fear had been realized and I was still alive.”

(commencement speech at Harvard, June 5, 2008)

Rowling on Fear and Imagination is a post from: Living Sexuality