Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Today, monogamy is one person at a time.
Everyone should cultivate a secret garden.
The secret to desire in a long-term relationship
You never know your partner as well as you think.
Sex is about where you can take me, not what you can do to me.
Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other.
Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery.
Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are.
When there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.
It's our imagination that's responsible for love, not the other person.
There's something very full in knowing that your partner accepts you as is.
It’s hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned her sense of autonomy.
Mystery is not always about travelling to new places, it is about looking with new eyes.
Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance.
It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become.
In dating, if you say no, your lover goes on to the next person. In marriage, if you say no, the person stays.
Marriage isn't meant to make you happy - it's there because it gives you a life in which you can find happiness.
We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.
Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness.
In my community there were two groups of people, There were the ones who did not die and the ones who came back to life.
Women want to talk first, connect first, then have sex. For men, sex is the connection. Sex is man's language of intimacy
The attraction of dating is that you don't take yes for granted - - you're fully engaged, there's seductiveness, tension.
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.
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.
What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict? ... Therein lies the mystery of eroticism.
There is no neediness in desire ... there is no caretaking in desire. Caretaking is mightily loving, [but] it's a powerful anti-aphrodisiac.
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.
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.
Romantics value intensity over stability. Realists value security over passion. But both are often disappointed, for few people can live happily at either extreme.
Are you asking a question because you want to know the answer or are you asking the question because you want your partner to know that you are having this question?
The very ingredients that nurture love - mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other - are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire.
Modern love is the enterprise that everyone wants to be a part of, yet there's a fifty percent divorce rate in round one and a sixty-five percent divorce rate in round two.
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.
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.
Acceptance doesn't mean predictability. Sex isn't always for 11 at night - - it's also 'meet at a hotel room at noon'. What you feel during dating can exist at home, if you don't suffocate it.
If you start to feel that you have given up too many parts of yourself to be with your partner, then one day you will end up looking for another person in order to reconnect with those lost parts.
The kiss that you have never given is just as powerful as hours of actual lovemaking. The erotic isn't just what is happening between people's legs. It is also what's happening in their erotic mind.
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.
Women - - and men - - need to understand that a woman's transition is often much longer. The caretaker must leave the place of orientation to the needs of others to the place where she focuses on herself.
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.
A peer relationship is one where the partners experience an affectionate, companionate coupledom. They are friends. They are the product of the egalitarian model; they are good life partners, but are often less sexual.
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.
For some people, a one-night stand doesn't make any difference in a seven-year love affair. I don't believe the degree of betrayal is always commensurate with the egregiousness of the behavior. They are two separate things.
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.
Most affairs do die a natural death. Today, you look at your partner's phone to find out the weather, and you find out about a lover. It has never been as easy to cheat as it is today, and it has never been harder to keep a secret.
You know what happens to sex in marriage? Instead of inviting desire, you monitor it. Especially men: You let her sleep late, you take the kids to the park, and all that time you're thinking, "Tonight I'll get some." That doesn't work.
One of the most amazing abilities of sexuality is to momentarily transcend the borders of Self into something that is no longer defined by physical property and that is utterly unique. It's really what many call a religious experience.
Very often we don’t go elsewhere because we are looking for another person. We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become.
In committed sex, in marriage, people don't feel the need to seduce or to build anticipation - - that's an effort they think they no longer need to do now that they have conquered their partner. If they're in the mood, their partner should be too.