“The Naked Date is not a time to vent about your controlling boss or discuss your child’s learning disability; it’s not the time to banter about the repairs going on in the kitchen or whether you should put your house on the market. In fact, it’s not a talking event at all. In its purest form, the Naked Date is a time to get sensual, get skin-to-skin, and be close—a time set aside for love, sex, and intimate sensuality. Does it have to be sexual every time? No. But it does need to be close. (...) When you do this week after week, your partner will begin to feel the respect you offer him or her by your willingness to show up. He or she will know that you value your intimate time together, and that you’re willing to set aside your worries and cares and then connect. That’s a huge thing all by itself.”
Source: Naked Marriage: How to Have a Lifetime of Love, Sex, Joy, and Happiness
“There are three aspects of a relationship that need to be attended to: my being and needs, my spouse’s needs, and the marriage’s needs. The marriage is an entity all by itself, and just like a child or a creative project, we have to feed it and nurture it. So sometimes we have to show up for it when we don’t initially feel like it.”
Source: Naked Marriage: How to Have a Lifetime of Love, Sex, Joy, and Happiness
“We want the mastery of being able to lead our husband or wife into love. To stop thinking of passion as a hormonal experience for twenty-three-year-olds, and start living it for what it is: an adult, time-bound, mastery-seeking, exquisitely experiential ability to make our partner’s heart and senses go from zero to one hundred, over an adult timeline, just because we led him or her there. Just because we can. That’s what romance is all about. Guiding and awakening, with the expertise of all of our sensual art forms, arousing our lover to love.”
Source: Naked Marriage: How to Have a Lifetime of Love, Sex, Joy, and Happiness
“The option I'd really like," he says matter-of-factly, "is to build a life with you. A strong, put-together kind of life. I know you're pretty good at assembly yourself, probably better than I am, in fact. So maybe it could be... a joint project?”
Source: The Party Crasher
“He is not curious about my work, I am not curious about his. I’m general, we stopped asking each other how we were, what we thought, and what we wanted a long time ago. We stopped being curious about each other, period. You cannot spend your life with someone without curiosity. It is as devastating as infidelity, yet somehow working in a slower, gentler, more insidious way. It is being unfaithful to your own life”
Source: But You Seemed So Happy: A Marriage, in Pieces and Bits – A Tender and Funny Gen X Memoir on Divorce and Love
“They're not going to bother me tonight. They won't denigrate my efforts, or ridicule anything that's mine, won't roll their eyes, or correct me, or cut me short and leave the room. They won't burden, or overwork me, or heap upon me responsibilities that are theirs. And, no more than they are doing, they won't intrude on my privacy, try to embarrass me or make me uncomfortable.
Plus, they seem pretty far beyond hurting each other.”
Source: Why Did I Ever
“Marriage is only an accident of situation, situation an accident of history, and history of geography.”
Source: The Hand Of Ethelberta
“Marriage is only an accident of situation, situation an accident of history, history of geography,”
Source: The Hand Of Ethelberta
“Sometimes the whole of marriage was a cover story.”
Source: Silverview
“I gaze at his unshaven face; it's manly. He's handsome in an old-fashioned kind of way, straight out of a 1950s movie”