Great Throughts Treasury

"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."

"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."

"Romantics value intensity over stability. Realists value security over passion. But both are often disappointed, for few people can live happily at either extreme."

"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."

"Success, to me, is helping one person or many people counter the isolation and pseudo-connectivity of our lives by boosting their ability to connect to themselves and to others."

"Sex is about where you can take me, not what you can do to me."

"The attraction of dating is that you don't take yes for granted - - you're fully engaged, there's seductiveness, tension."

"The secret to desire in a long-term relationship"

"There is a complex relationship between love and desire, and it is not a cause-and-effect, linear arrangement. A couple?s emotional life together and their physical life together each have their ebbs and flows, their ups and downs, but these don?t always correspond. They intersect, they influence each other, but they?re also distinct."

"The caring, protective elements that nurture home life can go against the rebellious spirit of carnal love. We often choose a partner who makes us feel cherished; but after the initial romance we find, like Candace, that we can?t sexualize him or her. We long to create closeness in our relationships, to bridge the space between our partner and ourselves, but, ironically, it is this very space between self and other that is the erotic synapse. In order to bring lust home, we need to re-create the distance that we worked so hard to bridge. Erotic intelligence is about creating distance, then bringing that space to life."

"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."

"The intense physical and emotional fusion [new lovers] experience is possible only with someone we don?t yet know. At this early stage merging and surrendering are relatively safe, because the boundaries between the two people are still externally defined. [The lovers] are new to each other. And while they are migrating into each other?s respective worlds, they have not yet taken full residence; they are still two distinct entities. It is all the space between them that allows them to imagine no space at all? In the beginning you can focus on the connection because the psychological distance is already there; it?s a part of the structure. Otherness is a fact. You don?t need to cultivate separateness in the early stages of falling in love; you still are separate. You aim to overcome that separateness."

"The very ingredients that nurture love - mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other - are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire."

"There is no neediness in desire... there is no caretaking in desire. Caretaking is mightily loving, [but] it's a powerful anti-aphrodisiac."

"Today, monogamy is one person at a time."

"There is no sex without a cue. People who date have their cues at home, before they meet. You think about where to go, what to eat, what to do and say. Sometimes the cue is short - - just before we reach the bar - - but sex is never just spontaneous. Spontaneity is a myth."

"There's something very full in knowing that your partner accepts you as is."

"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."

"They are friends. They are the product of the egalitarian model; they are good life partners, but are often less sexual."

"We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt."

"What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict? ... Therein lies the mystery of eroticism."

"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."

"When there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek."

"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."

"Women want to talk first, connect first, then have sex. For men, sex is the connection. Sex is man's language of intimacy"

"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."

"You never know your partner as well as you think."